With Robert Fagles’ 1996 translation of Homer’s Odyssey fresh in my mind, I went to see Chrisopher Nolan’s new film a couple weeks ago. My biggest takeaway was that the movie wasn’t that “bad” considering all the negative comments leading up to its release, mostly in that it wasn’t as “woke” as some had feared. The trite, contemporary dialogue with a couple of modern profanities didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. There was no sex or nudity. The violence was very tame with little blood or spectacle. And yeah, he left out some original material from the story, but they weren’t the most egregious omissions. Altogether, not a “bad” movie by some standards. Maybe you’d let your 14-year-old son watch it.
As an adaptation of a book, Nolan’s film works with the skeletal structure of Homer’s original work without too many obvious departures, if you’re somewhat familiar with the story. But I think its predominant failing is that it isn’t a great film. Odysseus isn’t presented as a great war hero. Penelope isn’t a great wife. Helen isn’t a great beauty. Achilles, the greatest warrior, is notably absent. The war of Troy isn’t a great war. And the journey home isn’t a great journey filled with great obstacles and great deeds worked in tandem with or in opposition to the will of the great gods. In effect, Nolan sapped all the greatness out of The Odyssey.
For me, the film seems like a reduction of something that was once larger than life. Many people love the story because of its greatness, its mythology, its power; many people will be disappointed because Nolan’s film is not great, mythological, or powerful.
Perhaps that interpretation is intentional, with Nolan is showing us a world worn out from greatness, calling into question the very things that civilizations uphold as worth doing. Critics are making the connection between Nolan’s Odysseus and his J. Robert Oppenheimer. What does the destruction of Troy have in common with the nuclear age? What if the hero is merely a catalyst for destruction? What if one man’s military prowess is in fact the cause of societal collapse?
If Nolan intends to reduce greatness to point out the moral problems of war, he did his job. As in Oppenheimer, the anxiety expressed on the protagonist’s face through much of the film is intended to convince the audience of the horror of war and the negative consequences of power and ambition. Agamemnon and Menelaus are brothers in crime as well as in blood, according to this film. And in a specific nod to current political tensions, we hear of Odysseus’ mandated fealty to a warlord anxious to ‘control global trade routes’. That one small comment from Odysseus about Agamemnon’s real reason for going to war diminishes the entirety of The Iliad and the greatness of the ten-year Trojan War, fought over the most beautiful woman in the world bound up in the complicated designs of the gods. Having been so reduced, war becomes anxiety, unwholesome vying for power, and the obvious corollary of misogyny. As one of my friends pointed out – referencing a comedy sketch about Nazis becoming self-aware – is like the Greeks asking themselves, “Are we the baddies?” Maybe Nolan is asking western global powers to be self-reflective.
However, much as I appreciate Nolan’s adaptation as a means to communicate a pressing message to western society, there is another deviation in his film that impoverishes the original concept of greatness. That is, the reduction of allegory and the demythologizing of the text which ultimately destroys the concept of piety which was so important and tangible in Homer.
Some might argue that the film feels more grounded in reality and more accessible to modern audiences. But I’m not talking about the cringy cyclops or the man-hating Circe, both of whom are downplayed and almost satirized as mythological creatures. At a deeper level, Nolan portrays a post-religious society – an individualistic secularism where the protagonist fights against his better judgement as he grapples with his conscience and suppresses his trauma. The goddess Athena and the nymph Calypso seem not so much real, but rather elements of Odysseus’ psyche as he processes his pain. Piety, the virtue of giving to the gods what is their due, is on the wane; it is being replaced with a kind of self-guided discernment of right and wrong, the object being world peace and the preservation of a civilization, rathert than justice, giving the gods their due. With no higher power, there remains nothing for Odysseus to pay deference to and the mythology collapses. With Odysseus as the front-runner of this new irreligion, his counterparts seem naïve and stuck in their past, as evidenced by the lip-service to “Zeus’s law” which loses its potency by mindless repetition.
Nolan’s adaptation is an impoverishment because he erases the piety lived out in Homer’s characters. When reading the original text, you see a kind of proto-Christian anthropology, a kind of natural law unfolding in the lives of the characters as they conform to or defy the gods. What is the will of the gods? The reader has a better understanding because we see the exclusive behind-the-scenes actions and motivations of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Apollo, and Hermes. The human characters, however, as well as the lesser deities, must abide by certain laws and pay deference to portents and signs, often subject to interpretation by a blind seer. And while it seems a little haphazard knowing the will of the gods, the basic obligation of piety cannot be broken without consequence: due sacrifice must be made to the gods; the dead must be honoured; the guest must be welcomed; the guest must not take advantage of the host; sacred persons, places, and things are not to be defiled. Break one of these rules and you won’t get home. In Homer’s vision, piety is waxing strong, foreshadowing, in allegory, its Christian fulfillment. In Nolan’s vision, on the other hand, piety is simply the opiate of the masses.
In a strange twist of anachronism, the characters of Nolan’s film live in a post-religious, perhaps Marxist or Nietzschean world where, in the past, piety helped you reconcile suffering and pain as the will of the gods. Ultimately, however, Odysseus’ homecoming fulfills the story arc of his prolonged absence, but not of his character’s suffering. He literally sails off into the sunset with his wife as if it were the end of a nice American romance, as if twenty years’ physical separation and routing the suitors were the essence of the conflict after all. We, the audience, are denied even a Marxist or Nietzschean resolution to Odysseus’ struggle, perhaps because these philosophies can’t offer a better solution to suffering. Ithaca hasn’t become a classless society, throwing out religion which was keeping the lower classes suppressed. Odysseus hasn’t become a self-determined Übermensch, stoically impervious to pain. Did we forget that the conflict was his inner struggle against his conscience and against a benighted piety? Is his reunion with Penelope the antidote to the real villain – his war PTSD? Did we, the audience, just get served some lotus flowers?
At the end of the day, Nolan’s post-religious vision can’t offer meaning to the struggle that he invented for Odysseus. If we carry Nolan’s idea to its logical conclusion, it seems that a civilization would do well to be self-aware before it destroys itself because the goal is preservation of society, not character development, not personal growth. The goal is existence, not a life built on virtue full of purpose and meaning with the suffering that accompanies it. It’s the same old ‘earthly paradise’ scam. In truth, we will never be fulfilled in this world. We need a mythology, an accountability to a higher power, because nothing created will give purpose or meaning to the pain that we suffer. The ancient Greeks did not have the fulness of this concept because they lacked Revelation. But as a proto-Christian society, they came close to the truth by believing in Zeus and Athena and oracles and sea nymphs and monsters – an enchanted world which answered to a higher power.
Back to Homer. Odysseus and his crew disrespect and disobey the gods on multiple occasions. The consequence is “arriv[ing] late, a broken man.” He is not being punished for his war crimes; he is learning piety to the gods because virtue is what makes one great. One key event in Odysseus’ career (sadly not included in the film) happens when he is washed up on Phaecea and meets Nausicaa. After ten years of war and ten years of wandering at sea and imprisonment with Calypso, he is a broken man. Without revealing who he is, he tells Nausicaa of all his woes, and she upbraids him by telling him to accept the will of the gods. This is his pivotal moment. After seven years of weeping on Calypso’s island, he finally realizes that he is not what happens to him. Although his name literally means “pain,” he is “the man of twists and turns,” the king of Ithaca, the son of Laertes, the husband of Penelope, the father of Telemachus, the Achaean who went to war for the honour of his friend, and most importantly the apostle of Athena. He suffers pain, but he is the great Odysseus.
Classical literature such as Homer’s Odyssey tries to answer ontological questions of being and causes and purpose by constructing a mythology, a lens by which it tries to make sense of things, upholding natural virtues and denouncing natural vices according to the limits of paganism. Mythology can be seen is an approximation to the truth of Christianity, and readers can gain so much insight into human nature, pagan virtue, and storytelling by connecting with writings from the past.
Demythologizing a text for insight into current issues impoverishes the richness that classical literature has to offer. Homer is not going to suffer too much damage because some twenty-first century filmmaker made an adaptation to suit a passing ideology. But it’s unfortunate that Nolan can’t offer real meaning, real purpose, and real consolation to the suffering of Odysseus. He deconstructs the cause of pain by exchanging impiety for a guilty conscience and separation from his family. He then provides a false remedy to this conflict by reuniting the protagonist with his family, reducing the suitors to a kind of “final boss” before he can rescue the princess. What the film isn’t saying is that the suitors must all die and the palace must be purged in a final act in which the hero rights impiety. Instead, the film is filled with hundreds of small, contrived conflicts to distract the audience from the fact that they have been hoodwinked into taking in a different moral message from a different overarching conflict and resolution.
In Homer, this one great purge of the impious suitors who violate the law of hospitality is so central to the resolution of Odysseus’ journey that the gods themselves inspire, protect, and assist the hero so that they may be honoured by his actions which re-establishes his greatness. In Greek mythology, greatness reflects the divine, and this heroism is the precursor for Christian virtue in which the hero, with God’s help, becomes godlike in his actions. In this film, the allegory of Odysseus’s journey is merely the angst of a post-religious society with no clear message besides “war is bad.”
Nolan builds on the bones of a timeless classic whose flesh is a rich mythology steeped in a sense of virtue and greatness embraced by an entire civilization now lost. With all that money and all those IMAX cameras and all those Hollywood stars, Nolan could have used the greatness he brings to film to regift Homer’s story to a modern audience so they might judge for themselves the values of the ancient world. Instead, we have been given another “sandals and swords” film with enough action sequences, plot development, and visual stimulus to fill three hours, but whose message will have lost its potency in a few years as other ideologies take its place.
It’s not a bad film. It’s just not great.
