Odysseus the Cunning, King of Ithaca, hero of the Trojan War. The legend and the tales of Odysseus’ trickery at the walls of Troy had traveled back to Ithaca and beyond. But his, as many of us already know, was a longer, slower journey.
The Odyssey is an epic story of wandering and reckoning. A tale as old as time, almost. The multiple story makers, orators and performers the world labels as “Homer” brought about Director Christoper Nolan’s source text millennia ago. The narrative endures that time. Now Nolan imagines it for us again and we applaud (I did… many of the audience did). Because the result is a new visual, mental, and emotional spectacle that should be seen by any enjoyer of the art of cinema.
Commentary on this film seems ubiquitous. No news feed can be accessed without someone’s opinion appearing in a headline. Several I read described Nolan’s new work as being “loosely” based on the original text. I would disagree with the word “loosely”. Indeed, the key themes of Homer’s poem are all there in this new Odyssey: Odysseus’ departure to war, the tests against the forces of the Gods during his return, the homecoming (nostos), and the underpinning moral codes of Zeus’ law (xenia) that Odysseus negotiates along the way. Odysseus’ long journey home from war includes encounters with the most famous of Homer’s myths and monsters: the Cyclops Polyphemus, the giant Laestrygonian warriors, Circe the witch, Calypso the nymph, the Sirens, and Hades itself with its ghosts of Odysseus’ past.
Although this new version is clearly rooted in Homers’ epic poem (my informed opinion), it is certainly Nolan’s Odyssey. The director’s penchant for time manipulation displayed in previous films (Memento, Inception) is in place throughout the telling as he moves Odysseus back and forth from entrapment by Calypso to remembrances of Home, from Troy to the battles with supernatural beasts. Nolan also adjusts the tenor of the hero’s evolution from the taming of his brutality to the trauma and regret caused by it.
The awe of the film, and there is much of that, is in the tests. But its power is in the depiction of the very human experience of the leaving and the coming home. That power is made palpable in the theater, in great part, by Matt Damon’s strong performance as Odysseus. In an important monologue near the end of the film, as he explains to his wife why it took him so long to return (he is twenty years gone), he poignantly grasps the disconnect caused by inescapable change over time and the agonizing truth of the impermanence of life, relations, perspective, and belief.
Nolan is not trying to duplicate Homer’s poem onto the screen—much to the chagrin of numerous always-angry people. Historical accuracy, whatever that means in the retelling of an ancient tale that itself spans hundreds of years in its creation, was not his priority. He has stated that his questions were "What is the best speculation and how can I use that to create a world?" What makes The Odyssey important… what makes it an amazingly impactful view, is that it very successfully allows, forces maybe, audiences to experience a marvelous fantasy in some fantastic past. A place and past that we can sense, that we can marvel at, and feel the very human story within the myth. 9 out of 10.
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