My seat is rumbling with a low thrum before the film even starts. The chair lurches and tilts along with whatever's happening on screen, so even the Universal logo is accompanied by a mechanical shudder.
It's 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, the SilverCity Riverport theatre is surprisingly full for the hour, and as the lights dim, Ludwig Göransson's score swells and rattles the walls. The low horns hit somewhere below my sternum. I will not be leaving this theatre until 1:20 in the morning, and by the two-hour mark my ears are ringing, though not uncomfortably so — I am viscerally, sensorially immersed.
I read The Odyssey in high school, during a customary Greek mythology phase that also included (parts of) The Iliad and, of course, Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles and Circe. So although I walked in as nothing close to a Homeric scholar, I had more than a passing familiarity with the plot.
When I finally stumble out of the theatre, well past my bedtime, I’m torn between two conflicting feelings about the film. First, that this was the most impressive piece of pure, dedicated filmmaking I’d seen in many years. Second was that somehow, without me noticing until I had resurfaced after the credits, Nolan had sanded down the edges of Homer’s most brilliant character — Odysseus — into something much safer, more modern, and consequently, much more boring.
I'm not a harsh critic. So long as I can tell that the people involved cared about what they were making, that's most of the battle won for me — and it is very, very easy to watch The Odyssey and feel the years of work and care in every single frame. Whatever you think of Nolan as a person or a filmmaker, few would argue he doesn't take his work extremely seriously.
The film is visually stunning in a way that's practically impossible to overstate. The opening shot alone, with low, rhythmic, mournful drums echoing through a dimly-lit, orange room, sets the tone of orality — the sense that this tale has been passed from mouth to mouth for three thousand years and is now, somehow, being passed to me.
The ships, the palace, the cave, and especially the ocean — every environment has breathtaking texture and scale. At the same time, even the small, nearly throwaway details, like the strange, futuristic look of Agamemnon's helmet, or Penelope's vivid turquoise robes, fit seamlessly inside the film’s world instead of pulling you out of it.
Then, of course, there's the Cyclops. Polyphemus is realized through a 60-foot-tall animatronic, puppeteered by the same artist who operated TARS in Interstellar, and the result is one of, if not the most, striking creature designs I've seen on screen. He is terrifying, but he is believable. In the confines of his lair (filmed in a real cave in Greece), his overwhelming stature is horrific. At one point, he picks up one of Odysseus's men and eats him, in a scene reminiscent of Francisco Goya's painting Saturn Devouring His Son. It’s genuinely nightmarish, especially when your chair is crackling along with each of his bone-crushing bites.
If I had to pick one scene as the best in the movie, it’s Circe’s island — there’s no question. Samantha Morton's performance is magnificent, and the transformation sequence was done almost entirely without CGI, through practical effects, prosthetics, movement, and masterful editing.
As soon as the men land on the shores of Circe's island and I see the lion, tiger, leopard, and panther lazing near her hut, we already know what the men are in for. The animals prowling around Circe's house are described in Homer's poem as once having been men, now tamed into eerie docility by her drugs, dawdling and fawning on visitors like pets instead of attacking them.
For the men, though, the experience starts out normal, almost pleasant. The sorceress serves them a huge meal, and they sit around a big table, dining and laughing, as Circe looks on pensively. Then, gradually, without any clear line between what came before and what is to come, the scene becomes the single most disturbing thing I've ever watched in a theatre. The men start eating faster and faster, as if it's out of their control. They're unable to stop, slurping and laughing wildly. And as they do, Circe steps up behind one of them and starts moulding his face into that of a pig, her hands pressing into his jaw, spreading it open. It's the best execution of body horror I've ever seen. I felt nauseous. I felt thrilled. I could not look away.
Part of what made the sequence land for me was knowing the original poem. In Book 10 of the Odyssey, the men's transformation isn't total — Circe turns their bodies into swine but she leaves their minds untouched. They understand exactly what has happened to them. They cry. They weep. That is what makes the myth so horrifying in the first place: not the transformation itself, but the trapped, fully-conscious awareness of it, and the inability to even protest, let alone escape.
The film does this well; the horror creeps in imperceptibly, and before you know it, the men are squealing in protest from their sty and ramming against the door of Circe’s hut. When Odysseus finally confronts her, Circe tells him, “I just turned them into what they are.” When she relents and turns them back, she says softly, as she rubs her hands on their bodies: "back to your disguises."
Watching Circe at work, I remember thinking, this is what filmmaking is for. This is what film is meant to be. The Odyssey is one of the oldest stories human beings tell each other, and Nolan approached it with the seriousness of someone who understood that.
Visually and sonically, I don't think this film could be improved. But of course, making something that looks and sounds this good has never been what Nolan struggles with. But telling a good story is. Homer's Odyssey is a famously good story. It's a story that trusts its own moral universe enough to let its hero act within it, consequences and all.
Nolan's Odyssey, by contrast, keeps bashing you over the head with its thoroughly modern ethical concerns. The original Odysseus isn't a hero because he's a kind, honest, virtuous man — he's a hero because he's brilliant, quick, ruthless. He’s a hubristic bastard who wins through deception. We're supposed to admire the tricks he uses to get his men out of Polyphemus's cave, and when he can't resist turning back to shout his own name at the creature — just to rub it in — we let him. Nolan's Odysseus does turn back to shoot an arrow at the Cyclops, but it's because the creature has spat out one of his men's helmets. An act of ego is turned into an act of … camaraderie and brotherhood?
Nolan's Odysseus is held to such a high standard of moral goodness that he can't be criticized within his own story. But that also makes him much less captivating. Robert Pattinson's Antinous is pathetically human and impossible to ignore because of it — but he's not the lead. I'm not supposed to be rooting for him as much as I am.
I saw a Reddit post that addresses Nolan's morality problem by way of Martin Scorsese. The director once responded to critics complaining that The Wolf of Wall Street lacked a moral centre by asking, basically, whether they really needed him to spell out that Jordan Belfort's behaviour is wrong. That's exactly my problem with Nolan's Odysseus. I didn't root for Belfort because he was good. I rooted for him because he was a fun disaster to watch. That's what I wanted from Nolan's Odysseus, too — but instead, he's a perfectly fine, morally unquestionable, stand-up guy.
Nolan leans hard on "Zeus's Law" (which is part of Homer's poem as well), repeating it over and over until it stops holding any modicum of weight. The law amounts, more or less, to "treat others as you'd like to be treated," or “love thy neighbour,” which are entirely respectable sentiments, but not what makes The Odyssey worth telling. Nolan's Odysseus carries the Trojan Horse around his neck like Oppenheimer carried the bomb — which makes sense, since Nolan has said in interviews that he was thinking about Oppenheimer's guilt while shaping this character. But this hollow, mournful guilt flattens Odysseus into someone who's spent 10 years discovering and rediscovering that “war is bad,” instead of the clever, self-mythologizing survivor he's supposed to be. Once you've read the original poem, it's almost hilarious to imagine Homer's Odysseus losing sleep over how his war crimes have affected humanity.
The moralism isn't just about Odysseus's character either. This is a film about Ancient Greece. Where's the nudity? The sex? The infidelity? The yelling and fighting? There's almost a complete absence of sex, sexual desire, and even nakedness in the film. In the poem, Odysseus sleeps with Circe and Calypso. He fights the suitors naked. And what finally convinces Penelope that the old beggar really is her husband in disguise is his knowledge of the bed they built together. There's barely any tension in this film, sexual, violent or otherwise, between Odysseus and the women around him.
Even Circe, the character central to my favourite scene in the entire movie, gets swindled by this moralistic veneer once the body horror is over. Homer gives Odysseus and Circe a real standoff — wands and swords drawn, fighting words spoken, oaths sworn — before anything is resolved between them. The film skips all of that. They have a conversation that takes less than five minutes of screen time, and she agrees to turn the men back almost as soon as Odysseus asks. Why the hell would she do that? Rather than two dangerous people negotiating from positions of real power, one of them relents simply because the story needs to move on.
Taking on an adaptation is a daunting task. There will invariably be people who cry "it's not accurate!" Despite my — many — critiques, I don't intend to be one of those people. Demanding strict fidelity to Homer's morality is a strange, modern expectation to place on a retelling. Dante, Joyce, Shakespeare — none of them treated their classical or historical sources as untouchable. Nobody calls Ulysses a failure for putting Homer through 1900s Dublin.
Myths are meant to be reshaped by whoever is telling them next. Arguably, the beauty of myths and legends is their pliability — their capacity to fit the laments of whoever is telling them, whenever and wherever they do. Stories survive because every generation gets to misuse, twist, and fiddle with them a little. My issue isn't that Nolan changed things. It's that the specific things he chose not to change — the guilt, the remorse, the hauntedness — happen to be the least interesting, least Odyssean, least Bronze Age things he could have kept. And to make matters worse, the details that made both Odysseus and the women around him genuinely dangerous and enchanting got Nolan-ed out of the story in the process.
I keep going back and forth on what I really think about this movie. It's not my favourite Nolan film. But I also don't think Nolan went into this thinking he'd be making the next Interstellar. I think he wanted to use one of the oldest stories in Western civilization as a lens for what he's worried about in the world right now — that just like the Ancient Greeks, “we are the sea people” — and I think he does a good job of that. At the very least, he does a visually and sonically stunning job of it.
I'd love, at some point, to see an adaptation of The Odyssey that doesn't back down from the Bronze Age, and that honours its characters, culture and morality on their own historical terms. Ancient Greek classics are enjoyable and immersive, thousands of years later, because their characters are simultaneously three-dimensional and psychologically identifiable, but also genuinely alien to us from where we sit reading — or watching — them. Nolan spent $250 million and over 2 million feet of IMAX film stock to make Odysseus a nice guy. I would’ve preferred a bastard.
