Why does a filmmaker tell the same story twice? I guess that only Christopher Nolan himself could explain what artistic instinct drew him from the tale of the father of the atomic bomb to the warrior who built the Trojan Horse.
Yet The Odyssey undoubtedly serves as an unexpected companion piece to Oppenheimer. Both films warn of what happens when the smartest person in the room becomes distracted by war, and lets the venal and cruel run roughshod in his own home. There’s a bloody trail between the greatest creations of Odysseus and Oppenheimer, since they were intended to end a ceaseless war in one devastating blow, instead simply cracking the world open.
In adapting this antique epic of men, gods, monsters, and self-inflicted tragedy, Nolan is actually working from three texts. First and foremost, Homer’s The Odyssey, which deals with the clay-footed hero’s decadelong return from war. Then there’s Homer’s prequel, The Iliad, dealing with the Greek army’s 10-year-long siege of Troy. But there’s also the much later Aeneid by the Roman author Virgil, who was much more fascinated by the famous equine tool of deception, designed by Odysseus himself.
This being Nolan (the film’s sole credited screenwriter), he doesn’t simply create a longer linear narrative from the three. Time and memory, ever his twin obsessions, restructure the flow to begin with the loyal Greek soldier Sinon (Elliot Page) presenting the giant wooden gift of surrender to the Trojans.
It seems like an arbitrary beginning. Indeed, the first hour of Nolan’s The Odyssey is almost maddening in its rejection of structure. That is purposeful, and subtly bathes the narrative in a suitable tone. Ithaca is in chaos without its king and everyone is defined by that absence: Penelope (a strikingly regal Anne Hathaway) sits in her royal chamber, waiting for her husband to return. Their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), seethes while suitors abuse their hospitality, deifying the father he never knew. The blind swineherd Eumaeus (John Leguizamo, surly and unrecognizable) and Argos the dog are the only members of the household to hold faith that the king will return. All the while, on some far beach, Odysseus himself (Matt Damon) is rendered contentedly vacant by the narcotic lotus petals fed to him by the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron). Yet even he has a hole, a place where the memories of who he was should be.
In these scenes, Damon sets aside Odysseus the cunning warrior in favor of a more complicated, damaged character: graying, confused, searching in the debris of his wrecked ship for shards of memories yet guzzling down lotus flowers to blur them out again. In recounting his returning memories to Calypso on that beach, he gains purpose and Nolan grants the film its structure.
Any urges to declaim what Nolan’s doing as turning a cornerstone of world literature into therapyspeak should be thrown in the same bin as the inevitable idiocy over diverse casting. Nolan’s Adriatic is a place of philosophy and introspection, but also the nexus of the trade routes of the world. His sense of grit and grandeur also makes him the perfect modern filmmaker to translate the Greek mindset on the supernatural as just another part of life. Their gods are not merely some remote invisible force, but they are undoubtedly meddling assholes, leaving their spawn like Polyphemus the cyclops and the shapeless Scylla to plague humankind. Even those that make themselves plain to men are enigmatic, like Athena (Zendaya), who haunts Odysseus as a reminder of his crimes and a lighthouse to home.
Such interactions are a reminder that it’s never the gods that are the problem, it’s the urges of mortals. Benny Safdie as Agamemnon may not get much story here, but his gigantic ebon frame hangs like a shadow over everything. His malice is equaled in its poisonous nature by Robert Pattinson as the ambitious Antinous, a depiction of vile, writhing, craven duplicity for the ages. When Odysseus’ memories finally take him back to the fall of Troy, its ashes of war are now reminiscent of the burning Spitfire on the beach in Dunkirk, that battlefield the same sands on which Sinon stands. The true tragedy of Nolan’s The Odyssey is that Homer would recognize it so well.
The Odyssey
2026, R, 172 min. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Elliot Page, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Charlize Theron, Mia Goth, Benny Safdie.
