The Odyssey is a Sharp Rebuke of War and a Lament for the Disjointedness of Humanity

The Odyssey is not a historical account. It’s an epic poem which, along with the Iliad, is often attributed to Homer, who may or may not have even been a real person or may have been an amalgamation of multiple authors. It is a story of fickle gods, the folly of men, and the menace of monsters. It is a story of senseless wars, of ambition, greed, and ultimately, one man’s decade-long journey home.

Most people have not read the Odyssey. Not Richmond Lattimore’s rigid, academic faithfulness to structure and language, not George Chapman’s lyrical, poetic interpretation, and not even Emily Wilson’s accessible version viewed from a modern, feminist lens (but if one were to pick up a copy, this should probably be the one). Odysseus did not exist. Neither did Helen of Troy or Agamemnon. At the very least, not in any definitive way that Homer wrote or any of the translations that came after. Matt Damon playing the Greek hero is just as valid (or problematic, your pick) as Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen.

Whatever uproar there is about Christopher Nolan’s casting choices is merely baseless noise from a faceless audience that knows next to nothing about oral traditions or what a dactylic hexameter is. Nyong’o, at the very least, is one of the most beautiful women alive, so the angry Internet can shove it up their cyclopean caves.

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The problem, if it even is one, with Nolan’s diverse all-star cast is that it’s an all-star cast. Sometimes, the recognizability of its stars can be distracting, especially when the actors appear to play thinly veiled versions of themselves. It is, at times, distracting to hear Jon Bernthal’s American vernacular contrast against Himesh Patel’s proper English. Nolan didn’t bother to find a cohesive accent to bind everyone’s dialogue, which is a logical, practical solution to crafting a story set in a mythical, bygone era where nobody spoke English to begin with. But Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, makes some baffling dialogue selections such as the use of casual terms like ‘mom’ or ‘dad’, and then use archaic sentence structure like, “we burn the world entire.” Sometimes it’s poetry, and sometimes it’s jarring casual speech.

But Nolan is nothing if not one of the most deliberate and meticulous directors, so all of this disjointed, anachronistic mishmash of speech is a deliberate and blatant Tower of Babel hidden in plain sight—or plain sound, as it were—to help drive home his point about man’s growing, inherent distrust towards one another and our devolution into tribalism.

The diversity of the players in The Odyssey isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s part of the point. An African American Helen exists in the same world as an Afrikaner Calypso (Charlize Theron), just as a Latino Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), Odysseus’ loyal servant and swineherd, exists alongside a Gurajati Eurylochus. Yes, most of the leads are all still white, and Nolan could’ve gone the extra mile and cast an Asian Penelope instead of Anne Hathaway (who is, make no mistake, just perfect as a Grecian queen), but this is as diverse as any production of the Odyssey as you’ll see. The casting choices feel more evocative of a stage play than a film production, which again feels like a deliberate decision by Nolan to echo the Odyssey’s narrative roots. This is reaffirmed by the presence of Travis Scott as a bard who essentially raps about the Trojan War.

Even the set pieces are largely barren and empty, designed with agonizing restraint, as if to mimic the sprawling theaters of ancient Greece where storytellers enraptured audiences through words with minimal props. The most famous rendition of Ogygia, the island where Calypso has imprisoned Odysseus, is a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder that depicts a lush garden of sensual delights. Nolan’s interpretation is a barren isle, devoid of comfort or luxury, the shattered remnants of Odysseus’ ship strewn about. There is no luxuriant wood, no melodious birdsong, no fruits aplenty; nothing but a sparse shelter that must do nothing to stay cruel weather. Nolan sanitized Calypso’s enslavement of Odysseus, removing all carnal affection and making it less like rape and a little more like forced therapy for a complicated man suffering from PTSD.

Nolan has stripped the Odyssey down to the barest of threads, using the enormity of the landscape to dwarf its players and convey how small man is, or used to be, in the world. Nolan shot the entirety of The Odyssey in IMAX using cameras the “size of a coffin,” and the only proper way to fully understand the scope of what he was trying to achieve is to watch it on the biggest screen possible. Anything less would be a failure of the viewer to match Nolan’s boundless ambition and audacity. In a way, The Odyssey’s greatest failing is that there are fewer than 40 cinemas in the entire world capable of screening it in its full 15-perf/70 mm glory.

It’s somewhat baffling that a film that opens with the line, “a time of apparent magic,” and is based on an epic whose events are largely driven by the vicissitudes of shallow and petty gods, has elected to remove them altogether. With the exception of Athena (Zendaya), who appears to Odysseus in sporadic visions, the Greek gods are nowhere to be found. Magic is at a minimum, with Circe’s transfiguration of Odysseus’ men being the most spectacular display of wizardly power and the silver-clad Laestrygonians’ mystical control over their island’s trees. One of the film’s most terrifying scenes is when Odysseus and his crew are trapped in a cave with a grotesque Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), who feasts on sheep and men. The Odyssey may keep magic to a minimum, but it’s completely otherworldly and entrancing.

Odysseus’ devotion to Athena symbolizes his worship of knowledge and intellect, a fitting devotion for the cleverest of Greek heroes, the man responsible for the idea of the Trojan Horse. This, finally, is the crux of Nolan’s nearly three-hour opus: a condemnation of war embodied by the guilt of the man who broke open the impregnable gates of Troy.

It is at the end of a long, laborious journey that we finally understand why the Odyssey is a practical microcosm of our world and its people. Zeus’ law states that hosts must treat guests or strangers with utmost hospitality and respect. It’s a law that is referenced throughout the film, from the opening scenes with Penelope’s many suitors overstaying their welcome in Ithaca, including a delightfully hateful Robert Pattinson as Antinous. Zeus was the god of hospitality and his law is built upon the Greek concept of Xenia, or “guest-friendship,” a tradition and moral obligation of treating others as honored guests. Xenia is derived from the word xenos, or stranger. The same root word for xenophobia. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods mingled among them and were therefore careful not to treat strangers harshly for fear of mistakenly maltreating a god. Christians who actually read the Bible should find this strangely familiar because when Jesus said, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me,” in Matthew 35, He was basically talking about Xenia.

Man has been making the same mistakes since time immemorial. Nolan reframed Odysseus’ conflict from an arduous journey home into the slow admission of guilt for gleeful participation in war. More precisely, a betrayal of Zeus’ law and the realization that he is himself the monster he had always warned his wife and people of. In Homer’s epic poem, there are unsavory, brutal truths that paint Odysseus, aptly described by Emily Wilson as a “complicated man,” as a willing participant in the ravaging of innocents. It’s a harsher realization for a man celebrated for his cunning and intellect because Odysseus should’ve known better but chose to go down a darker path, anyway.

But if there is anything that Nolan does not do, it’s give in to despair. The man behind Interstellar, where love equals gravity, and the man who actually gave Bruce Wayne a happy ending in The Dark Knight Rises, is a man for whom hope is the universe’s singular driving force. The Odyssey is Nolan holding up a mirror to man’s flawed and broken humanity, a sprawling canvas of brutal landscapes and punishing weather in 70mm IMAX to remind us how small and inconsequential we are. We break Zeus’ law again and again, and in our differences retreat to insularity and hate. But Nolan tells us it doesn’t need to be this way, and when Odysseus finally finds his way back to Penelope’s arms, he shows us the warmth of home.

Many might consider The Odyssey to be Nolan’s greatest work yet, and it certainly has the audacity to shake our idea of what it means to interpret ancient epics for the modern era, but it isn’t without its flaws and questionable choices. The Odyssey is just another Nolan opus that moves the needle just a little further, a distillation of a vast epic to remind us that the gods, God, or whatever we might worship, speaks to us in the simplest terms. Because who doesn’t understand a sunset? Or thunder? Christopher Nolan is fluent in the language of divinity, and The Odyssey is here to help us learn it.