OK, I’ve watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. And I feel the need to talk about it.
To tell the truth, at a rough guess it would seem that everyone who saw the film in cinemas yesterday (the cinema in my town was full: every screening, all day long) is feeling the same. Since I unlocked my phone this morning I must have seen at least fifty posts about the film. And compared with the tone that had built up (the widespread distrust, the pre-emptive criticism and the accusations of woke culture), the comments I have read have all – or at least most of them – struck an entirely different tone.
In short, Nolan’s Odyssey is a masterpiece. Everyone is realising it.
But not for the reasons we expected.
Of course, the cinematography is monumental; IMAX gives the footage a breadth you simply don’t feel in standard cinemas. Even the performances are very, very strong (above all Pattinson as Antinous, but also Matt Damon in the Sirens scene, or on his return to Ithaca). How strong? Strong enough that I expect a few Oscars when next February comes round.
But no: none of this makes The Odissey the masterpiece it is.
The credit belongs entirely to Nolan.
Let’s find out why together in this (mostly) spoiler-free review.
A modern Odysseus
Let’s start from one premise.
This is not Homer’s Odyssey. It is Nolan’s Odyssey: a modern Odyssey, with all its light and shade.
If at first this made many people turn up their noses before release, in reality the effect works very well.
Nolan has mastered the Odyssey. A feat at which he had been written off, yet from which the English director (like Odysseus against Poseidon) emerged victorious.
That the story is his own is clear from the very first frame.
The film opens with the caption “In a time of apparent magic…”. A line that makes us European viewers instantly ask: apparent in what sense? Not least because the Odyssey is pure epic: the story of gods and creatures that shape people’s lives, and of a hero who, through his own wit, finds a way past every adversity.
But here’s the thing: that is the Odyssey of the bards.
Here, in the twenty-first century, the story we are told is more human, more psychological. The magic is only apparent because… I can’t say. But yes, it is apparent: it is there, but it might not be. It exists, but in stories and memories.
The gods are on everyone’s lips, and that matters more than any actual intervention on their part, because whether they exist or not is irrelevant. What counts is what people believe.
The law of Zeus and the shadow of the subconscious
This is also why the heart of the story is the law of Zeus: the Greek concept of hospitality, examined in the film in all its hypocrisy.
For centuries we have celebrated the great cunning of Ulysses, but as modern people we may fairly ask: where is the honour in the horse? Where is the merit in betraying the customs of our fathers and the ancient values?
For three millennia we have been used to an Odysseus at war with the Gods over offences involving Polyphemus and the Cattle of the Sun. For Nolan, however, the real struggle Odysseus lives through is internal, so much so that his true enemy is his own subconscious. Guilt. Remorse. That reflection in which he still cannot recognise himself, but which has a name and a form: the people of the sea.
There: I found this aspect very strong. It is, after all, the crux of the whole film and what gives logic and meaning to that “apparently” which had made me turn up my nose so much.
Nolan’s Horse
The true protagonist of the story, then, is not so much cunning Odysseus (who is not cunning at all, but for good reasons) as his Horse.
For the first time we see inside it: we live alongside the Achaeans who spent days there in silence, and we see it for what it is: a stain on humanity. Rather like the bomb in Oppenheimer (but in an ethical, moral sense).
While all this was happening on screen, however, another horse was being unveiled. The advertising one, tied to the film’s marketing.
A huge piece of bait, which pre-selected the audience for The Odyssey and generated extraordinary debate.
Let’s talk about all those controversies Nolan so carefully engineered. The figures of Sinon and Helen of Troy, played by Elliot Page (long rumoured to be playing Achilles) and Lupita Nyong’o; the inclusion of Travis Scott; Agamemnon’s unrealistic armour. Little more than means through which the director chose to stimulate discussion around the film, concealing his intentions until the very end: to deliver a profoundly human message, of values and of rebuilding.
A final verdict
Some things don’t work.
The Odyssey is not a perfect film, and various limitations remain. Mediterranean coastlines full of birch trees, Dover-style cliffs, the thinness of the Cyclops scene. Yet this reimagining of Ulysses remains a hugely successful gamble, as do many sequences that will go down in cinema history (Circe and Hades above all).
For all these reasons, we can and must regard The Odyssey as a living film. Topical, even though full of ruins (a perfect symbol of the decline of the Bronze Age, and of our own). Thanks, I have no doubt, to the Copernican revolution at the heart of the film. One that will – rightly – spark a great deal of discussion.
New Connections (FAQ)
Does the film work for those who don’t know Homer’s Odyssey?
I defy any Westerner not to know the Odyssey. That said, perhaps it works even better. Those who don’t carry the original text with them meet the film with no expectations to manage. Nolan’s Odyssey does not presuppose knowledge of the poem: it uses it as material on which to build something different. Those who know it by heart risk spending the first two hours measuring the distances. Those who barely know it enter the story unguarded, which is exactly the condition in which the film works best.
Were the casting controversies really a strategic choice, or a reading after the fact?
Hard to say for certain, but the consistency between the choices and the film’s theme is too precise to be accidental. Elliot Page as Sinon, the archetypal figure of deception; Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, the pretext for a war told by those who never fought it. Every controversial casting choice touches precisely the blind spots of the Homeric tradition. Calculated or not, the result is the same: the debate selected the audience and built anticipation among those who wanted to quarrel with the film before even seeing it.
Is it worth seeing in IMAX, or will a standard screen do?
It depends on what you want to take away from it. The IMAX cinematography has a breadth you don’t feel in standard cinemas: the sea voyage and Hades sequences lose scale on a normal screen. But the film holds up on any screen, because its real weight is in the storytelling. IMAX is better if you can get to one, but it is not essential.