Emily Wilson Reviews Christopher Nolan's Superficial Odyssey Adaptation
An Uncomplicated Man
Christopher Nolan's $250 million adaptation of The Odyssey offers a family-friendly spectacle but lacks narrative depth and emotional resonance. While the film captures the epic's themes of survival and time, it fails to develop believable characters, reducing complex figures like Calypso and Penelope to underwritten roles. The movie prioritizes grand explosions and noise over the human scale and restraint found in Homer's original poem, resulting in a confused vision that misses the opportunity for a strong creative reinterpretation.
Nolan's spectacle threatens to drown out his story just as the towering waves of the wine-dark sea threaten to overwhelm his hero's ship.
- beloch
"But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before."
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Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.
Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get int […]
- jf
When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".
Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.
When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":
Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward:
What was the artist trying to achieve?
Did he/she succeed?
The third's a zinger:
Was it worth doing?
Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.
- dsign
It's a movie for theaters and not a flashback edgy post; the success of the work is about pleasing the audience. That is already a thing in Homer's original Odyssey, at least as I read it in high school. But now with a few more decades on my ribs, I can quickly find out that the text that I read came from oral traditions that spanned from 1200 to 600 BCE, and after finding its way to written form, a cultural chain of transliterations:
Archaic Greece -> Hellenistic Alexandria[^1] -> Roman Egypt -> Byzantine Constantinople -> Renaissance Italy
Each age was obsessed with something, and the latest stages in that chain are heavily marked by Christian values. So, yeah, swords and explosion and stuff and don't do anything we would consider obscene today which includes sex, though movie directors are completely unabashed about bloody horror. To me, it's not a reflection on the director, but on his audience and their society.
- stasomatic
In a movie involving a few archery scenes, a movie with a gargantuan budget - hire an archery instructor. As an advanced amateur archer, the glaring mistakes, from stringing a bow to the draw form and release, it's hard to suspend disbelief and continue watching. Yes, it's a movie based on a myth, but it would have been that much better for me, only if they threw a couple of $Ks to an archery coach.
Same thing with movies with foreign languages. Folks, if you watch "The Hunt for Red October" or anything super recent from Hollywood where there is a Russian or Ukrainian dialogue, they don't speak Russian or Ukrainian. It's just a word salad, mostly.
- nickcw
[after a pretty scathing review which I mostly agree with]
> Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.
- Kon5ole
The most surprising to me was that a movie famously shot entirely on IMAX with real practical effects looks so bad. The shots are very often close-ups, with shaky action and extremely short DOF. Nothing is in focus for long enough to discover it.
When the rare wide panoramic shot appears it's flat sunlight on a featureless beach. Greece surely has great nature but it was not on display here.
Overall a very weird decision for the equipment being used IMO. Any quality IMAX brings is lost, or even hurts the experience due to the DOF or lack of light.
That's just my impression of course. I'm aware it has gotten praise for the visuals but can't understand why.
- mi_lk
Well the author, an expert in Homer, doesn't hold punches that's for sure.
It also shows a literature critic doesn’t really translate into a film critic because this piece is borderline pedantic about the adaptation script and not the movie as a whole.
- ks2048
> This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.
After just seeing the film, I've got say, "Nolan trying to make a point about Brexit" did not cross my mind. I guess she is relating the "be nice to beggers" narrative to being pro-immigration?
A number of her critiques come down doing things that make the "good guys" likable and the "bad guys" unlikable to modern audiences. That's reasonable, but it's also pretty understandable that Nolan didn't want to add "cruelty to animals" and "abusing women".