Programme Notes: The Odyssey

Hero Image

Rich Text

Programme Notes: The Odyssey

by Alistair Harkness, Film Critic, The Scotsman.

Please note: these notes contain character descriptions, plot details and SPOILERS, and are best read after viewing the film.

Backtrack to the early 2000s and Christopher Nolan is contemplating his next project. Having already made the transition from micro-budget DIY debut (1998’s Following) to dazzling break-out indie hit (2000’s Memento) to mid-level studio film (2002’s Insomnia remake), a blockbuster is the next logical step. Insomnia backers Warner Bros. is rebooting Batman, but that particular project is with Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen. Instead, the studio signs Nolan up to make the Brad Pitt movie Petersen had been developing: a swords-and-sandals epic called Troy that’s loosely based on Homer’s The Iliad and depicts the epic Trojan War.

In a landscape still buoyed by the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), it’s precisely the sort of project that could have established the then-thirtysomething filmmaker’s box-office bonafides.

Then movie gods intervened.

Petersen’s ill-fated Batman vs Superman project collapsed and when the German director asked for Troy (2004) back, Warner Bros. capitulated and gave Nolan what would become Batman Begins (2005) as a consolation prize. The rest is history.

Flash forward 20 years, though, and there’s a neat serendipity to that history. Following the unprecedented box office and awards success of 2023’s

Oppenheimer — almost a billion dollars in ticket sales and seven Academy Awards — Nolan’s decision to use his creative and commercial cache to adapt Homer’s other epic poem, The Odyssey, has allowed him to complete some unfinished business.

Telling the story of Odysseus’s return home 20 years after leaving to fight in the Trojan War, the film kicks off with a mysterious shot of the giant wooden Trojan Horse Odysseus has designed to breach the impregnable walls of Troy. Protruding mysteriously out of the sand like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes (Dir: Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), it's an image Nolan has told interviewers he’s had in his head since working on Troy and it proves to be the key to his entire approach to The Odyssey, which blends the incredible with the credible in a way that no movie directly drawing on the Greek myths has hitherto managed (Petersen’s 2004 version of Troy mostly excised the gods and monsters).

But if his own 20-year odyssey to get to this point feels apropos given the story, The Odyssey has plenty in common with Nolan’s oeuvre, starting with its protagonist, here played by Nolan regular Matt Damon. Inspired by Emily Wilson’s acclaimed 2017 translation — particularly its opening line: “Tell me about a complicated man” — Nolan turns Odysseus’s decade-long journey home following the decade-long Trojan War into a thrilling, thoughtful, bloody epic that questions and deconstructs the whole notion of heroism.

Wracked with guilt and longing for the family life he’s been pulled away from in the service of war, Odysseus is a classic Nolan character, up there with the protagonists of the aforementioned Memento, The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012), Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014) — privileged men haunted to various degrees by memories of wives, girlfriends or children they’ve lost or abandoned in the obsessive pursuit of causes bigger than themselves.

But there are overlaps with Oppenheimer as well. Odysseus is a military strategist and problem solver whose dawning realisation of who he is and what he’s done is complicating his desire to return home. Like Robert Oppenheimer he’s got blood on his hands and, over the course of a movie that literally takes him to the gates of Hell (there’s a brilliant sequence set in Hades), he starts to see how his actions might have made the world worse.

That’s a trait he also shares with Batman’s broken alter-ego Bruce Wayne, when he’s no longer sure if he’s the hero or the villain in the opening of The Dark Knight Rises (2012). There are echoes too — per Damon’s career — of Jason Bourne, the memory-impaired Black-Ops agent whose own reckoning with his murky past in the The Bourne Identity (Dir: Doug Liman, 2002), The Bourne Supremacy (Dir: Paul Greengrass, 2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (Dir: Paul Greengrass, 2007) collectively plays like a contemporary-set spin on The Odyssey.

But The Odyssey isn’t just about Odysseus. Nolan makes customarily brilliant use of fractured timelines and nested narratives to tell the parallel stories of both Odysseus’ grown-up son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and his steely wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). As Telemachus sets out on his own quest for information about whether the dad he’s never known is alive or dead, his formidable mother has to do all she can to fend off the suitors hoping to take her husband’s place on the throne of Ithaca after his years-long failure to return from Troy.

What’s startling, though, is Nolan’s ability to take all this character work and palace intrigue and fuse it with gargantuan set-pieces that weave in the fantastical elements of the story without diluting the psychological reality of the film. Set in “a time of apparent magic” The Odyssey features encounters with a giant cyclops, giant cannibals, sirens and vengeful gods and goddesses.

As the first film to be shot entirely with his preferred large-format IMAX cameras, Nolan’s preference for real-world locations and — where possible — practical in-camera effects renders all this on an unprecedented scale. It’s certainly hard not to be impressed watching his cast navigating the chilly waters of the Moray Firth in full-size replicas of Greek warships or escaping those aforementioned cannibals in

Culbin Forest, the latter doubling for the mythical land of Laestrygonia (in addition to Scotland, the production travelled to Greece, Iceland, Morocco and the US).

In some respects, Nolan's approach can also be viewed as a way of honouring the primitive magic of Ray Harryhausen’s tactile effects work on Jason and the

Argonauts (Dir: Don Chaffey, 1963) and Clash of the Titans (Dir: Desmond Davis, 1981), cheesy B-movies the director loved as a boy. But the set-pieces also see him finding evermore imaginative ways to make even the most fantastical scenes feel real. One stand-out sequence featuring the enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton) exposing Odysseus’s men for the swine they are is properly horrifying. In interviews Nolan has cited the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London (Dir: John Landis, 1981) as an influence, but it’s the physicality of Morton’s hypnotically weird performance that makes it work in way that just wouldn’t have been possible with digital effects.

Nolan has also cited auteur-driven historical epics like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and Marin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) as tonal reference points, though regarding the last of these, he probably didn’t imagine The Odyssey would itself become a Last Temptation of Christ-style pawn in the ongoing culture wars. That happened recently when online trolls (bolstered by Elon Musk) launched insidious attacks on the casting of Zendaya as the goddess Athena and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, two fictional characters from a 3000-year-old text whose race is inconsequential to the story at hand.

Ironically, that kind of racism only reinforces the value of the film. As it builds up to the sacking of Troy — rendered here with gut-wrenching horror — Nolan transforms the movie into a searing exploration of how quickly the bonds of civilisation can fall apart when we forget our own humanity and treat all strangers and outsiders as enemies. Using the guise of a spectacular blockbuster to surreptitiously rebuke the chaos of the current moment, Nolan has made The Odyssey his own Trojan Horse.

Footer