Christopher Nolan Has Always Been Making “The Odyssey”

There are times when you can sense Nolan’s frustration—not with Homer so much as his own inability to reshape the material into something more than mere spectacle. When Odysseus and his men navigate a course between the stonelike, man-grabbing tentacles of Scylla and the enormous churning maelstrom of Charybdis—or, as they are known in less orthodox translations, Rocky and Poolwrinkle—Nolan seems even more impatient to press on than the men are. And when Telemachus pays a crucial visit to the Spartan king Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and his faithless queen, Helen of Troy (a fiercely defiant Lupita Nyong’o)—in a sequence that also recaps the grim postwar fate of the Greek conqueror Agamemnon (an unrecognizably helmeted Benny Safdie)—you sense plot points being jammed capably, if perfunctorily, into position.

Mythology can be unyielding, and apart from one bold borrowing from Virgil’s telling of the Trojan-horse story—Sinon (Elliot Page), a warrior who appears in the Aeneid but not in the Odyssey—Nolan is compelled to follow the natural flow of Homer’s narrative events. It’s in the realm of language and theme that he finds the creative liberation he seeks. He has simplified and deformalized much of Homer’s poetry, and, in a shrewd decision, he has encouraged his actors to speak in a contemporary register, in more or less their native accents. Damon doesn’t go full Bostonian, but he gives us the most plainspoken American of epic heroes, down to the occasional F-bomb. His old-fashioned movie-star charisma has a bracing cut-the-crap terseness. When Odysseus outwits Polyphemus, the Cyclops—a towering puppet, brought to life by the actor Bill Irwin—he does so in near-total silence; gone is the character’s floridly articulated ruse to get his one-eyed captor drunk. Damon can be as crisp an orator as any actor now working, but his performance here reminds you why Jason Bourne, moving stealthily through a crowd like a sheathed dagger, remains one of his defining roles. There is something about a more taciturn Odysseus that suits Damon’s no-nonsense affect, his contained gravity. It feels right that, when he adds insult to the Cyclops’ injury, his taunt takes the form of an arrow.

Nolan doesn’t exactly share his hero’s reticence; one of his signature tactics as a writer is to place blocky, boldface ideas in furious opposition. “Oppenheimer” (2023), his despairing drama about the origins of atomic warfare, was about the chasm between theory and practice—an academic genius’s inability to confront the darkest applications of his brilliance. “The Prestige” (2006), a tale of rival professional conjurers from the late nineteenth century—talk about a time of apparent magic!—pitted the rigors of art against the compromises of commerce. Like those films, “The Odyssey” unfolds amid momentous social and technological upheaval: the Trojan War has ushered in a brutal new era of human domination, and the gods themselves have retreated in disgust from mortal affairs. The ideological conflict here is between Zeus’ law, which insists on compassion, and the rules of combat, which increasingly demand that every rule be broken.

The secularism of Nolan’s film thus carries a genuine moral logic. We encounter just one Olympian deity, Athena (Zendaya), who pops up from time to time to offer Odysseus her counsel, and even she might well be a mere projection of our hero’s addled mind—like one of the extras in Nolan’s dreamworld fantasia, “Inception” (2010). Poseidon, the angry lord of the sea, is visible only through his handiwork, the great sloshing storms that nearly capsize Odysseus’ red-masted ships. Zeus himself is entirely absent, which is why the repeated invocations of his law feel so resonant: in a world of overwhelming human savagery, a simple gesture of kindness becomes a profound act of faith, reasserting a covenant between men and the gods who might still walk among them.

It’s no accident that the most powerfully imagined set pieces in “The Odyssey” are all predicated on violations of Zeus’ law. Circe’s swine-and-dine trick is one. Polyphemus’ violent inhospitality is another. Then, in the film’s most shattering moment, Odysseus realizes that no one has dishonored Zeus’ law with more world-altering consequences than he and his men did at Troy—a mass tragedy that, as presented here, is morally analogous to the horrors that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s invention unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nolan divides the sacking of Troy into two lengthy sequences, both shot under cover of darkness but edited (by Jennifer Lame) with a magisterial clarity. The first sequence plays out with breathtaking suspense, the second with wrenching tragedy; the difference is calibrated by the composer Ludwig Göransson, whose score pulses with mournful dissonance and martial fury. Violent mayhem hasn’t always been Nolan’s choreographic strong suit, but in “The Odyssey” he finds the propulsive rhythm of big-screen action. Blood spurts and weapons clash as they never have before in his films, and the impact of every loosed arrow registers with sickening force. Would Homer have admired the result? It’s hard to say, though I suspect that, here and there, Kurosawa might have.