THE ODYSSEY

Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Himesh Patel

Director: Christopher Nolan

173 mins

The first narrative feature to be shot start-to-finish on IMAX film, The Odyssey showcases lustrous ocean hues and 250 million dollars or quids’ worth of production value to sporadically radiant colour effect. Projected on celluloid, it does meaningfully look like something that avoided a digital intermediate as much as possible. Having designed a new “blimp” to surround the camera and contain its noise (an innovation that required actors positioned around it to make eye contact via mirrors), he offers the first test-case for this as a feature-length narrative medium. There are expected pleasures from familiar sources of IMAX’s previously demonstrated strengths: long helicopter shots soaring over cliffs and other images that include humans primarily as reference points for scale. But screen-filling close-ups with lots of headroom do not make a convincing case for this as a compositional strategy. Perhaps it’s the lack of visual texture and attention to colour and set design; size aside, the visual effect is generally bland, and it’s difficult to forget that you’re watching a product designed for two entirely different compositional modes and releases. Nolan plays the expected hits of Odysseus (Matt Damon) making his way back home after the Trojan War, peaking early with two of the most famous set-pieces. This rendition’s Cyclops is very good indeed, a synthesis of animatronics, puppetry and some kind of CG finishing appliqué that’s decisively uncanny with its humanoid frame, lumbering with a centre of gravity and slowness. The transformation of Odysseus’s crew into pigs by the goddess Circe (Samantha Morton) is admirably grim, with the witch sculpting men’s faces. Thematically, The Odyssey’s larger arc aligns with Nolan’s regular preoccupations. His male protagonists are nearly always haunted by either the possibility of losing their female partner or having actively contributed to their harm, and Nolan’s Odysseus is the definitive wife man, grinding for 20 years to make it back home. Waking on a beach as an amnesiac, Odysseus tries to recall how he ended up in this situation, something the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) warns against: “You want to remember, but what if memory destroys your happiness?” Nolan’s big adaptation contribution is to bend the text towards atheistic ends. Rejecting religion is a fine line to walk when your story involves multiple gigantic monsters, but Nolan cordons off the fantastical into the realm of Ray Harryhausen, functionally separate from any of the mythological faiths they were attached to. 

The opening title card sets the agenda: “A time of apparent magic,” that penultimate word setting the sceptical tone. There are no gods in the clouds debating the mortals’ fates here, and Odysseus is constantly denying their will or existence, as is son Telemachus (Tom Holland). In this context, while “Zeus’s law” is often invoked and defined as the obligation to host strangers lest they be a god in disguise, its usage is bandied out by characters of varying levels of admirability, sometimes quite cynically. The only god Odysseus actually encounters is Athena (Zendaya), whom he converses with and who no one else can see, which is in keeping with the source material, where she’s frequently either disguised or invisible. But Nolan has a final twist: Athena bears the same face as one of the victims slaughtered in the invasion of Troy, and Odysseus talking with her is quite possibly just a form of processing his trauma. Religion is a story we tell ourselves to reconcile with that which we can’t rationalise or comprehend, a less preferable form of storytelling to the purely secular; the final voiceover spells out, with Nolan’s usual lust for clarity, that we will forget the lessons of history until we revisit its stories. Why Nolan wants to use a lot of resources at this moment to triple-underline “the power of storytelling” is clear enough. 

We are repeatedly told that we are watching a civilisation nearing its end, in which the breakdown of the laws of hospitality is part of the larger decimation of the social contract. It turns out right-wing critics who pre-emptively decried the film were right to be wary, insofar as it stands against war, violence, and misogyny and for civility. While Nolan’s dialogue is certainly not taken from Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation, he might well have borrowed some guiding principles from her translator’s note, which states that “A translator has a responsibility to acknowledge her own agency and to wrestle, in explicit and conscious ways, not only with the multiple meanings of the original in its own culture but also with what her own text may mean, and the effects it may have on its readers. Because The Odyssey has become such a foundational text in educational systems and in students’ imagination of Western history, I believe it is particularly important for the translator to think through and tease out its values.” Nolan takes that principle and extends it out to Circe all but explicitly saying she was raped, then having Odysseus confess that the invasion of Troy, while seemingly his greatest triumph, in fact traumatised him for life, echoing the historical hand-wringing of his Nolan predecessor Oppenheimer.