My Take on Nolan’s Odyssey

I've seen some interesting discussion about Nolan's new movie The Odyssey. The first time I saw it, I didn't hate it but I didn't love it either. After having taught the book to 11th graders for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years, I came to love the book. It is powerful, beautifully written, and essential for understanding Greek intellectual history and Western Civilization, which have been major interests of mine.

After watching Nolan's depiction, I was reflecting on The Iliad, which I actually like more than The Odyssey, and as I thought about what Homer captured in that work I got a sense of what Nolan was doing.

When I saw the movie, I didn't connect Nolan's Odysseus with Homer's Odysseus. He just seemed to be too depressed throughout the story, but that was not what I saw in the classic text. But that is very much how The Iliad struck me. I always connected well with Achilles, and the central struggle that I saw in him was a struggle for meaning: Why am I fighting in this war? What is the point of fighting and gaining glory and then dying?

The struggle with Agamemnon seems central to the story, but really that was just an occasion to bring Achilles to reflect on something deeper, which is evident in Book I and later when all the Achaeans come and ask him to rejoin the fight and he essentially tells them that no amount of glory is worth risking his life. Of course he is still upset with Agamemnon and that is a factor in his refusal, but it runs deeper, and the big question as the story unfolds is what it will be that will bring him back into the fight, because it is pretty evident that he will return and kill Hector eventually.

And that brings me to Odysseus. He was clever, he was thoughtful, he cared about people: that comes through in both The Iliad and The Odyssey. So is it a stretch to say that he would have felt guilty about killing the Trojans and for being the mastermind of their defeat? Is it a stretch to think that he would have been exhausted by all of the killing, which really had no point except to avenge Helen's taking and to please the plans of the gods?

And that is the bigger question: Why are the gods so interested in this war taking place, in taking out the Trojans, and in determining whether and when Odysseus would return home?

I don't imagine that Homer wrote The Iliad or The Odyssey in order to critique the Greek worldview, but he was an artist and he noticed things and wrote about what he noticed. I think Nolan is an artist of a similar type. I especially loved Oppenheimer. I went back and watched his Odyssey a second time and loved it. I think he captures something of the hollowness of the heroic, war-centered worldview that shapes Homer's world.

I know he didn't get all of the details exactly as they were in the book. I actually think it's fine that he left out the "nobody" trick that Odysseus played on the Cyclops because I never exactly found that part believable. I really don't see why it matters that there aren't a lot of (or maybe any?) ethnic Greeks in the film, I don't care that the Lotus flower plays a different role, and I don't even mind that Achilles isn't present in the underworld scene even though that is one of my favorite parts of the book and I don't understand why Nolan left it out.

Nolan is an artist, and I'd rather try to understand what he was capturing than judge the film by how closely it reproduces every detail of Homer. I'd like to understand what he was capturing, and I'm convinced that he did capture the spirit, the power, and the beauty of Homer's two great works.