As I was typing the bones of this review, I found myself accidentally writing Oppenheimer instead of The Odyssey. It’s an easy mistake to make in some regard, given that both titles feature the same vowel and come out within just a few years of each other; it feels like it was only yesterday that I was pondering what to say about Nolan‘s Best Picture-winning reckoning with nuclear proliferation (Hannah took that one on). But the two films also share a specific piece of DNA as well, in Nolan’s concerns about war, nation-building, and the inhumanity struck by those seeking power. It’s an easy layup to say that The Odyssey is thematically, in form and function, a sequel to Oppenheimer.
Though a more interesting angle to me is that it plays, in very specific ways, like the kind of movie Nolan’s career has been careening toward. It’s a film about a father trying to get back to his family (Interstellar), while being stuck in a prison both of his own making and at the whims of very powerful people (Inception), with much of its backstory told in nesting flashbacks as its protagonist orally struggles to remember his past (The Prestige with a touch of Memento), and capped off with many scenes of hand-to-hand action (pick any Batman movie). That isn’t to say The Odyssey is a retread, far from it. Instead, there’s an argument to be made that it’s Nolan’s specific storytelling methods reaching a perfected form. If Oppenheimer was the polar opposite of much of what we’ve come to expect from him, then The Odyssey is Nolan sharpening old tools he had put away and somehow making them better than ever before. And he does it on one of the cornerstones of the West’s literary canon.
I’m currently in the midst of reading The Odyssey for the first time, in two different translations — Emily Wilson‘s historic and Hemingway-esque take propped up against Daniel Mendelsohn‘s sturm und drang, purist sensibility. There’s much to be learned from sitting down with it in terms of understanding the importance of that source text in how it shaped culture. Fantasy fiction, the Hero’s Journey, the concept of the novel itself – none of that would exist without Homer (or whoever Homer actually was) taking those oral traditions and recording them for the first time in a coherent fashion. And while there have been a few direct adaptations, rather than something more loosely inspired like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, this is the first big budget production to tackle Odysseus’ full journey back home. Seeing where Nolan decides to trim and what he maintains, and even where he pulls from another source altogether, becomes a big part of the adventure on the scholarly side.
Telemachus (Tom Holland) is pissed. The father he’s never known has left him with a miserable mother, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), who is doggedly pursued for years by dozens of suitors who seek her hand in marriage. These suitors, most notable of which being the crafty Antinous (Robert Pattinson), sit in his hall all night, drink and eat all of their provisions, draining his family’s remaining resources. Eventually, he decides to set sail and determine whether his father Odysseus (Matt Damon), the lost king of their island Ithaca, is truly alive or dead.
It’s no spoiler to say, because we learn very quickly, that Odysseus is very much alive, and has been held for years in a functional state of forced memory-loss on the isle of the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), to whom he shares his slowly pieced together past. Among which include his plot to end the decade-long Trojan War, which sees Nolan pull a healthy amount from Homer’s other great epic, The Iliad. From there, he tells of the arduous attempted journey home, which includes encounters with Polyphemus the cyclops (Bill Irwin), the wrath of Poseidon, Laestrygonians, and the witch Circe (Samantha Morton, in one of many standout sequences), among others. But it’s the subterfuge against Troy that looms largest in the telling, and the weight that the Trojan Horse carries with Odysseus is what gives The Odyssey its core thematic heft.
It may or may not surprise you to learn that the Greek Pantheon plays a huge role in the epic poem. While Odysseus and Telemachus endure their separate journeys, deities like Zeus, Hermes, and others all squabble like relatives at a Thanksgiving Dinner and regularly interfere on behalf of Odysseus whenever the mood strikes. Athena herself is basically the core supporting character, providing direct guidance to both and journeying along with them as Odysseus’ patron god. Of course, Nolan has been tagged in the past as a grounded filmmaker, mostly owing to how he stripped his version of Batman of much of the comic booky, more fantastical aspects of the character and his world. With The Odyssey, there is some pullback in that regard, with a healthy dose of plausible deniability about the gods and their actual ability to interfere with the events of this tale — this Odysseus feels a bit like an agnostic, or at the very least, a rugged determinist who feels like he makes his own fate — but at the same time, he does regularly see his protective goddess (Zendaya) when he most needs her. A bit of the filmmaker having it both ways.
That aside, Nolan’s embrace of the density of Greek myth and its strange legendarium is admirable and a strong rebuke of those early career criticisms. You want a cyclops? Baby, you’re getting one. Men getting turned into pigs? Oh yeah, it’s happening. Nolan strikes an eerie note whenever these fantastical aspects spring forth. It brings to mind one of my long-held hopes that Nolan would finally shift his way over to horror someday. And while that day hasn’t yet come, this is the closest he’s ever played in that genre: entities off in the mist luring men to their doom, an army of spirits in the River Styx, soldiers being eaten like a live-action Goya painting. It’s all there but in name. What is Horror but Fantasy re-categorized for better marketing anyway?
The Odyssey is also a film marked by its melancholy and a sense that, much like in Oppenheimer, the world really is changing before its characters’ eyes. Throughout, there is mention of “Sea Peoples” and the arrival of these prophesied harbingers of doom will bring an end to the Bronze Age. For decades, academics have debated whether The Odyssey acted as a kind of key to unlock the identity of the historic tribes, or at least one particular confederation of them, that precipitated the Bronze Age Collapse. Nolan threads this idea and its resolution deep into The Odyssey‘s own ode to pacifism. It’s a brilliant bit of invention taken on its own, but when combined with everything else on offer, it may very well be his strongest screenplay.
And I haven’t even mentioned how it’s the first Nolan movie to make me tear up (anyone who knows me at all will catch this on sight) and how it quite likely has his most rousing climax, the swordplay here being some of the best action he’s ever shot. I feel like a broken record – I called Dunkirk “his best movie to date,” and then with Oppenheimer I said the exact same thing. With The Odyssey, could it be happening again? I’ll stop short of being the Boy Who Cried Wolf and instead say it’s an essential twofer with its predecessor. One thing I can say for certain: I think the Best Picture race is already over.