The Odyssey is a story of a world defined only by memory. If you leave for a distant war and are gone for 20 years, of course you would struggle to recognize the son you left as an infant upon your return; of course the stories about squalls and lust and uncontacted tribes would take on mythic qualities, fluid enough to flow into whatever religious or political bent the people telling and hearing the tales prefer. Your wife will need little shibboleths to know it’s really you.
Christopher Nolan has been rightly praised, as a director, for his unparalleled commitment to practical effects and rightly criticized, as a screenwriter, for an attendantly labored approach to story. He’s made a handful of excellent movies despite his Achilles heel. But The Odyssey is the first time his devotion to the literal Real has been wielded so effectively. None of this was supposed to be photographed; the inherent contradiction in putting Homer’s epic on screen—Poseidon is either anthropomorphized or he isn’t; we see Odysseus’s face in close-up, 50 feet tall on IMAX screens—forces choices that could easily sap it of its ambiguity, and therefore of its symbolic power.
Instead, Nolan uses this contradiction as an opportunity to explore the gap between what people actually fear and what they merely claim to. His Odyssey (which relies primarily on the most recent major translation, published by Emily Wilson in 2017) features fantastical, supernatural elements, but is far more troubled by the capacity of humans for evil—and for lying to themselves and others about their culpability in it. For instance, he depicts the poem’s cannibalistic giants, the Laestrygonians, as soldiers who are simply bigger than Odysseus’ men, a perfect reflection of how they must have looked in the villages they razed. In Wilson’s translation, those giants are “not humanlike.” But this is not a straightforwardly terrestrial explanation: The towering soldiers are as unreal as legendary giants, their armor presaging a new era of mechanized warfare the Greeks unleashed at Troy. That they are more plausible by degrees makes them exponentially more terrifying.
And still, there’s a pervasive sense of liminality. The Odyssey was filmed across Europe and northern Africa—in Italy, Greece, Iceland, Scotland, and in disputed Western Sahara—yet all the beaches transition gradually as if the sea and land intermingle forever. For as dutifully naturalistic as the setups are, the film occasionally takes on the feel of a stage play, where its latticework of accents, syntaxes, and acting styles are allowed to accentuate something other than strict verisimilitude. Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus sounds like Jon Bernthal, a rich boy playing thug; Robert Pattinson, who’s outrageously fun playing a real piece of work like Antinous, sneers and scoffs his way through the palace; Mia Goth’s Melantho has the proverbial face that knows about text messaging, which only makes her a more sinister presence in the wings of Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) quarters. And for all the whinging about the cast’s racial diversity, the actor who in some ways reads least as an ancient Greek is Matt Damon, whose Odysseus scans as American, which is almost certainly the point.
For as long as he’s been making movies, Nolan has been fixated on the effect time has on our memory and processing of traumatic events. He renders an Ithaca where most characters make assumptions about the world not based on the best information, but in ways that flatter their conceptions of self: Telemachus (Tom Holland) has his unspoiled image of Odysseus and is “sure” his father is alive, because who he is is Odysseus’ son; Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) thinks he’s likely dead, which simply emphasizes his loyalty. It’s only Penelope who’s interested in the truth at any cost. “I don’t want Odysseus’s song,” she barks at one point. “I want Odysseus!” This discrepancy between wish fulfilment and truth-seeking is simple enough to grasp when there’s a binary question, such as whether Odysseus is alive or dead. But sometimes the truth being sought or avoided is more abstract, more elemental.
Counter to Nolan’s usual ostentatiousness, the simultaneous threads of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and the crises he faced in the decade that followed the Trojan War are cut together without ceremony. Yet there’s a powerful synergistic effect: At certain times, you can feel the recollections straining toward unreliability, but never quite getting there—the non-Laestrygonians, Menelaus’ unfounded certainty as he explains the world, the whirlpool that might not have been quite so symmetrical but certainly existed in some form. (The most beautiful shot in a film full of them sees the Sirens, through mist, lounging on the rocks of their isle; it’s at once The Odyssey’s most painterly frame and the one that looks most like a 60 frames-per-second digital video.) We are not receiving scraps of necessary plot, puzzle pieces that will add up to a whole: these are character notes, comforting lies people tell themselves to make things manageable.
Most reviews of Nolan’s film note that he has rearranged things to underline the guilt Odysseus feels over the destruction of Troy, and specifically the Trojan Horse gambit that facilitated it. This is true, and of a piece with what has already come into focus as a filmography about humankind grappling with what it has wrought. But there’s something more elemental here than one man’s conscience, or even the critique of Western empire, embodied in Odysseus’s confirmation to Penelope that the spectral “people from the sea”—a looming terror Greeks have begun to fixate on, boats full of anonymous soldiers wreaking mythic levels of violence—are, in fact, he and his men. When, in that same conversation, he recounts what happened in Troy, it’s as if he witnessed an evil he did not previously know existed. It recalls the atom bomb—not the way it’s rendered in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but rather in Twin Peaks, where it’s a singular moment of rupture in the fabric that once kept the universe in balance.
And so The Odyssey becomes a uniquely effective anti-war movie. In 2017’s Dunkirk, even as Nolan homes in on the tragedy and hypocrisy of war, he valorizes acts of heroism within it. This is easy enough: Dunkirk is about an evacuation. Here, though, the entire enterprise is vile, and futile, and irredeemable, made worse by the self-delusion of the people who pursue it. Even though it would be two millennia before people put this language to it, throughout the movie I found myself thinking of American wars of “liberation.” The most forceful argument to this end comes during a sequence in Hades, when Sinon (Elliot Page, giving the film’s best performance) essentially spits on Odysseus’s ethical and narrative framework for the world. He can pluck his bow before firing an arrow if he wants, but the deer still gets killed.
In 1826, a French inventor named Nicéphore Niépce pointed a camera obscura out of a window in his estate and, over the course of about six weeks, produced an image of buildings and countryside. Basically everyone agrees that it’s the world’s oldest surviving photograph. And that’s the point: surviving. An ephemeral record is no record at all. And while photography, like any other artistic or journalistic medium, is subject to all sorts of editorial judgments—and therefore has the capacity for dishonesty—there are guardrails: you can stage a photograph, but you can’t exactly fake one. What appears inside the frame, at one point, existed.
Obviously, that era is over. In historical terms, it’s a blip: two centuries of objectivity in images. But as we drift back toward an environment where anything can be claimed as true, The Odyssey argues that those narrative flourishes can only fool us for so long. At a certain point, you’re going to have to look into a mirror. Without surveillance footage, or a blurry picture, or even so much as a written word, Odysseus realizes that what has been done is irreversible, no matter how it’s reframed or explained.