Bioenergeia

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is an excellent blockbuster but a failed adaptation, and that is precisely why it is worth discussing.

As a blockbuster it meets its marks of scale and spectacle. The pacing is well done; it smooths over parts that would otherwise feel slow with flashbacks of the Trojan War. And despite the action being spaced throughout, the climax is a justified payoff. Some strong acting performances by Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Robert Pattinson keep the narrative of the movie strong and keep you entertained for the full three-hour runtime. The Nolan fingerprint on this movie is apparent, though I would put it closer to the middle third of his repertoire. Despite any criticisms, I would recommend seeing it because of its strength as a high budget entertaining film and the interesting conversations it is likely to inspire.

As many speculated prior to release, my critiques of the film must begin with its disappointment as an adaptation.

The issue of its immersion as a period piece has been a polarizing topic among reviewers, but I think the heart of the issue is not its historical accuracy. The film would have been inaccessible without a degree of modernizing of language and style; however, it fails to fundamentally transport the viewer to ancient Greece. Homer’s Odyssey is not just a story of a man returning home from war. It is a work integrated with its characters, gods, morals, and social institutions to create a whole. Hospitality, honor, glory, fate, and the intervention of the gods exist in relation and frequently in tension with one another. The power of the story comes from sitting in that worldview instead of translating it to our own.

The moral theme of Nolan’s focus was the concept of ancient Greek hospitality and reciprocity called Xenia, or “Zeus’s Law”. The creative liberties taken with this moral theme were to universalize the concept into “Golden Rule” of sorts. It is not just an ancient tradition among aristocratic societies of Bronze Age Greece, but the belief that one should treat all men as they would want done to them, lest the stranger they mistreat be a god in disguise. This is the basis for how Odysseus sees Athena in the film. Athena is not the goddess of wisdom intervening in the affairs of the world, but rather an externalization of the guilt Odysseus feels for betraying Zeus’s Law in the sack of Troy. This is a recurring theme of how Nolan treats the Olympian gods. They are reduced to omens, symbols or psychological projections.

This fundamentally changes the story in a way that makes immersion more challenging. The shifting of the focus from gods, fate, honor, and glory and their real interactions to a more interior struggle of guilt and reconciliation is a dead giveaway that the story is of a contemporary age. The story resembles a Dostoyevsky novel more than Homer.

This tendency toward modernization unfortunately permeates more superficial aspects of the film as well. The dialogue is unmistakably modern, bringing the setting closer to the audience rather than the audience to the setting. Lines such as “Our age of bronze is collapsing” sounds more like the director speaking directly to the audience and not something an ancient bronze age hero would have said. The score doesn’t develop any further than conventional blockbuster intensification and occasionally drowns out significant lines of dialogue.

Visually I also feel an opportunity was wasted. Nolan’s use of practical effects over CGI was excellent, particularly the cyclops scenes. But this doesn’t make up for the color palette being dominated by blue-grey and firelit darkness. Nothing in the films washed out palette evokes the Mediterranean Sea, Greece or Anatolia. Scenes featuring any greenery feel like a reprieve from an otherwise bleak looking world.

My deepest regret about the film is that it robs the audience of the ability to experience the world of Homer and the ancient Greeks on their own terms. Period pieces are not just recreating appearances but stepping into the milieu of the time. The Robert Eggers film The Witch succeeds in this way because it does more than put actors in pilgrim costumes, it reconstructs seventeenth-century consciousness. Nolan’s Odyssey instead brings Homer’s world to the moral psychology of the twenty-first century.

This film is important to see because it raises fascinating questions about adaptation itself. If you keep Homer’s plot but replace his cosmos, what exactly has been adapted?