The Odyssey

(Directed by Christopher Nolan, 2026)

My Ancient Greek class attended the Adelaide premiere of “The Odyssey” on the IMAX screen at Palace Nova East End, Adelaide.  We are a hard audience. Our excellent teacher Dr. B (originally from Rome) has shepherded us from the alphabet to Plato via his amusing (but rigorous) methods over the last dozen years.  So, By Zeus, Nolan had better do Homer right!

He did.

We had some minor quibbles – apparently Agamemnon’s black armour is not correct for the time, (but Benny Safdie made an amazing, surreal figure in it. Sauron eat your heart out). In accordance with Hollywood’s most dearly held DEI convictions, a black woman (Lupita Amondi Nyong’o is cast as Helen, and her twin sister Clytemnestra (?)) and a trans-man (Elliot Page) plays a young man, a messenger who doesn’t even appear in the poem. But Nolan’s film is so sweeping, wild and wine-dark, that we barely noticed.

More importantly, Nolan’s Odysseus is eaten by remorse and guilt.  Homer’s never was!  He seems to be borne along, away from home without will, whereas Homer’s wanderer sometimes chose to delay his homecoming.  Calypso (Charlize Theron) keeps Odysseus in a state of  forgetfulness by feeding him lotus flowers until she asks him to recount his story and he begins to remember his home. Again, not in line with the story from the poem as we know it. Perhaps more importantly, Nolan’s Odysseus does not tell the cyclops Polyphemus his true name, while boasting, so the film lacks the element of Poseidon’s wrath which contributes to Odysseus’s ten year trip home.  This writer felt the lack of the gods overall. Possibly Nolan (almost) left them out, to develop the more modern themes of self-determination and delusion.

Matt Damon is admirable as Odysseus, the man of many ways, (πολυτροπος).  Anne Hathaway is a hard Penelope, surveying the banqueting hall from behind a raised screen, weaving and undoing Laertes’ shroud. Our resident weaving expert, J, noted the authenticity of her loom with approval. Penelope waits and watches.  She watches the suitors lay waste to the palace at Ithaca, and she waits for Odysseus, not knowing that he is taking the long, long way home, well after the other Achaeans have reached their shores. This viewer did feel that Tom Holland’s Telemachus was rather beige, not growing to manhood as he does in the poem. On the subject of his mentor, Athena, Zendaya did her best but, sans the ceiling-scraping supernatural armour in which she sprang, full-formed from her father’s brow, she was also a little lacklustre.  Dr. B suggests that, rather than being Odysseus’s supernatural assistant, in this version she represents his guilt.

It sounds right. The bard (rapper Travis Scott) thumping his stick to suggest the metre, rather oddly chose four beats, not six, to represent hexameter, but we forgive him. The music is fabulous. Instruments were even made to mimic ancient depictions on amphora. At our subsequent class Dr. B noted the spectacular sound of Odysseus testing and using his bow and took us through our translation of lines 401, and following, in book XXI of the poem, in which the stringing of a bow is compared to the stringing of an instrument.

Scylla and Charybdis are missed, but again, this is a more “realistic” telling and millions of US dollars go only so far.  The unmissable set pieces – Polyphemus and the sirens – were creepy as they should be, not storybook ogres but real, ghastly threats.  That brings us to Circe.  In a tour de force Samantha Morton steals the show as the fed-up, ruthless sorceress who exacts a terrible revenge on the marauding hordes of sailors who treat her island as if it were their own, so intent on pillage that they don’t even stop to wonder why there are leopards and lions in their unwilling hostess’s grounds.  There are many brilliant performances; we regret that we cannot name all of the cast, but Morton dazzles and stays in the mind.

Some of the more violent scenes of the poem are missing, perhaps in accordance with the emphasis on a more empathetic hero. No maids are abused or hanged.  But the slaughter of the suitors is satisfyingly brutal, particularly because we see them ill-treat the dog Argos and we hate them for that more than anything.

The above are the few complaints we had.  Overall this is a tribute to the great poem of antiquity and a rollicking good film.  Those who are not familiar with the story might want to acquaint themselves with it before hand, as it can be difficult to follow; generally speaking, we are spared expository dialogue.

To those (snobs) who complain that this is not “Homer’s Odyssey”, I say, we can never have “Homer’s” Odyssey, save in the original.  For it to become a script, the story must be condensed, suited more to modern times and so it changes.  My Odyssey is not yours.  This is an earnest, busy and beautiful piece based on a serious, millenia-old classic work of psychology and adventure, not on a comic book series.

The three hours did not lag. None of us snored.

[Minority Report

Well, I’m going to wear the mantle of a snob. Much as I like some Christopher Nolan films (Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Oppenheimer), and dislike others (Interstellar, his silly Batmania phase), it is conceded that he is a very good director indeed – not up there with, say, Visconti, Carol Reed, Tarkovsky or Hitchcock, but getting close to the top shelf. And it is understood that Academy awards will revivify box office receipts (not that this film needs it), so box-ticking in terms of casting and context are de rigueur.

But the Odyssey and its companion book are foundational texts of Western Civilisation and therefore some responsibility rests on those who interpret or adapt it to tread fairly lightly and not deviate too far (e.g., Pope, Chapman, Joyce). The original narrative of human striving, the role of chance, hubris and nemesis, human foibles of hatred and transgressive temptation, the critical utility of The Tribe, are all arrayed in Homer, and are seminal tropes paving the way for Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and beyond, to the modern work of the likes of Madeline Miller (Circe) and Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain). But their presence in the film are oblique at best.

Nolan’s film looks and sounds great (even with the latter dialled-up to ’11’), consistent with his superb visual sense, accentuated by being filmed in IMAX 70mm. Terrific locations feature from seven countries. The acting is fine overall (my personal hurrahs go to Samantha Morton as Circe and Anne Hathaway as Penelope). There are moments in the film where the dialogue is ‘clunky,’ the action lustreless and the overall effect strangely lacking in humour or really deep feeling (accepting that the source material is a tale of gods and monsters, and episodic at that).

I mentioned casting. I managed to overlook this during much of the film but there were two exceptions. First, Ellen Page (he’ll always be Ellen to me, because of her magnificence in Juno – see below). But Page, playing a character that appears in Virgil, not Homer, is an unlikely-looking warrior, and as the film’s central organising moral raison d’être, (s)he jars.

Secondly, the cohort of Odysseus looked like a bunch of waiters-cum-actors from Ithaca, New York, rather than ancient Ithaca. Not so much a hardy crew of Greeks, but a salad from central casting (Koreans, Hispanics, African Americans, Indians) – the critical utility of The Tribe?

That said, like Odysseus, lash yourself to an IMAX mast and watch this in any event. You may love it like TVC’s main and worthy reviewer, or like it a lot, as I did. And if you’re going to carp, at the very least: See it!]