The Film That Launched a Thousand Tweets

Nolan's Odyssey has split the internet. Beyond the debate over black Helens and Viking ships lies a deeper question: what becomes of Homer's epic when claimed by a late-stage civilization?

Editor's Note: Given the controversy surrounding this film's reception, LEO has decided — in the tradition of Guareschi’s Candido — to run two reviews: a pro and contra, if you will.
This is Part 1, written by our editor-in-chief, David Boos.

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns…” (Homer, Odyssey 1.1, trans. Robert Fagles)

Whoever takes in Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the epic with Homer’s opening still in his ears will stumble at once, like Faust over his rendering of Scripture. For after nearly three hours of film, it becomes clear that Nolan has sinned gravely against Homer’s work: the film does not sing, and its Odysseus is not cunning.

That may at first sound like pedantry plucked straight from Medusa’s scalp, but it is essential for answering the question of how this perhaps most controversial film of recent years — if not decades — should finally be judged.

But first things first. Infinitely much has already been said about this film, so some structure is in order. As the ancient Greeks knew, this is best done in three parts. And since this is a film review, we may as well borrow them from the cinematic Olympus.

The Good, ...

The concerns voiced in advance that the film might be “bad” on account of its baffling choices in casting and production design turn out to be misplaced. Christopher Nolan and his team (above all his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who has given Nolan’s films their recognisable look since Interstellar) know how to produce a film competently. Considering the quality of the source material, a certain — highly placed — minimum standard was always going to be reached.

And so it is. Whoever goes to the cinema without any particularly intimate relationship to the Odyssey will be well entertained. The adventures of Odysseus are realised with visual force and intensity. From the cave of the Cyclops to the giant Laestrygonians to the great reckoning on Ithaca at the story’s end — something is always happening. The Odyssey proves to be enormously grateful material for film, especially with modern means. The various stations of the wanderings are all set pieces, some shorter, some longer, so that boredom never sets in.

But the expectations for a Christopher Nolan film run higher. In terms of acting there is no total failure, even if Robert Pattinson’s Antinous becomes, as the film wears on, ever more the caricature of a crookedly smiling villain — but there are also few positive exceptions. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope comes closest to deserving praise, yet precisely her dialogues with Telemachus suffer from anachronistic concessions to the Zeitgeist, as when she rebelliously carps at the patriarchy or voices her worries about the Sea Peoples.

Matt Damon as Odysseus, on the other hand, can safely be called a miscasting. Granted, the melancholy, muttering would-be homecomer is a register he now commands in his sleep, and it comes rather close to the interpretation of the character Nolan intends. But in the few moments when the roguish side of Odysseus surfaces, Damon visibly lacks the lightness it would require. To say nothing of how it pains the viewer to watch the supposedly most legendary archer of his age handle a bow like a five-year-old playing cowboys and Indians.

So the film lives above all from three elements: its visual power, its source material, and the competence to cut it all into a naturally flowing whole. For in many respects, The Odyssey is perhaps Nolan’s most conventional film. Long gone are the days of conceptual experiments like the early Memento or Inception; Nolan relies on a relatively classical narrative structure, broken up only by the fact that large parts of the wanderings are told in flashback during his seven-year stay with Calypso.

This makes the film very accessible: armed with nachos and a one-litre soft drink, the cinematic blockbuster can be enjoyed without effort. And should the action sequences somehow fail to satisfy, Ludwig Göransson’s booming score makes sure the senses are beaten into submission.

Nolan’s critics accuse him of a certain pseudo-intellectuality and a lack of emotional depth in his films. Both objections will be raised against the Odyssey as well, once the excitement around the release has settled. There is a danger that this film, currently being praised to the skies in some quarters, will prove to have little rewatch value. Too depressing, too dependent on the bombast of the big screen — so the charges might then run. A fate like that of The Force Awakens, the first of the new Star Wars films, seems far from impossible, once the feeling slowly but surely hardens that one has fallen for a hype with little substance behind it.

…the Bad, ...

At this point, the film’s marketing campaign must be addressed, for it is probably the largest, most efficient, and most novel social media campaign of its kind. It cannot, of course, be proven which elements were deliberate calculation and which merely unexpected virality — but it would be naive to believe that productions of this magnitude, and the forces marketing them, do not deliberately set certain trigger points.

From the first trailers onward, it was clear that there were discrepancies between the claim of supposed fidelity and the reality. Agamemnon’s costume recalled a Batman on steroids, Odysseus’s ship is a Viking longship rather than a Mediterranean bireme, and then of course there were the casting decisions — above all the black Helen and the trans actor Elliot Page — upon which the wrath of the online masses discharged itself.

It must be said: such reactions are anything but surprising in the year 2026. For over a decade now (longer, that is, than Odysseus himself needed to get home), films with forced diversity have been enraging the film-going public. Nearly all productions that relied on it flopped massively, and so the question arose why Christopher Nolan, of all people, should take this path for his biggest project to date — and at a moment when peak wokeness already seemed behind us.

A not improbable explanation is supplied by the Academy, responsible for the Oscars: for several years now it has issued guidelines requiring films in contention to fulfil certain diversity quotas. In a year in which little high-calibre competition is to be expected, Nolan could use this route to put himself in pole position to bag a record haul of golden statuettes at next year’s ceremony. If there is one ambition one may safely credit to a filmmaker like Nolan, it is surely that of dethroning Peter Jackson’s Return of the King with his interpretation of the Odyssey.

Supporting this reading is the fact that the most conspicuous diversity choices from the trailers take up remarkably little space in the film itself, and that some of the most progressive statements — such as Penelope’s critique of the patriarchy — cluster at the beginning and end of the film, almost as if to assure the Academy right away that things are progressive here, and to make sure it is not forgotten by the closing credits. For the film itself — for those who worry about such things — remains relatively untouched by overt wokeness.

When Snow White or Supergirl gets a progressive paint job, boycotting is easy — no one expects a cinematic masterpiece. But when a hitherto rather apolitical director like Nolan, and moreover one of the last whose name alone fills cinemas, makes such concessions on his biggest project, then in the end everyone has to form their own picture — and precisely that forming of opinions has ruled the internet for days. Those who have not seen it cannot join the conversation, for he or she has not understood what the film is about. All this is favoured by the intellectual nimbus of Nolan’s films, so that theories quickly made the rounds claiming The Odyssey is actually a subversive, indeed a secretly right-wing masterpiece that all the haters simply failed to understand.

Psychologically, the campaign was a masterstroke. Even critical minds grew weary of the hatred and decided to give the film a chance after all. It is attractive to be a contrarian — especially since Nolan always leaves the door open to attach them to intellectual superiority. The answer to the rage became another form of rage.

Still, it must be said that the film has not really dispelled its critics’ concerns. Only the superficial reading — the one that wants to turn the debate into a culture-war quarrel or even a question of race — is easily refuted. The “spirit of the Odyssey” invoked by Nolan himself, which not coincidentally recalls the much-cited “spirit of the Council” in the Catholic Church, remains by contrast a central defect of the film.

And so ragebait turned into what is probably the most effective marketing campaign for a film in a long time: one that not only brings in high box-office returns but even leads to an overvaluation of the film itself. Had there been no outrage, critics would primarily have busied themselves with whether the adaptation does justice to its legendary source. Now it suffices not to be utter woke rubbish to harvest praise for a cinematic masterwork. Some reviewers even ennoble the film as one of the greatest of all time. This overreaction to the exhausting internet rage will age very badly indeed.

…and the Ugly.

Is Nolan’s Odyssey a faithful interpretation of Homer’s epic?

No.

Is that legitimate?

Yes.

Is that a problem?

Yes.

How can that be?

Ships, colour palettes, actors… all of that is ultimately incidental. Many filmmakers before Nolan have reinterpreted the material of the Odyssey. The Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which transplants the plot fairly exactly to the Mississippi region of the 1930s, was often cited as an example before the release of Nolan’s film. But Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Steve Martin and John Candy also contains elements of the wanderings, and 2001: A Space Odyssey carries the inspiration in its very name.

Yet there is a difference between creating a work consciously inspired by a source and striving for a faithful adaptation. Even if some of the film’s defenders now argue that it should be understood not historically but mythologically, the sum does not add up.

True, Nolan kept mythological beings like Polyphemus and Scylla in the film — but the gods, omnipresent in the original, he banished from the narrative entirely, except for Athena, who amounts to little more than Odysseus’s guilty conscience personified. Everything else in the production design is trimmed for realism, underlined further by the repeated insertion of the Sea Peoples and the entirely anachronistic self-description as the “Age of Bronze” in the dialogue.

Nolan himself has claimed in interviews that he understands his film entirely in the “spirit of Homer’s Odyssey.” With that claim, and with a quasi-historical staging, a work bearing this title can only be measured by the standard of fidelity. Nolan thereby makes life difficult for himself. Had he — like Sean Connery once did as an ageing Robin Hood in Robin and Marian — made a freely Odyssey-inspired work about an ageing Odysseus and his realistic experiences, no one would have batted an eye. But this film purports to be The Odyssey, and that takes more than the plot.

Beside the absence of the gods, the first and most striking error is the figure of Odysseus himself. Nolan’s Odysseus is a broken war veteran, a John Rambo of the Bronze Age, who has little in common with the cunning and often downright haughty Odysseus of Homer.

Nolan cut the dialogue between Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus, and with it the famous wordplay about “Nobody.” In Homer, it is Odysseus’s hubris that tempts him, after blinding the Cyclops, to reveal his true name. In Nolan, he simply — and rather abruptly — sends one more arrow after Polyphemus while fleeing: for a brilliant tactician and traumatised war veteran, a remarkably stupid move.

Equally incomprehensible is how the otherwise humourless, stooped Odysseus lets himself be bound to the mast to expose himself to the Sirens’ song. In Matt Damon’s portrayal these scenes feel incoherent, because the character’s impish side is entirely missing.

And how the war-scarred Odysseus lets himself be carried away, at the end, into a massacre of the suitors — in which, unlike in the original, his son Telemachus and the servant Eumaeus play only the most subordinate of roles — likewise defies all internal logic.

Nolan quite obviously wanted to make a modern anti-war film. In interviews it became clear that he sees the Odyssey as an extension of Oppenheimer, in which the question of guilt was equally central. One can do that; it is even, in a certain sense, a timely interpretation of the material, for it is the language of our civilization in its late stage. All the more consistent — though all the more distorting compared to the original — is the ending, in which Odysseus sets off with Penelope, amid the upheaval of the age, on a road trip to the West, while his son Telemachus is to lead the kingdom. Mom and Dad (to stay in the idiom of Nolan’s film) enjoy their retirement on a cruise, while the son gets to grapple with the oncoming Sea Peoples. Thanks a bunch.

It is, incidentally, exactly such things that will be taken as grounds for reading a subversively right-wing message into the film. But Nolan is no director of the covertly reactionary; his message is rather that of his Odysseus: war is bad, the world is going down the drain, something will come after, let us sail west on the best ship available. Living the best boomer life.

One last thing. The film repeatedly mentions “songs” that would be sung about the siege of Troy. These mentions carry a dismissive undertone, for they insinuate that the trauma the soldiers lived through would survive only in glorified form.

That may even be true — but it is a distinctly modern (or postmodern? who can tell these days…) point of view. The cynicism that no fight is worth fighting any more may be understandable for our age, perhaps even correct. Civilizations in their terminal stage are almost always marked by the fact that it is no longer clear what would still be worth fighting for.

But the epic in song form is a product of cultural youth. Scarcely had archaic Greece acquired its alphabet before the Iliad and the Odyssey were created. The Song of Roland and the Nibelungenlied likewise stand at the beginning of Western high culture. They may deal with collective memories of darker ages, but their tone is not one of resignation — it is heroic, a tone of overcoming and ascent. It is the springtime of a culture, not its deep winter.

And to capture exactly that would have been perhaps the most important task of a faithful adaptation of the Odyssey. Films must always adjust details when literary works come to the screen. The decisive question is whether the spirit of the work is met.

Nolan claims that is precisely what he did. But he is likely too captive to his own late-civilizational reading. And so an epic of radiant power became the depressing tale of a broken old white man. It became the deconstruction of the Odyssey.

That this film nevertheless bears the title The Odyssey is thus probably its greatest sin. For in an age when hardly anyone reads any more, let alone Homer, it is to be feared that Nolan’s version will become the primary reference for decades to come whenever the Odyssey is mentioned. And then the problem will not be the question of when exactly the lotus flowers were eaten, and by whom — but whether anyone will still understand what an uplifting work the Odyssey actually is.

The proem of the Odyssey calls upon the Muse: Sing to me. Nolan’s Odyssey does not sing. And that is its true failing.