Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is An Ode To The Morally Hollow Male Hero

CW: Spoilers!! 

Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated The Odyssey has crashed upon our shores at theatres, where only the lucky few may trek to find in 70mm IMAX (god-forbid we diminish the scale of its grandeur). Like any good summer blockbuster, it has everyone talking about it. And, unsurprisingly, with an adaptation of an epic of this magnitude, the audience finds themselves in two volatile camps: ‘classical elite’ and ‘Nolan-the-genius’. 

Before I get too deep into the weeds of adaptation, I must say that in an era of AI generated scripts and overused CGI it is deeply refreshing to see the effort and care Nolan takes with the practical effects. Creating over 2 million feet of film; carting around massive cumbersome cameras; investing in animatronics and a sixty foot tall puppet is no easy feat.

Yet these efforts alone do not add up to a good movie. 

The Hero Nolan Wants?

Is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey faithful to Homer’s epic poem? No.

Will this disappoint some of his contemporary audience who revere the classical poem? Yes, of course. Myself included. Does it need to be faithful? No. But now that the rudimentary questions are out of the way, we can begin to follow a more interesting line of questioning. If we give Nolan the benefit of the doubt––given the beloved director he has come to be––and assume that the changes to The Odyssey were intentionally made to address the needs of a more commercial, 21st century audience (and not out of ignorance or negligence to the original) – then why? 

The homecoming––the nostos––of Homer’s poem is almost entirely erased; the most potent recognition scene we get being perhaps Eurycleia as she washes his feet. No reuniting with his mother in the Underworld, no catharsis as we watch father and son team up to defeat the Suitors, no reinstatement to the throne. And perhaps most imperatively, no hanging of the twelve disloyal maids in the bloodied Great Hall as part of the final slaughter. 

This choice is perhaps the most telling. It’s difficult to imagine Matt Damon’s Odysseus ordering his son to hack the maids to death with swords (only after they have been forced to clean up the entrails of the decimated Suitors) and Tom Holland’s Telemachus being the one to suggest that they be hung instead, not out of pity, but as a warning. 

In Nolan’s story, Odysseus must always be truly good – always sounding his bow before a hunt for the sake of ‘fairness’, explaining to us that he only joined in Agamemnon and Menelaus’ war out of fear of their retaliation on the Ithacan people, and constantly acting as a pillar of morality in contrast to his wayward and piggish men onboard his doomed journey. 

Nolan doesn’t induce Damon to fake madness to postpone joining the war effort, unlike his Homeric counterpart, because this would jeopardise his bravery and honour. Damon’s Odysseus seems to sometimes have the mind of a conscientious objector stuck in the armour of an Ancient Greek warrior. Made out of plastic, but still. 

All these concerns about the moral failure of warfare and its catastrophic effects are clearly off the back of Nolan’s major 2023 success Oppenheimer. The movie is unmistakably interested in forcing Odysseus to reckon with a form of moral hypocrisy. This is evidenced in his long speech to Penelope, where he remembers the destruction of Troy as not a magnificent victory (as the bards would say), but a point of humiliation which coerced him into breaking ‘Zeus’ Law’. The very law his comrades and fellow sailors floundered and were punished for. 

Yet where this existential dread and fear for the foundation of human civilisation worked very well in Oppenheimer, it feels disingenuous and empty in The Odyssey. Perhaps applying 21st century anxieties to ancient Hellenic people is like trying to describe the stock market to Alexander the Great. The belief that certain perennial questions about mortality, war and legacy have pervaded the life of every human to ever live is, in my opinion, hugely overstated. I’m inclined to defer to the moving The Atlantic article ‘What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?’ by Gal Beckerman on this subject. 

However, to return to the case of Oppenheimer v Odyssey, the second reason these fears fall flat is because we know the fall and future of the Ancient Greeks. Even the clumsily anachronistic line about the end of ‘the Age of Bronze’ is hard to sympathise with when we know the Iron Age is right around the corner. Oppenheimer worked because the threat of nuclear warfare and complete devastation of the world we know today is still a very real fear and point of unease for everyone sitting in the cinemas. 

This is not to say that Homer’s The Odyssey does not deal with very important human issues – of course it does. It would not have prevailed upon our imaginations and studies as long as it has if it didn’t. But we make a fatal error when we try to superimpose modern ideals of war and human valour onto the ancient. It is unfair to both us and them. 

The strongest testimony for this is the film’s fundamental misunderstanding of what the war was for. What motivated any of the Greek heroes to fight the Trojan war was not Helen, nor economical trade rationale, nor even a colonial imperative to ‘civilise the barbarians’; it was kleos. 

Kleos is the Ancient Greek word for glory, but more specifically an immortal glory. 

No heaven awaited the Ancient Greeks for being good or obedient to the gods in their lives, only the miserable emptiness of the Underworld. But for the select few, those who made sure their names echoed forever in the mouths of the living, that was the ultimate reward. 

The Fall of Troy is only as tragic and grand as the Homeric poem dictates, not to elicit some complex guilt, but to bolster the devastation the Greeks and Odysseus wreaked. 

Who was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in kidnapping or chasing Helen is more so a modern concern. Whether or not Paris and Priam and Cassandra and so forth ‘deserved’ their demise is a sort of futile question for the listeners of the epic. 

Hector lost to Achilles because of might and the will of the Fates and the Gods. And in this universe the Gods unequivocally do not favour people because of their moral virtue. 

Nolan thus has an understandably difficult time shoehorning a distinctly Christian, post-industrial, dovish message into Odysseus’ story. 

The Uncomfortable Cost of Going Home 

The Odyssey, first and foremost, is about a man’s singular and desperate desire to go home. Home to Ithaca; home to his wife and child; home to order and peace of some kind after fighting a war that wouldn’t end. The recognition scenes in the Homeric poem rank among the most emotional and heart-wrenching moments in the Western literary canon. They are expertly crafted to keep its listeners on the edges of their seats, on the verge of tears of joy and pain, begging and pleading with the bard to hurry up and let them kiss each other and rejoice. 

The problem with Nolan, however: he never really lets his characters go home. 

In Interstellar, Cooper comes home too late. In Inception, we don’t know if the spinning top ever falls. There’s always some third act twist with Nolan that leaves his audience scratching their heads as the credit rolls and in deep discussion over whether the catharsis is real or imagined. 

We see the same thread of intentional anti-catharsis across Nolan’s work––Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight included––and in many ways this is the most magnetic aspect of his filmography. It lets the credits roll but keeps the storybook open in the mind. It allows an increasingly insatiable audience to return time and time again to the same movie with more and more ravenous questions. 

Cleverly, Nolan refuses to ever settle the debates or mystery with a single explanation or answer. Perhaps because he knows that no one interpretation will satisfy everyone. 

Yet without this, catharsis––the function of tragedy as Aristotle imagined it––can never occur. Catharsis, designed to cleanse and purge the soul of these excessive emotions such as fear and pity, is never possible. 

In fact, most of Nolan’s filmography encourages us to chew and ruminate on these feelings for as long as possible rather than expel them. 

This is an irreconcilable difference of ethos. 

In Homer’s The Odyssey, nostos is the driving force behind the entire epic: the deep longing and desire to return to something that was before. Where we get the word ‘nostalgia’, nostos isn’t simply a desire to go home but also a deep bittersweet regret of the time lost at war. 

And to deny Odysseus that, to deny him his home, his throne, his son just as he finds them again, is perhaps the cruellest choice of any adaptation. 

Nolan’s ending is not bittersweet, it is not satisfying, it is not confusing, it is not an ending. Ironically, there is a strange alliance with the Homeric poem in this regard, as many scholars argue that The Odyssey should have ended in Book 23 with Penelope’s arms wrapping around her husband’s neck and never quite letting go. Yet wherever the actual end of the Homeric poem comes from, it cannot be a mistake that it finishes with Odysseus’ characteristic display of hubris being curtailed for the umpteenth time by Athena. 

I say characteristic, but this version of Odysseus is hardly recognisable in Nolan’s version. He is a sanitised, uncomplicated hero with a good heart and bad luck. Gone is the man of ‘many twists and turns’, the ‘complicated man’, the man of ‘many ways’ as the famous opening line has been interpreted. The only glimpse of his arrogance we actually get in the movie is the episode of the Sirens. 

At this point in the film, the men have lost half their forces in the tragedy with the Laestrygonians and those who are left barely trust Odysseus anymore and are threatening mutiny. Yet in the midst of this, Odysseus, who has been fairly level-headed and cautious thus far, takes the opportunity to indulge in what is really a frivolity. Homer’s Odysseus couldn’t care less about endangering the lives of his sailors in this moment; his sole preoccupation is becoming the first person to hear the Siren’s song and live to tell the tale. His episode with the Sirens is not an act of necessity to survive but a test of his own machismo – a self-imposed trial akin to one of Hercules’ labours, undertaken purely to add yet another feat to his growing catalogue of heroic accomplishments.  

Within Nolan’s sombre world, such a fun and needless moment seems to have no place. The scene is confusing at best. At worst, it loses its allure and excitement, its mystical whimsicality, perhaps encapsulated in the fact that Nolan does not attempt to even imagine the Siren’s song at all, ejecting the audience from Odyssey’s experience in the only scene that bears any resemblance of amusement. In fact, Odysseus is not allowed to have any fun at all. No sex, no jokes, no banquets in strange lands. Equally though, Odysseus is not allowed to be truly menacing or scheming.  

By far the best line of the film has to be Odysseus’ to Telemachus: ‘The clearest view of a man is from below.’ And yet Nolan denies us the right to truly view Odysseus from this vantage point. Perhaps afraid of an unforgiving modern audience prone to virtue signalling, Nolan makes Odysseus into a Marvel––or more appropriately for this director of DC––superhero. Damon’s Odysseus is only so bad that he can be forgiven easily enough through showing remorse and deep guilt – the Homeric Odysseus is a far more opaque man to wrestle with. 

Yet as I noted with adaptations, Nolan’s Odysseus does not have to be a carbon copy of his literary or aural counterpart. In fact, Matt Damon brings a sensitivity and silent strength to the role that held some promise. But it feels as though Nolan is afraid to have Damon commit to an Odysseus who is intentionally bloodthirsty, cunning and brutal, and is forced to reckon with these actions by sitting in his guilt. 

Moreover, I even found myself feeling slightly annoyed at the level of remorse Odysseus was reckoning with. Given the moral corners Nolan backed Damon’s Odysseus into, why should he feel so bad about the Trojan war? Would it have been better to sit out of it and let the other kingdoms attack the Ithacans in retribution? Or let the war continue endlessly? If Zendaya’s priestess/Athena apparition is supposed to be haunting him as some karmic PTSD, the least they could have done is ensure that Odysseus was the one who slit her throat. 

Of course I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that they include all the brutal violence and torture in Homer’s epic, or else the UK rating would’ve had to drastically change from a 15+ (intriguingly rated R in the US). The text is already required reading for UK students studying Classics at GCSE level, but Nolan’s signature hyperrealist style would render its graphic violence too visceral even for the adult members of the audience. But this threat of brutality is a central theme of the poem, and more specifically, a pivotal part of the lives of every woman in the Hellenic world.

Nolan, very peculiarly, decides to touch on this topic not with a mortal woman but a deity. Circe. 

The entire episode is entirely disjointed. While the special effects are visceral and entertaining, Circe’s somewhat compelling speech is completely undercut by Odysseus’ questioning and Circe’s obvious supernatural control of the situation. Rather than conjure some sympathy for the female plight, it continues to paint Circe as paranoid and obsessive and malevolent – especially with an inexplicable bird for a sister.

Circe’s line on the men turning ‘back into their disguises’ is quite interesting but flippant. Like Odysseus, we never actually see these men be truly piggish and callous. The film is in two minds about everything. We are supposed to feel sympathy for their impending deaths––doomed by the fates––Odysseus trying ever so hard to save them and yet they are also supposed to be monstrous and disgusting. The sympathy sort of evaporates, and all you’re left with is a sense of indifference. Their deaths are neither tragic nor comeuppance––you don’t cry or rejoice––they are nameless and forgettable. Their deaths are a foregone conclusion. 

I believe that these changes speak to a larger issue in modern audiences and contemporary values that are quick to censure and unable to hold two truths at once. Morality is reduced to a simple black and white fairytale with ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and even the ‘morally ambiguous’ are actually one or the other in disguise. There is almost a puritanical degree to which bad deeds must be explicitly punished and good luck trying to get audiences to empathise or identify with a protagonist whose virtuousness isn’t resolutely confirmed by the end of the movie, giving justifiable explanation for any poor or corrupt choices they have made thus far. 

Depiction is perceived as endorsement. Across all media, there seems to be a pervasive fear that the discussion or representation of a difficult topic will forever stain the name of the creator. Fiction is essentially a thoughtcrime depending on what you would like to explore. Instead of posing moral questions they must also provide the correct answers. 

Nolan does well to leave endings narratively ambiguous but struggles a little more––like almost all directors––to be truly ethically troubling. I think there is a fear that if one wades too deep into these murky and dubious waters one will never return. Or as Nietzsche put it, when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes at you. 

There are so many parts of this movie that I desperately wanted to work. Nolan is expectedly impressive in the cinematography, the practical effects, the soundtrack which Ludwig Göransson absolutely kicks out of the park. 

It was enjoyable and awesome in the very literal sense. 

The sheer effort of filming such a grand movie plays a huge role in keeping cinema alive, and is enough for me to happily hand over my money to the theatre to watch this movie again. In an age (not of Bronze) but where cinema is slowly dying and streaming services suck all of our money and interrupt our movies with adverts, I would never want to shoot us in the foot and needlessly tear down a movie and a creator like Nolan. May he continue to make movies that confuse his audience with screens getting 100 metres larger every time and each one an hour longer than the last. 

And yet, having said that, we have lost the ability to critique anything in an engaging or interesting way. We have lost the meaning of the word ‘critique’ and confuse it often with its much more colourful cousin ‘criticism’. Like Odysseus’ simplified morality, every review must be a rave or a brutal takedown. This is very obviously to attract attention and readers –  the headline ‘Some parts are good, some parts are bad’ is far less enticing than something like Emily Wilson’s witty and brutal evisceration. 

Yet again, like Odysseus’ ability to be inspirational, heroic and a pillar of morality, whilst also being a selfish and impulsive and ruthlessly cruel man who makes no apologies for either is how I felt about Nolan’s Odyssey. The parts I loved, I love wholeheartedly and without reservation and the parts I hate, I loathe and commiserate over even if they contradict each other. This is natural, this is human. We love and hate in equal measure. Homer understood this, the Ancient Greeks understood that even fictional heroes cannot and should not be reduced to archetypes.

Fairytales of that simple didactic nature should be reserved for children, but the adults should be able to discern a little more discriminatingly. 

Who Gets Left Behind?

This is especially the case when it comes to the women of the Odyssey. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect, and where Nolan duly receives the most pushback, the women of his Odyssey are barely footnotes in the lives of the men around them. Poor Nausicaa is written out entirely.   

Yet even in a world where women could not leave their homes unmarried or unaccompanied by a male chaperone, Homer presents Calypso complaining about the double standards for male and female gods, Circe toying with soldiers’ lives just for the fun of it, Athena flummoxing and rolling her eyes at her uncle Poseidon’s plans and wishes, and Penelope outwitting over 100 suitors for over a decade by weaponising her loyalty, fidelity and ‘feminine gentility’ to crucially save her son’s life. 

Unfortunately, Anne Hathaway’s obnoxious displays of anger and indignation are completely counterintuitive to everything that makes Penelope interesting or effective as a character. She is intended to be Odysseus’s equal. The only person in the world cut from the same cloth––or carved of the same olive tree that envelops their immovable marriage bed––and a beacon of loyalty to guide Odysseus home.

Penelope is a mountain; Penelope is an anchor; Penelope is as twisted and gnarly as the roots that have anchored her to her husband and land. 

In the poem, Odysseus and Penelope test each other endlessly. It takes several lines and a baffled Telemachus before Penelope allows herself to believe her eyes and trust that Odysseus has truly returned to her. 

This couple is endlessly skeptical and wary of everything – it is fundamental to their intelligence and a direct result of being burned one too many times by a god in disguise. 

Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway’s versions of the characters are shiny, simple creatures by comparison. Unbeaten by the horror of never being able to trust your eyes and accepting of everything around them as a certainty. They are so unburdened by obligation that they give up their duties to the throne under the pretext of an exile that no one could have actually enforced. 

As Odysseus mocked Eurylochus, does Nolan think if he has the couple sail away into the horizon together the audience will not notice the lack of a resolution? 

In many ways we end up being the Gods. We dictated Nolan’s edits and Odysseus’ fate with our appetite for easily digestible moral failures and we see everything. We bicker amongst ourselves about who truly deserves what and are every bit as fickle as the Olympians. And just as man cannot understand the life of a deity, these hollow characters in Nolan’s film cannot comprehend the depth of human feeling.  

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