Three Ways of Thinking About The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, reviewed by an international relations professor.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey to see what all the hubbub was about. A movie written and directed by the most successful commercial director of the current moment, with an all-star cast that includes Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, John Leguizamo, Charlize Theron, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page, Samantha Morton, and Lupita Nyong’o among others?
Yeah, that’s worth a look-see:
With a filmmaker as ambitious as Nolan — ambitious enough to attract the malevolent attentions of Elon Musk — choosing to adapt one of the most ancient texts in Western civilization, there are three questions worth asking:
Is the movie any good?
Does the criticism of the film make any sense?
Is the movie anything more than entertainment?
My answers to these questions are pretty simple: yes, not really, and most definitely yes.
Is it a good movie worth seeing in the theater? God, yes. It’s beautiful on the big screen. Shots as simple as seeing a Greek trireme on the ocean are breathtaking. The Circe sequence is Nolan at his best: disturbing and arresting and I am still not sure how he pulled it off. The performances — particularly from Damon, Hathaway, Morton, Pattinson, and Leguizamo — are outstanding. The ending is thrilling, and at close to three hours I didn’t think it dragged in the slightest.
Is it perfect? No. As with all Nolan screenplays, there are some lines that are incredibly clunky. At one point a character says, “our Age of Bronze is ending” and I could not suppress a chuckle — and then another responds with, “so it’s true our civilization is collapsing.” Yikes. As with all Nolan films, the lady characters are often more symbols and archetypes than flesh-and-blood individuals.1
These are minor cavils. Nolan is also perfectly synched with the material. The second-most surprising thing about Nolan’s The Odyssey is that it took him this long to adapt Homer’s epic into a film. Homer’s version of The Odyssey hopscotches across time and place. Anyone familiar with Nolan’s oeuvre from Memento to The Prestige to Dunkirk to Tenet to Oppenheimer knows that Nolan likes to play with time. He has his fun with flashbacks and flash forwards.
Does the criticism of the film make any sense? There are so many ways to say no —and, to be fair, one way to say yes. The Musks of the world are decrying some of the casting choices, such as Lupita Nyong’o as Helen & Clytemnestra, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, Travis Scott as a bard, and Elliot Page as Sinon. A lot of Musk devotees on X, like Matt Walsh, are declaring that the film is bad or woke, which for them is the same thing.
The silliness of these criticisms are only heightened by the film’s commercial success. Among other things the rank hypocrisy is wildly funny. Conservatives have bashed progressive critiques of casting like, say, Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell or Emma Stone in Aloha. Now, suddenly, they are declaring it’s Very Different when a brown actor is cast in a white role. In this case it’s particularly ridiculous, since none of the major parts are played by Greeks and everyone is speaking American English.2 When someone like the National Review’s Rick Lowry describes the criticisms as “miscast” you know things have gone too far.
That said, there is one valid critique, which is that Nolan’s version of The Odyssey takes the ultimate Greek fable and infuses it with a more Judeo-Christian sensibility. As Helena Hunt points out in The Ringer:
The straight-faced director excises the carnivalesque lineup of Zeus, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, et al. and replaces them with a distant deity who manages to show up only in sea storms and thunderbolts and comes with a distinctly modern set of virtues… Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have their share of woe and divine retribution, sure, but they’re also filled with the bawdy, shifting moods of the gods, who bestow their favor unevenly and pursue their lust and vengeance to extremes. Nolan sands those gods down into a more moral, quasi-Judeo-Christian idea of monolithic power and then puts their divine weight behind some of his chosen themes. The effect is to re-create the gods after our own (or Nolan’s) ideas of remote and irreproachable moral authority, as if we couldn’t believe Odysseus would worship these gods if they didn’t measure up to our standards….
Nolan folds together the discordant values of the gods until there’s one message left: Practice hospitality, avoid war, and treat others how you’d like to be treated. That sentiment is nowhere to be found in Homer—it’s basically the opposite of how his selfish gods and heroes operate—but it does show up in a different religious text a few centuries later. It’s a more monotheistic ideal with a more contemporary aspiration: to urge us to welcome strangers into our gates, let up on all that warmongering, seek justice but show mercy, and humble our egos before the unknown powers that be.
So yes, Nolan departs from Homer’s text in significant ways — but to say he does so in a way that offends cultural conservatives is, well, blasphemous. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson is correct when he explains, “it's funny that Nolan made The Odyssey kinda Christian—accentuating the main character's guilt, trauma—and then many Christian conservatives, who decided that they were going to hate the movie because it had a Black actress in the wrong role, instead have to twist themselves into the pretzel of arguing that making the Odyssey Christian is ‘woke’ and they just really wanted to see a movie and hero that properly embodied the very same archaic and anti-Christian values that in any other context they would consider abhorrent.”
The fact that I’m writing about Greek mythology and Judeo-Christian values straightforwardly answers my last question: there is a deeper message to this film. Indeed, to answer Ana Marie Cox’s question before she even asks it on our Space the Nation podcast, there is a surprising amount of international relations (IR) in this film.
