THE ODYSSEY (dir. Christopher Nolan, starring, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway)

 THE ODYSSEY (dir. Christopher Nolan, starring, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson)

 

Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey is a preposterous sword and sandal depiction of Homer’s epic which rejects a historical approach.  So, Matt Damon’s Odysseus wears an absurd pair of leather arm guards, omnipresent in such mish mash puddings that seem to incorporate old style Hollywood blockbusters with genuine renditions of the Homeric epos.

The film is set in the classical Greek era, circa 5^th century BC, about 700 years after the period the epic alludes to which was the 11^th-12^th centuries BC, in the heart of the bronze age.  Nevertheless, historic changes are alluded to such as the arrival of the sea peoples and the bronze age collapse which prefigured the beginning of the iron age and the arrival of new peoples who began to dominate the Mediterranean world.

The gods are alluded to but are never visualised.  We learn that the Cyclops Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, God of the sea, storms, earthquakes, and horses.  Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and delivers his riddle, telling the monster that he is ‘no man’, a scene deleted from the film, and the final moment also when the Cyclops community laugh at Polyphemus who is being attacked by ‘no man’.  It is as if Homer sent a postcard to Freud which Nolan has somehow contrived to absent mindedly lose.  Although Homer’s epic implies a greater coherence, this has somehow been lost in Nolan’s rendition. 

Although the goddess Pallas Athena appears to Odysseus in Homer’s work, when he arrives in disguise on the island of Ithaca, she is never visualised.  She isn’t even a voice in Odysseus’s head.  We are left to wonder at the end whether the gods exist or function as narrative devices driving the story on. 

The best scene in the film is at the very beginning, when the Trojan horse appears half-buried in the sand rather than a ridiculous wooden horse on a set of wheels, ready-made to be obligingly wheeled into Troy to begin the destruction of the city.  Nolan cleverly abandons the approach of films like Clash of the Titans, where the gods appear in some rendition of a Roman sauna, replete with ridiculous togas, as if they are on the way to a toga party.

The overall sense of Homer’s epic is maintained and its logic and story telling power are retained.  Another key scene in the Nostos (a word meaning ‘journey home’ and the root of our word ‘nostalgia’) is Hades.  Odysseus encounters Sinon, the dupe he left with the Trojan horse to deliver his message.  Sinon is then dispatched by the Trojans.  The prophet Tiresias directs Odysseus to kill a black ram, once the dead have drunk its blood, they can speak.  Sinon speaks to Odysseus, alleging that he was deceived and depicting Odysseus as a sly trickster.  Sinon is a character omitted from Homer’s epic but the attribution of deception to Odysseus was a common notion in antiquity.  Odysseus then meets Agammemnon and catches up on the bad news of the King’s homecoming.  Agammemnon is betrayed by his wife Clytemnestra but avenged by his son Orestes.  Agammemnon warns him not to return to his home ostentatiously but meekly, in disguise.

The Telemachy is underscored and Telemachus is, at best, a spear carrier.  Anne Hathaway is clearly mis-cast as Penelope, a roll better suited to Charlize Theron who appears as the nymph Calypso, robbing Odysseus of his memories with the lotus flower.  In The Odyssey, Calypso merely delays Odysseus, promising him immortality if he will stay with her, but ultimately and reluctantly allowing him to leave.

The fight with the suitors at the end of the film is clearly absurd but somehow, we come to believe that Odysseus pulls it off.  A literal rendition of the poem with all the correct arms and armour and characters mouthing Homeric Greek would clearly be wrong and what Nolan has done is to make an Odyssey for mature people in the 21^st century.  The film is very good, but I preferred The Vikings, O well…

Paul Murphy, Leicester Square, London, August 2026