★½

Christopher Nolan does not believe in gods enough to make dramatic the act of defying them.  The film he presents is not really an odyssey so much as a divine comedy, but without any comedy… or the divine.

If this is supposed to be the epic, poetic tale of a king’s return – the journey made perilous by hubris and curiosity, and where the gods of Olympus waged a proxy war against each other through man’s clash of steel and whining of arrows – then Nolan has missed the forest for the trees, and also replaced the trees with poles like a particularly ungratifying season of Festivus.  Odysseus (Matt Damon) is not the wily, cunning trickster who disarms his opponents with his words and false gifts before the bloody move.  He is instead, predictably but disappointingly, a Nolan protagonist – i.e. someone whose idea or momentarily wrong move destroys the world (or a sense of the world), and whose guilt and self-hatred over it drive him into the depths of its ruins for the whole film.  That was Leonard in Memento (2000), Dormer in Insomnia (2002), Cobb in Inception (2010), and, of course, most obviously J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer (2023).  The Odyssey is a kind of sequel to his Oscar winner, and an utterly pointless one at that.

The Trojan Horse represents Original Sin.  The film’s final frames zoom in upon the horse’s face as it burns with Troy – with Odysseus musing that one day the whole ugly matter will be forgotten.  What makes even less sense is the fact that the Horse is somehow a violation of “Zeus’s Law,” which in Nolan’s Odyssey is a painfully Kantian mutual obligation of courtesy between hosts and guests.  It mattered not how the war began, with the cucking of King Menelaus by Paris with Helen, or that the War had carried on in a ten-year bitter stalemate.  The visual answer Nolan offers us as to his own film’s confused sense of law and morality is in the presentation of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie).  He looks like Steppenwolf and Judge Dredd cross-bred with the Black Knight, his face never revealed without his helmet.  A demon king, which makes Odysseus the servant of evil, using a devil’s trick to burn the world.  His self-awareness – in a scene with Penelope (Anne Hathaway) where he explains Agamemnon’s pretext, attacking Troy to control the trade routes – does not redeem him here because the alternative path they contemplate is also their final destination.

The humiliation of The Odyssey’s titular lead does not end there.  For his deeds, Odysseus is driven to punish himself and even his crew, plunging them into Hell multiple times, first by taking the “scenic route,” which leads to the Cyclops – an utterly banal sand sculpture who says nothing until blinded, whose words cannot be understood by the audience until they are explained later by the crew, and who Odysseus never tricks, merely insults after injury with an extra arrow to the socket.  His trademark cunning and placation of the beast before the stroke of the spear is nowhere to be found in that sequence, nor is it to be found when he must save the crew from Circe (Samantha Morton).  Circe (aka the future Mrs. Telemachus) is tragic in two parts – tragically miscast and tragically pathetic.  A lonely witch, a 21st century childless cat lady; Nolan’s Circe has nothing on the veiled, distracting power of Silvana Mangano in Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (1954).  In that superior telling of Homer’s epic, Mangano’s dual role as Penelope and Circe gave purpose to the latter.  The old hag here occupies Odysseus’s attention for five minutes before sending him on yet another adventure that ends with him and his crew running back to a ship and rowing out for the umpteenth time.

Nolan’s archetype of the tragically haunted stoic professional lead character does not enrich the portrait of Odysseus.  Asking Nolan to enliven a protagonist is like asking a Tarantino character not to use the dry cleaners immediately afterwards, but somewhere in the course of making this adaptation, Nolan forgot that two separate magical beings fell in love with Odysseus and put him under their spell for far longer than he would have wanted.  Matt Damon being a bloodless asexual, unloving and unlovable in a homecoming journey may be appropriate in Nolan’s mind, but in a Greek epic, it’s both a waste and a mockery.  His Odysseus is at his best when he is cloaked as the beggar and conspiring with Telemachus and Eumaeus.  But he lacks the mischievous whimsy of a character that would willingly have himself tied to a mast just so he can intentionally subject himself to seductive temptation while the crew blissfully oars on.  A painful sequence here; the audience’s displeasure with it became the film’s only enduring meme.

The character confusion is only slightly worse than The Odyssey’s political confusion.  It is one thing to omit the raid and plunder of the Cicones.  Every Homer adaptation leaves that out.  But Nolan inherently references that moment when the “threat” to Ithaca is externalized as “raids by the Sea People violating Zeus’s Law.”  Even as the suitors are given more to do here, their presence is trivialized as a nuisance – a distracting hindrance to the larger threat beyond the shores.  The point could not be further missed.  The real threat to Ithaca is inside the palace walls, not outside.  The suitors are false princes, discourteous squatters, and lustful, covetous agents of corruption.  By themselves, they are a cancer upon the kingdom.  But while Robert Pattinson can certainly convince as a craven Antinous, the suitors are just dining hall bullies.  Nolan fails to accentuate the moral lesson of their foul presence in the palace.  It only gets worse when the revelation comes that the “Sea Peoples” were just Odysseus’s Greeks.  It is the wrong way to connect unconnected story points that need no connection at all.

Telemachus (Tom Holland) and Athena (Zendaya) are both victims to Nolan’s political treachery.  In Homer’s wonderful poem, Telemachus’s coming-of-age investigation opens the plot, which leads to Athena bidding Zeus to permit Odysseus’s release from Calypso.  Odysseus, always introduced in disguise, cannot hide the truth of his strength and prowess, which is why his revelation is a climactic moment in the story not once, but twice.  Athena is his protector and partner in crime, not a ghost to haunt him for deeds he does not even commit.  And because Telemachus’s role here is ultimately nothing more than sheer futility, he does not actually end up endowed with the wisdom of a king, despite this film’s presumption otherwise.

In place of active gods and the imperative to scour Ithaca, Nolan insists upon the inadequate and unsatisfying platitude of Zeus’s Law.  With the rest of the adventure being merely bad weather and anomalies, repetition of the law ad nauseam makes for a “theme” without a theme.  Zeus’s Law is pointless if gods are not actually among us, i.e. when the story effectively writes Athena out of it.  Camerini understood that when he made Ulysses without her.  The belief that gods do walk among us has Nolan’s contempt.  Zeus’s Law is thus a facile moral authority.  To the extent that anyone is in a position to elaborate upon it, it is the Achilles stand-in character Sinon (“Elliot Page”) – who as a shade in the underworld reveals the deadly lies that first put him on the beach and then got him killed.  Though the dialogue mirrors his famously tragic exchange with Achilles, this Odysseus learns precisely the wrong lesson from Sinon.  He returns to Ithaca desperate to avenge Sinon, takes the name of Sinon in his disguise precisely so he can tell of his bravery, and kills Antinous as a kind of blood payment for betraying and dishonoring Sinon.

This is not divine law, but mortal lawfare.  The guilty creature on screen before us is not the Odysseus of Homer, but the Ulysses of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.  But even Dante did not condemn him for the destruction of the world, but rather for his lies, tricks, and manipulation of others.  Had Troy fallen by honest warfare and had he returned home immediately without any incident, Dante’s Ulysses would likely not be found in the eighth circle of Hell.  But Nolan frets over the hardwiring of human consciousness towards global doom and self-destruction so much (just as he did with Oppenheimer and, even before that in Tenet) that he relies on Catholic literature and Christian imagery to apply his atheism to visualize Greek polytheism.

It is unfair to just call it nihilism, as others do, for in Odysseus Nolan also sees redemption.  He makes music with his bow to make the hunt more sporting.  And his choice to sojourn with his crew away from the rest of the Greek fleet after the War is portrayed as a brave act of separation from evil.  His desire to protect his kin is genuine.  But it is a perverse Aragorn-ing of the character to presume that he is kingly and destined to return for exhibiting the qualities of a skilled ranger.

The silver lining has already been said by others – Nolan’s desecration demands that Homer be revived by other means.  That appears to be happening, and that is well and good.  It does little, however, to soften the sting of heartbreak that so grand and daring a filmmaker, worthy of the stars and the expanse of space, is befuddled by old, relatively straightforward poetry.

– Vivek