The dead bear witness in ‘The Odyssey’

It’s a time of magic, monsters, and men invoking Zeus’s law. But in an intriguing departure, the gods themselves no longer have a central role or physical presence in the story, as Nolan places fate and fanaticism firmly in human hands. For instance, the goddess Athena was a guiding force in the tale as we’ve come to know it, influencing events across space and time. Here, she’s played in mournful silence by Zendaya, appearing only before Odysseus (Matt Damon) as an observant specter that may well live in his imagination—a splinter in his mind, emanating from an emotional breaking point revealed gradually over 172 minutes. If any Nolan film were to benefit from a rewatch, it’s The Odyssey, but the first time around is just as compelling.

The story begins, much as it does in Homer’s foundational poem, with Telemachus (Tom Holland), the young prince of Ithaca, waiting for his father Odysseus’s return after 20 years, before embarking on a journey of his own to learn of the general’s fate. In a banquet hall filled with rowdy suitors for the hand of the resilient Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway), a bard played by rapper Travis Scott recounts, in verse, the famous episode referenced in Homer’s Odyssey, in which Greek warriors led by Odysseus infiltrated Troy’s walls from inside a wooden horse, left behind as divine present. Nolan not only presents these songs and recollections on a humungous scale each time they’re referenced, but he turns this tale of subterfuge and the sacking of Troy into an original sin—a lie that broke the contracts between men, and in the process, broke the world.

 On one hand plays out a tale of royal ascension. As Penelope observes the third year of the suitors’ bacchanal from behind screen doors, the young, fresh-faced Telemachus tries to prove himself a worthy heir. However, the mother-son pair are at the mercy of the scheming suitor Antinous (Robert Pattinson) and his ruthless right hand, Polybus (Corey Hawkins). But the more Telemachus inquires about his father’s fate, the more he hears tales of bravery and cunning—from the likes of Odysseus’s faithful, blind servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo)—which inspire him to wait and search a little longer.

On the other hand, somewhere far away, a haggard Odysseus lives out his years on a beach, under the spell of the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), who finally urges him to remember how he got there, and what happened to his loyal soldiers. The hero’s own recollections become the narrative backbone of Nolan’s film, but they play out not as a sprawling adventure, but as a chilling descent into madness told with horrific, practically rendered special effects. Along this seafaring journey, Odysseus’s second-in-command Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) plays the silent judge to his general’s dangerous decisions, as the fleet rows homeward from Troy, and wrestles with whether to mutiny.  

Where the poem trades in oral accounts of Odysseus’s journey, Nolan’s adaptation turns each of these tales into an episode of its own, as the Ithacan soldiers come face to face with innocent villagers, vengeful witches, alluring sirens, a terrifying Cyclops, and eventually, the spirits of the many men they betrayed and left behind—among them, the loyal Sinon (Elliot Page), a character pulled from outside Homer’s tale. Page, in his brief role, becomes the movie’s eerie moral conscience, in a scene of mucky ritual and superstition that elevates The Odyssey from a mere sword-and-sandal story into a deeply troubling moral conundrum of how best to remember the dead, and who these commemorations truly serve.

In a similar confrontation, Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o) questions her own place as a beautiful woman for whom wars were fought; she knows she’s just a pretext for a darker instinct lurking in the hearts of men. Underlying each adventure in The Odyssey is a sense of cruelty found far beneath the heroic text, as Nolan examines the mythmaking that goes into creating legends, and elevating men to godlike stature through half-truths and obfuscations (not unlike this year’s folklore deconstruction The Death of Robin Hood—or any number of Nolan’s own films, like The Dark Knight). 

 To better reflect the modern world, Nolan takes his casting cues from Shakespeare adaptations and picks the best actors for each part, no matter their ethnicity. However, that they each perform with American accents, regardless of their origins, serves a dual purpose. It not only allows the dialogue to veer from stilted cinematic traditions—it adopts a casual cadence akin to Emily Wilson’s famously accessible translation, and to subversive historical films like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ—but it also helps project this tale of circa 12th Century BCE antiquity onto a modern political context. Nolan leans on historical hindsight to emphasize an oncoming Bronze Age Collapse, turning the film into an omen of the now. “Zeus’s law” is thrown about both as a guiding kindness and an excuse for atrocity, not unlike the Christo-fascism of the modern United States, whose militaristic ambition becomes reflected in Odysseus’s ventures. If this is the end of the world as we know it—an empire eating itself from within while spreading misery and death—then it’s happened before, and we would do well to heed the warnings.

All the while, a secondary question emerges, as Nolan imbues his adaptation with historical speculation. The Bronze Age Collapse is often attributed, in part, to a mysterious “Sea People,” said to have sacked numerous empires, but for whom little evidence exists. The characters in the movie speak of them as ghosts. But what if this legend could be granted concrete narrative form, if only retroactively, as an alternate view of the Ithacans’ brutality? How would such a people be remembered by their peers and loved ones? And what would be the emotional cost of achieving this lofty status across numerous atrocities canonized as myth? 

These episodes play out not through the traditional, measured staging of Hollywood epics, but through formal pandemonium, as Nolan leans on the elliptical editing and impressionistic bursts that usually define brief moments of memory or spurts of sensory input in his films, dating all the way back to Insomnia in 2002. Here, in his thirteenth feature, this fractal approach becomes his cinematic lingua franca, forcing us to piece together the broken shards of scenes unfolding in the darkness of caves and stormy seas.

That The Odyssey is the first film shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras makes its approach all the more awe-inspiring. It features landscape shots aplenty, but the technology is used more to highlight isolation than natural beauty (and to capture the terrifying scale of giants shot with forced perspective tricks à la The Lord of the Rings). It’s a work of intimate, rankled close ups magnified for the largest possible canvas, awash in cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s flickering flames, and accompanied by a building, folkloric score by Ludwig Göransson that feels like whispers carried on the wind.

There are those who will demand fealty to the text, and to the designs of the era in which the movie is set. However, Homer’s very existence is a matter of debate, and this story—passed down and transformed across the years—is one Nolan reimagines through the historical details its original authors might have been familiar with during their own lifetimes, several centuries post its setting. And yet, what makes Nolan’s The Odyssey special is that he doesn’t treat the text as a work in amber. Rather, it becomes a reflection of contemporary concerns, meant not to comment on the past, but on a present in which political ambition, and the zealotry it breeds, are a choking smog. This is hardly a novel insight, but to know it is one thing, and to feel it deep within your bones until it sickens you is entirely another.

Nolan’s recent works—Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet among them—feel consumed by these primal fears of society eating itself through climate change and war. In keeping with these fixations, his latest plays like a rousing culmination of modern nightmares echoed by the Bronze Age Collapse, led by men creating myths about themselves so as to be remembered in death, rather than catering to the living. But in The Odyssey, the dead speak back. They bear witness to ambition through the all-seeing eye of the IMAX camera, which exposes the rot beneath the rousing chaos of cinematic adventure, born of the very same militaristic instincts as empires in their death throes. As has long been an obsession of Nolan’s filmmaking: even heroism has a cost, and by refracting the original Hero’s Journey through this lens, he turns a foundational pillar of western storytelling into a deeply personal, tremendously moving saga of one man’s journey home, and whether he can conceive of a homecoming he deserves.