Odysseus is the clever, deceitful, loved and damned man of Greek legend. He is also J Robert Oppenheimer. Batman, too. He is Memento’s Leonard Shelby, and every other burdened, compromised hero who’s paced up and down the frames of Christopher Nolan’s work. As a filmmaker, Nolan has never tended towards the confessional. Yet his take on The Odyssey, one of history’s oldest extant stories, feels unusually intimate. What he plucks out of this 3,000-year-old epic condenses his most recognisable fixations – often, men’s desires to control time and fate – into the purest feeling of hope versus hopelessness. We fight hard for what we love, but what if it’s not enough? What if there’s no turning back from the path of destruction?
And the intimacy here is ironic considering the sheer size of this thing – The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on massive IMAX 70mm film cameras, meaning this is a blockbuster of literally unprecedented scale. It is also Nolan’s best work to date. It deserves to be the film that defines him.
His Odysseus (Matt Damon) conceives of the Trojan horse in earnest belief that it will turn the tide of the war waged by brothers Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), a bloody conflict to win back the former’s wife, Helen (Lupita Nyong’o), from the Trojans. But, like Oppenheimer’s A-bomb, he comes to understand his violation of the rules of war has sent history down a much darker trajectory. He is accompanied by his men (led by Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus) on the journey back home to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) awaits with their son Telemachus (Tom Holland). But the anger of the Gods throws him onto a dangerous path marked by impossible decisions, as ruthless as the choice Batman must make between saving his city’s greatest hope or the woman he loves in The Dark Knight. He lands on an island presided over by Calypso (Charlize Theron), where his memories, like Leonard’s in Memento, start to slip away from him.
As a feat of pure adaptation, Nolan has achieved something I admittedly thought was near impossible. His stamp is all over the film – this is intellectual, brutalist, muscular Hollywood fare – yet it never wavers in its commitment to, and comprehension of, its source text. There’s not a single decision here that’s been thoughtlessly made, nor that I imagine Nolan himself couldn’t easily defend, much to the imagined chagrin of certain lawless parts of the internet.
While it’s tempting to ding Nolan a few points for putting Odysseus and Telemachus in trousers (the height of barbarity to the Ancient Greeks), the work of production designer Ruth De Jong and costume designer Ellen Mirojnick offers a comprehensive style of its own. (As an aside, as it unfortunately must be said, all the racists bleating about Nyong’o’s casting would be in for quite the shock if they travelled back to the ancient world and realised how little it cared for the colour of someone’s skin. You can’t cry “historical accuracy” over a Christian invention.)
Specific touches of both the Bronze Age and Archaic Greece – the kore-style statue head of a young woman; the Mycenaean spiral work – have been built into a minimalist, heavily symbolic aesthetic that feels influenced, more than anything, by the history of Greek tragedy on stage, namely Peter Hall’s masked 1981 production of The Oresteia. The emphasis here is on The Odyssey as performance, as part of an ever-evolving oral tradition onto which Nolan has merely tagged his own name.
There’s a fearlessness to how Nolan communicates ancient ideas via modern language. Ludwig Göransson’s score avoids traditional orchestration in favour of a collision of synths and drums that replicate the rhythm of religious ritual, underlined by an appearance by rapper Travis Scott as a bard. Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, one of a horde of suitors who have invaded Penelope’s home, refers to the absent Odysseus as Telemachus’s “daddy”. Why not? To quote Emily Wilson, who translated The Odyssey into English in 2017, “[Homer] didn’t sound archaic to the Greeks”.
Similarly, Nolan embraces the story’s magical aspects, but visualises them via Hollywood genre: sci-fi for the creature Scylla, who plucks sailors out of their ships; disaster movies for the touch of the Gods, felt mostly through thunderous storms and occasionally via the watchful eye of Athena (Zendaya); An American Werewolf in London-style body horror for the witch Circe’s (Samantha Morton) transformations.
There’s not a weak link here in terms of performance. Damon finds balance between his hero’s bravado and his poetic introspection. Holland, doing career-best work, effectively charts Telemachus’s maturation. And there’s an especially touching turn by John Leguizamo as the blind swineherd Eumaeus. But it’s the women – Hathaway, Morton, Theron, Zendaya, and Nyong’o, who also plays Helen’s sister Clytemnestra – who really dazzle. Despite their powers as goddesses, witches or queens, they must contend, too, with their roles in men’s warfare: victims, prizes, widows. It creates a special kind of fury in their voices; quiet but concentrated.
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The events of The Odyssey supposedly take place in the Late Bronze Age, which ended with the societal collapse of many of the civilisations in the Mediterranean basin. We don’t really know why – war, environmental disaster, perhaps an economic crisis. Nolan, however, links it directly to one of the core themes of Homer’s text: the violation of “Xenia”, translated here as “Zeus’s Law”, an institutionalised concept of hospitality that proved crucial for diplomacy between these mighty civilisations. To modern audiences, it translates better as the concept of basic decency.
In the director’s eyes, the Trojan horse, a deceitful sacrifice filled with soldiers poised for slaughterous ambush, should be considered as much a violation of that decency as the suitors who plague Odysseus’s home. And it spreads like a disease. Suddenly, it makes sense why all of The Odyssey’s heroes have American accents. Nolan is thinking about a modern empire that has violated “Xenia” again and again, with its A-bombs and false ceasefires, and whether that empire is facing its own imminent collapse. It’s the lesson Nolan’s work has always taught us – time moves in circles. And we’re powerless to it.
Dir: Christopher Nolan. Starring: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Charlize Theron. Cert 15, 173 minutes.
‘The Odyssey’ is in cinemas from 17 July
