The Odyssey | review by Rafe McGregor

Faithful but flawed.

Very little is known about Homer other than that he was Greek, probably born in the eighth century BCE, and inaugurated European literary heritage with the Iliad and its sequel, the Odyssey, a pair of epic poems about the Trojan War. The war itself, which has been dated to the collapse of the Bronze Age in the twelfth century BCE, and Homer’s authorship are disputed, the latter a result of the poems being the product or an oral rather than written tradition. Like the Iliad, which I discussed in my review of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), the Odyssey consists of twenty-four divisions (later, ‘books’ or chapters) composed in dactylic hexameter. Where the Iliad tells the story of the fall of Troy, of the Achaean (Greek) victory in the Trojan War courtesy of King Odysseus of Ithaca’s cunning ploy with the Trojan horse, the Odyssey, literally ‘the story of Odysseus’, tells the tale of Odysseus’ homecoming which, like the war itself, takes ten years. The journey turns into an odyssey due to the combination of the god Poseidon’s wrath, the recklessness of Odysseus’ men, and his own vices and while he is away his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, must deal with a host of parasitical ‘suitors’ who want to instal themselves as King of Ithaca by marrying Penelope. Where the Iliad is a very different type of narrative to those with which we are now familiar, the Odyssey has many recognisable literary features, including the use of flashbacks and changes in narration. Although the gods play an important role, there is also a sense in which Odysseus is clearly the protagonist, with his agency driving the sequence of events that unfolds. Similarly, the diffusion of narrative focus among Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope is much more modern than the Iliad’s emphasis on heroes and kings and it is not difficult to discern a prototypical contemporary novel in the poem. This is probably why I enjoyed it so much when I first read it, unlike the Iliad, and why it is usually evaluated as superior to the Iliad by literary scholars.

The main problem with filming the Odyssey is, of course, the decade long sequence of events represented. If one counts only live action films that retain the original setting, there have been four cinematic adaptations to date. The first was The Odyssey (L’Odissea, 1911), a short, silent Italian film directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro and released seven months after the first cinematic adaptation of the Iliad. The second, Ulysses (Ulisse, 1954), and third, Nostos: The Return (Nostos: Il ritorno, 1989) were also Italian and were directed by Mario Camerini and Franco Piavoli respectively, with Kirk Douglas playing the lead in the former. There must be something about Homer’s epics and Italy, perhaps a throwback to the popularity of the ‘sword and sandal’ genre in the country in the nineteen fifties and sixties, because the fourth is a joint Italian, Greek, and British production. The Return (2024) was directed by Uberto Pasolini and starred Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in the lead roles. I liked The Return a lot, though I was disappointed when I realised that the film was going to focus exclusively on the events following Odysseus’ arrival in Ithaca. When I heard that Christopher Nolan would be directing The Odyssey, I must admit my heart sank. Nolan is famous or, perhaps more accurately, notorious for experimenting with chronology and temporality and has produced masterpieces like Memento (2000) by tinkering with time in ingenious ways. More recently, his experimentation has either been pointless (I’m thinking of Dunkirk in 2017 and Oppenheimer in 2023, both of which are historical) or entirely over the top (whatever it was Tenet was supposed to be in 2020). The fact that Nolan would be adapting a narrative that was itself achronological did not bode well and seemed like it might be a recipe for disaster.

I’m pleased to say that my fears were entirely unfounded, with Nolan creating a largely faithful adaptation of Homer’s original that includes most of all twenty-four parts in roughly the same order. The only major characters missing, as far as I can tell on a single viewing, are Nestor, Nausicaa, and Laertes, none of whose absence detracts from the storytelling. On the note of character, while the casting is not as good as Troy’s, it works much better than I anticipated, although the best acting is by Samantha Morton (playing Circe) and Charlize Theron (playing Calypso) rather than any of the three leads. My only quibble in this regard is the retention of American accents and contemporary American vernacular. Telemachus (played by Tom Holland) calling Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) ‘dad’ did not assist my suspension of disbelief and made me feel like I was watching a sitcom rather than one of the oldest stories ever. Remaining faithful to the original brings challenges of its own, however, the first and most obvious being running time and the film is just under three hours long. No one left the theatre nor did I get the feeling that the audience was restless by the end so Nolan appears to have succeeded here, combatting decreasing attention spans with compelling cinematic art in which both cinematography and sound reward viewing on the big screen. Second, the number of books included means that some scenes are very compressed and the following suffer for it: the Laestrygonians, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the cattle of Helios. Two other scenes are badly handled without screen time being the issue. The first, near the beginning, is the strangely sexless Cyclops (played by Bill Irwin), who is more funny than frightening, and the second and most disappointing, the slaughter of the suitors in the hall, which is represented with considerably less skill than in The Return (and is, unfortunately, the climax of the narrative for both Homer and Nolan).

Such is The Odyssey for those who are familiar with the original. How, then, has Nolan made it his own? While he doesn’t play with Homer’s chronology (at least to any significant extent), he does include one of his trademark twists in the tale, albeit indirectly related to time in this instance. The repeated mention of raiders from the sea is a leitmotif that feeds very nicely into the theme of this adaptation. Where one might regard Homer’s poem as being primarily about homecoming and family, Nolan’s film is about a great warrior who comes to realise the folly of war and regret the role he has played in destroying a city, a civilisation, and a culture (there are repeated flashbacks to the fall of Troy). Odysseus’ odyssey is as much psychological as physical, the recognition that he does not want to return to Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) as the same man who left her. With this in mind, Nolan’s new conclusion to the story works particularly well, providing a very satisfying narrative closure following the disappointing struggle with the suitors. Can Nolan’s The Odyssey be watched as a sequel to Petersen’s Troy? Yes, I think so. Nolan makes various nods to Petersen in his adaptation and while The Odyssey is a tale with more gods, more grit, and less glamour than Troy, the originals are themselves very different and the films provide a complementary contrast to one another as the respective stories of Achilles and Odysseus, of setting out for martial glory and coming back to live with its consequences.***