Film review: Nolan straightens out Homer's many-turning man

I’ve been obsessed with The Odyssey since I was a boy and first encountered the many-turning king of Ithaca in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Heroes of Greece and Troy. Since then I’ve consumed numerous translations and adaptations and even, in what I prefer to think of as commitment rather than evidence of arrested development, had the opening word of the poem tattooed in Ancient Greek spiralling around my right arm: Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ · πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν1·

Christopher Nolan has occupied a similar place in my cinematic life. I’ve watched every film he’s directed since Memento, and have rarely been disappointed. So when I heard he was tackling The Odyssey, excitement scarcely covers it. That excitement peaked when Tom Holland (the other one, not the actor playing Telemachus) said of the film, “It is by some way the best cinematic adaptation of a Greek myth I have ever seen. It honours Homer while simultaneously making something new of him.”

Needless to say, I bought a ticket for opening day. I walked into the cinema expecting to love it. Perhaps inevitably, I was a bit disappointed.

To give it its due, there’s a lot to like. It looks fabulous, is visually staggering and has some wonderful set pieces, even if the sea monster, Scylla jerks about like a Ray Harryhousen escapee. As an epic, it earns its three-hour running time; there’s a hell of lot of action to get through. But even so, it manages to pack an astonishing amount of portentous hanging about into those three hours.

For my money, the film’s central problem is Odysseus himself. Homer’s first defining word for him is polytropos: many-turning. It conjures a man of twists, evasions, disguises and contradictions. A wily fox. Homer’s Odysseus is resourceful, vain, deceitful, courageous, reckless and, at times, monstrous. Nolan gives us the opposite. His Odysseus is worthy, a trier, a fundamentally decent man doing his best in a violent, disintegrating world. We keep being told how smart he is but we don’t really get to see it. By making him more obviously heroic he’s easier to admire, but much less interesting.

The set pieces suffer from the same flattening. Individually, they’re often spectacular. Collectively, they blur together. Watching Odysseus and co run into the sea for the fourth time definitely felt like three times too many. The hapless crew charge, retreat, regroup and sail on, but the action rarely changes our understanding of anyone. The scale increases while the drama remains oddly static. The action with the Cyclops is fun but then more or less the same thing happens with the Laestrygonians: the crew blunder into a hostile landscape, discover its inhabitants are both enormous and unfriendly, and hoof it back to the sea. What initially feels thrilling starts to feel like lack of imagination.

Homer largely avoids this problem because each encounter alters our understanding of Odysseus. The Cyclops episode exposes his ruinous hubris. The Laestrygonians reveal his uncanny instinct for self-preservation, and perhaps something darker. Odysseus alone anchors his ship outside the harbour, allowing him to escape while the rest of his fleet is annihilated. Homer leaves us to wonder whether this was foresight, luck or selfishness. The monster encounters encompass moral tests that expose different facets of our many-turning hero. Nolan nails the spectacle but loses any sense of progression, leaving several of the film’s biggest sequences feeling like expensive variations on the same idea.

Even Circe, in many ways one of the film’s successes, is a missed opportunity. Her island shack is creepy, disorientating and genuinely dangerous. Yet Nolan removes the quality that makes her most threatening in Homer: her allure. In the poem, Odysseus remains with her for a year. He isn’t merely detained, he lingers, enjoying himself and his divine lover. His desire to return to Penelope proves considerably less urgent when presented with an immortal enchantress and a comfortable bed. Nolan will have none of that. His Odysseus remains resolutely homeward-bound, his honour never seriously endangered. Circe may threaten his body, but she’s never allowed to compromise his virtue.

The same thing happens with Calypso. Nolan compresses several episodes into her island, folding the Lotus-Eaters and the Phaeacians into a single narrative stop. It’s an efficient piece of storytelling, but it further reinforces the impression that Odysseus has only one desire: to get home as quickly as possible. The only reason he tarries so long with the Ursula Andress-esque goddess is because she fed him lotus blossoms to heal his mind and, as a result, he conveniently forgets his past life.

Homer’s hero is constantly delayed, sometimes by force, sometimes by temptation, often by his own choices. Nolan’s bounces from pillar to post with no control or agency. The journey becomes a series of obstacles rather than a record of a man whose own appetites repeatedly divert him from his destination. This happens repeatedly. Whenever Homer complicates Odysseus, Nolan absolves him. The result is a hero who’s consistently noble but never surprising. By sanding away his flaws, Nolan removes much of what makes him recognisably human and all of what made him so fascinating for so many hundreds of years.

The visit to Hades is the film’s greatest biggest disappointment. Eliot Page’s rather ponderous, plot-carrying Sinon is given extraordinary expository prominence while Agamemnon, introduced brilliantly as a menacing, Darth Vader like figure in black armour, turns out to be little more than a whiner. More surprising still, Achilles is absent altogether. Fleet-footed Achilles, arrogance and brilliance personified is the philosophical hinge between the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, he chooses a short life crowned with everlasting glory over a long life lived in obscurity. When Odysseus meets him among the dead, he bitterly regrets that decision. Better, he says, to be the poorest servant among the living than king over all the dead. It’s one of the bleakest moments in all literature. Glory doesn’t survive death in any meaningful sense. Honour counts for nothing in Hades. By excluding Achilles, Nolan sidesteps Homer’s most devastating challenge to heroic culture.

The film also weakens the relationship between Odysseus and his crew. Their growing distrust is presented as unreasonable and feckless. He goes from celebrated commander to “lucky bastard” to harbinger of doom largely because he fires an arrow at the very impressive CGI monster that’s eaten a bunch of his men. His decade as a war hero appears to count for nothing, leaving the impression that his men are simply feckless, superstitious ingrates.

Homer tells a more compelling story. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and then, having escaped, can’t resist boasting to the cyclops just who is responsible for outwitting it. His pride and vanity ensures Poseidon’s vengeance. Later, he withholds information from his crew, manipulates them and repeatedly places his own appetite for glory above their safety. He insists on hearing the Sirens while his men must row deaf to their song. He chooses to sail past Scylla knowing some of them will die without warning them. His brilliance repeatedly ensures his own survival, but it also creates the disasters from which he must escape and which dooms every single one of his followers.

Rather than presenting his crew as merely merely weak men failing a great leader. Homer shows Odysseus’ men as being in the service of narcissist whose genius can’t be separated from his hubris. Homer asks whether extraordinary intelligence is compatible with trustworthiness. We are asked to decide whether Odysseus is admirable or simply self-serving. Nolan answers the question by removing the problem.

For all that, the film contains one genuinely inspired idea. Spoilers follow.

Nolan recasts the mysterious Sea Peoples as the returning Greeks themselves. As Matt Odysseus-ish Damon confesses to Penelope, he violated Zeus’s laws of hospitality through the sack of Troy and the deception of the Trojan Horse. As such, they become the agents of the collapse of their own civilisation. It’s an elegant piece of historical myth-making. The Trojan Horse becomes a meta Trojan Horse. As it infiltrates Troy, it also infiltrates the whole of Mycenaean culture. Odysseus’s supreme act of cunning contains the seeds of his own civilisation’s destruction. The Greeks win the war but lose the world. It’s precisely the kind of morally ambiguous idea the rest of the film too often avoids.

On balance, I thought it was OK. I quite liked it. It’s ambitious, immersive and frequently spectacular. Nolan has made a magnificent adaptation of the events of Homer’s poem, but he’s failed to adapt its hero. Homer’s Odysseus is difficult to love because he’s deceitful, vain and dangerous. Nolan’s Odysseus is brave, loyal, honourable and a bit boring. He’s a good man doing his best, and that turns out to be far less memorable than the many-turning man Homer created nearly three thousand years ago.