It’s hard to imagine a more ambitious gambit for Christopher Nolan than adapting Homer’s The Odyssey, one of the oldest and most well-known pieces of Western literature this side of the Bible. Expectations for a Nolan film already start at the ceiling, and adapting Odysseus’ long, dangerous voyage home to Ithaca following the 10-year Trojan War blasted those expectations through the roof. Yet again, Nolan pulled it off.
The Odyssey is a truly spectacular piece of filmmaking, accomplished through Nolan’s clever push-pull of when to lean into source material and when to pull away. The Odyssey is a contemporary film, and not just because Tom Holland’s Telemachus says “Dad.” That single line, along with the decision to have actors use straight American accents and speak conversationally, attracted enormous scrutiny following the first trailer’s release. But deviating from traditional swords-and-sandals haughtiness (classical British accents and all) makes The Odyssey approachable in a way the source material hasn’t been maybe since the days of its oral roots.
The Odyssey is obviously an incredible story, but because almost all translations of the epic poem stay as close to the original text as possible (at least the translations taught in school), there’s an inescapable distance between a modern audience and the text. The film’s conversational dialogue closes that gap and lets the story breathe without getting bogged down by unfamiliar sentence structure or turns of phrase that require a search engine (or your favorite English teacher) to figure out.
That allows the core aspects of the story—the ones to which Nolan holds closest—to shine, both the literal scenes from Homer’s epic and the core themes that the story addresses. It’s hard to imagine a better execution of the major set pieces—the Trojan horse and the sacking of Troy, the cyclops, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the trip to the Underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—than what Nolan produced. The action is intimate and visceral, and the production design is absolutely incredible. Coupled with some of the best sound design in recent memory, the world is immediately and consistently captivating.
Nolan also deviates from Homer’s epic narratively—but not substantively—in two ways, both of which are excellent adaptive choices. The Trojan War, and specifically, the Trojan horse, feature much more prominently in the film and operate as an interrogation of the epic poem itself and the heroic tales that it seeks to lift. The Trojan horse is thought of as this brilliant military ploy—which it was—but it was also a dirty trick that trampled over military and social ethics. Odysseus (Matt Damon) struggles mightily with that and the decay that the Trojan War wrought overall.
Indeed, it’s Odysseus’ internal shame and guilt to which the film points as the primary reason for his long-delayed journey home, not necessarily the gods’ will and anger. And that’s the other major narrative deviation—where the gods are front, center, and active in Homer’s epic, they are merely an otherworldly background presence in the film, save for a few direct effective (Zendaya) conversations with Odysseus. The gods are there, yes, but their intervention is depicted as a reflection of the actions of men, not as a contradictory force.
The Odyssey is not a perfect film. When Odysseus finally returns home for the third act, the tone shifts dramatically, especially once the final showdown with the suitors comes, to one of hope and at times high camp. It’s not ineffective, but it’s slightly jarring. Nolan also again creeps back to a problem that consistently pops up in his third acts where he can’t help but hammer home his point too strongly. He tells you what the film was about, then again, then again, then one more time for good measure, and it’s very much an “I get it” situation. That’s simply not enough to take away from complete, brilliant filmmaking, and it’s not hard to imagine The Odyssey screening in English classes for many years to come.
