It feels cruel not to give Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey a five-star review. Who else is trying to make films that have any intellectual depth today? The other films out of Hollywood with such large budgets are Disney’s live action remake of Moana, a recent mega-failure, or the endless superhero films that are made for intellectually-challenged adult children. But Nolan’s The Odyssey, with its year-long ad campaign? Maybe it’ll lead people to read the original. Maybe it’ll cause people to ruminate on time and the depth of Western culture. In that case, Trump should give Nolan the Congressional Medal of Honor, though I wonder if Trump has read it himself. He has more Roman Empire tastes, preferring MMA gladiator-like sports where men beat up each other in cages.
The choice of The Odyssey as starting material states a position that Nolan has decided to deal with one of the cornerstones of Western Civilization. It was “major cultural comment” time in the Nolan Canon. I wasn’t disappointed; like all the films I’ve seen by Nolan, this one has an intellectual current running through it. I went to see how he’d use it to lay down some personal philosophy. He did this, for example, in the Batman films which were arguments for enlightened Capitalism against the calls for social anarchy represented by the mob. How would he handle Homer?
His philosophy was twofold—first, Western Civilization is doomed, but out of the ashes something greater will arise and second, aging successful men, despite whatever victories they may have had in their prime, look back upon their lives with a degree of guilt. The film ends with the equivalent of Odysseus’ retirement, as he and Penelope head out on the ancient equivalent of a cruise ship as Telemachus, their son, takes over the family business, ruling the island of Ithaca.
Except for its photography and special effects which, with a few exceptions (as in men tossed through the air with an odd slow-motion effect, or human bodies that look like dolls), are realistic, I rate Nolan’s The Odyssey as an artistic failure. It lacks in artistic unity. The scenes involving the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Giant Knights (where’d they come from?), even Circe, all could be cut from the film without any effect on the narrative. Why? Because the narrative is a series of philosophical comments made by Matt Damon, everything else has a random feel. The Babylonian sequence in D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance blows it out of the water.
The film reminds me of a run-of-the-mill silent movie from the 1920s, something conceived of to cash in on the success of Intolerance. The montage at times was ridiculous, as in the scene where Odysseus slays the suitors. We see cutaway shots to Robert Pattinson saying, “Get that spear,” and then “Get that sword” and “Get that shield.” It’s ludicrous.
While I was sitting in the theater, I imagined what the effect would be if parts of the soundtrack for Monty Python and the Holy Grail were overdubbed onto this film. Specifically, I laughed thinking of the effect of dubbing in “run away, run away!” as Odysseus and his men flee the Cyclops, the giant knights, or the specters from hell. And, as an absurdist touch, Agamemnon, leader of the Greek Army, was clearly patterned after Darth Vader. Why?
Watching the film, I wondered whether Nolan was interested in Homer's concerns at all. The Iliad and The Odyssey are books more concerned with the heroic origins and cultural foundations of Greek civilization, than with its end. They were seen in Ancient Greece as cornerstones, summations. Odysseus takes 20 years to get home and has an “affair” with Circe, but I don’t think Homer was describing a modern mid-life crisis. Why didn’t Nolan do Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? And as far as raping and pillaging goes, that was how things were done back then. Ancient Greece was hardly capitalist in any modern sense. It was much more a society organized around land, warfare, raiding and conquest. I recall reading in The Iliad this passage: “For the winner he set a great tripod, valued by the Achaeans at twelve oxen; for the loser he placed in the midst a woman skilled in many crafts, whom they valued at four oxen." That speaks of a mindset different than anything we’re familiar with in 2026.
