Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is a story about stories: the ones we tell each other, the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones that we dream into being. There is little in the way of objective truth to be found in stories, as there is little to be conjured from actions long lost amid the maelstroms of the past. Stories carry meaning, if certainly not fact. Memory itself is the most flawed of orators, the reality of events, of even ourselves, left to sift further and further from our grasp with each recounting. If that is true for us, how must it be for a story forged many centuries ago; one that has been retold again and again and again by countless authors to scores of audiences? Certainly its details are lost at the fore, the names warped and recombined like so much dough, the motivations of the players flattened and smashed until their shape barely resembles the whole of a person, having lost their sentience, their humanity. They have become the most infectious of creations, a story, one told to thrill a crowd, if little more. Such is the case with Homer’s “The Odyssey”, perhaps the oldest story in the Western oral tradition. A tale of war and loss, of gods and monsters, of great warriors and tyrants raging against the unfeeling nature of existence; a chaotic time of noble men and disastrous consequences. What Christopher Nolan offers here, with his infinitely ambitious follow-up to the Best Picture-winning behemoth that was “Oppenheimer”, is not a recounting of “The Odyssey” so much as a shockingly faithful decontextualization, a grand sweeping epic about how the stories we tell are a balm against the horrors we inflict and the lengths men will go to sidestep their comeuppance for the “great deeds” they will be immortalized for. Because stories are about control, a manhandling of reality into something more palatable, more docile and easy to digest; like a man forcibly rendered into the shape and form of a pig. Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has no interest in spinning legends, nor in heroes; it shows the men for what they are, filthy and pitiless; a beast without thought or empathy, swine as brutal as they are mindless, selfish, and cruel. All atrocities become myth when given enough time and retelling, but while the living may forget, the dead left in the wake of man’s desires have no such handicap. They remember, and, if we, the immovable powers of the modern world, are to forestall the impending damnation of ourselves wrought by our own “great deeds”, so should we.
“The Odyssey” opens with a Bard (Travis Scott) presenting a song of the Trojan War. “A face. A fleet. A war. A man. A thought. A trick,” he proclaims to a banquet hall full of men dining mindlessly on a feast in the Palace of Ithaca. His story lays out plainly not only the trajectory, but the cost, of the conflict. THE FACE is that of the resplendent and fleeing Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o), that which launched a thousand ships. THE FLEET is commissioned by the vengeful and monstrous King Agamemnon (Bennie Safdie). THE WAR is the Trojan War, waged to bring Helen home to Agamemnon’s jilted brother, the brutal Menelaus (Jon Bernthal). THE MAN is Odysseus (Matt Damon), King of Ithaca, a kind husband and father who follows his ruler’s demands in an effort to curb any further suffering of his people. THE THOUGHT is one of desperation and love. After ten years of waging a stalemate war against the unimpregnable walls of Troy, Odysseus was desperate to end this fruitless crusade by any means necessary. His wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) was at home with their son Telemachus (Tom Holland), and the longer Odysseus remained away, the more the ambitious men of Ithaca slithered into his home in hopes of wresting away the throne. THE TRICK is the rotten fruit of that thought; the Trojan Horse, an offer of friendship whose putrid excrement unleashed catastrophe when it was accepted and welcomed into Troy itself. This story, though, is not just a preamble to Odysseus’ trials as he and his men, at war’s end, attempt to return home and thus begin a decade-long struggle that would ultimately leave each of his men dead, but is foundational context to the shattering of a good man spurned to perpetrate acts of heinous cruelty. As the judgement of the gods collapses atop him and his crew as they sail phantom seas in search of home, Odysseus is left to face the prospect that a lifetime of honor cannot protect him from the comeuppance for the defilements that his brilliant “trick” has wrought; the destruction not only of Troy, but perhaps of civilization itself.
There is an argument to be made that “The Odyssey” is Nolan’s most overtly political film; odd considering his last work focused on the life and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Still, it’s hard to imagine most people walking out of “Oppenheimer” without feeling that nuclear war is an abomination, though, admittedly, there are some today who would still choose to unleash such malevolent hellfire on the faceless masses whose only crime was being born on the wrong continent. Evil’s face is a banal and familiar one after all. “The Odyssey”, however, is digging at something more sticky, a splinter left to fester beneath the thumb of a world that believes itself to be impregnable, evolved beyond reproach, and eternal. Greece was that way; Troy felt the same, societies who believed themselves to be at the pinnacle of human achievement, learning, and grace. Are we not the same, we who celebrate 250 years as if it weren’t simply a meaningless drop among the infinite fathoms of time? “The Law of Zeus” is a central tenet of the film, a colloquial understanding that all strangers should be welcomed into your home with generosity in the off chance they happen to be a god in disguise. Thus is the common decency of man, a universal understanding that every person is afforded certain inalienable considerations and charities without question or reproach. That this policy has taken root in a society which practices slavery and the brutalization of women is not a bug to its applicability today but a feature: a funhouse reverie from times long past that reminds us of how shamefully paltry our trajectory along the road of “progress” has been. Odysseus is a believer in The Law of Zeus, a good man who offers kindness and generosity to the people of his idyllic island paradise. Yet, even a good man can be pushed beyond the point of his most valued ideals; even a good husband and father can justify horrors in the name of “the greater good”. On their damned voyage toward home, Odysseus’ crew encounters all manner of monstrous creatures and mystical beings, but also regular people; innocents whose homes are burnt and provisions are pillaged. “But if you had welcomed us we would not have attacked you,” beseeches Odysseus’ lieutenant Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) to an elder man who cannot understand what he says. Words mean little when shouted down by the universal language of brutality and death. Soon after, when the crew finds themselves trapped in the caverns of the towering Cyclops, their approach is similarly skewed by self-importance and a sense of inherent dominion. The Cyclops lives a solitary existence, raising sheep and making cheese, seemingly a peaceful being. Yet, when it attacks those who intrude into its home, Odysseus and his crew burn out its eye in an effort to escape, leaving it blind and alone; its tranquility eviscerated by no fault of its own. Sympathy for the Cyclops is an early indication of the scab that Nolan is poking at; a reframing of what is truly monstrous and of man’s ability to see anything that it does not understand as something worthy of destruction. That cruelty, untouched by the lingering vapors of myth, leaves a pestilence in its wake; a sickness that the conquerors of the world, justified in their own minds, cannot help but spread across every unblemished shore they land upon. “The Odyssey” is not a celebration so much as it is a dirge, a funeral song for a time when men thought themselves giants and cruelly stomped with righteous privilege across the known world, only to be left living in the bloody backwash of their grand achievements alongside the decapitated heads of the liberated.
At the gates of Hades, Odysseus bears witness to the fruits of his trials. Upon offering a sacrifice, a dead man’s army rises from the ashen fjords of Hell; among them Agamemnon the Great and a man whom Odysseus knew and cared for, Sinon (Elliot Page). Sinon, a child of Ithaca, was tasked with guarding the great Horse along the shores of the sea in anticipation of the Trojans finding and sequestering it back into the confines of their city. He did not know that his King was hidden inside the bronze beast, alongside a dozen other men drowning and dying as they awaited their fate. Sinon, ignorant but loyal, was speared to the Horse by Trojan soldiers, relaying Odysseus’ false flag of truce and peace with his dying breath. Here, at the edge of the known world, Odysseus is faced with those left to fester beneath the boot heels of his accomplishments, the unnamed chattel churned into so much confetti meant to be foisted upon the victors of the great war. There are thousands of them, men in their broken armor, staring through dead eyes at their comrades who left them on the battlefield; unforgiving and vengeful, ever watching on their long guard of eternity. Surely there will be songs that memorialize them, but songs do not wake the dead; if anything, they merely bury them deeper into our collective unconscious, shaving away what made them a person and instead molding them into an unknowable hydra, faceless and legion. Glory has no place in war; the dead bestowed with honors end up in the same place as the conquered. In the film’s final, staggering set piece, we are witness to the fall of Troy through Odysseus’ eyes. He, the mastermind behind this invasion, watches in horror as his men sweep the city and lay waste to it. Buildings are crumbled, women are ravaged, children are murdered, and totemic markers of a once great people are left smothered in dust and blood. He watches as a statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, is decapitated before his eyes; her marble head left to fall and crumble in the dirt. The only monument left standing in Troy, when the fires of man have had their way with it, is the Horse; a funerary marker of the trust men once held for one another, an effigy to desolation and broken promises. The songs and poems, the stories and myths, have no time for such nuance; but Nolan does. If “The Odyssey” was born from oral tradition, it is tailor-made for reinterpretation, for the injection of meaning that is pertinent to the time it is told. This is Nolan’s turn as orator, standing above an assembled mob and banging his fist against the table, calling for quiet so he can spin a tale of the suffering that war brings to those without any choice in the matter; an ocean of bodies rising up with cold, putrefying eyes to glare in judgement of we who glorified their destruction. They know we will all join them eventually, another body on the pyre of progress and human achievement. That is the truth that the myths often ignore, but Nolan doesn’t. Instead, he decides to place humanity on a doomed ship across hurricanical seas, plagued by gods and sirens, cyclops and witches, shadows that are not dissimilar to those that danced across the walls of our ancestors’ caves. They beckon us, these stories, daring us to indulge our hubris and ignore their lessons at our own peril.
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is a titanic achievement and a testament to an artist taking every scrap of goodwill he has earned over the last twenty-five years and betting it all on red. It is gutsy filmmaking; grand, faithful, daring, and earnestly flawed, if all the more essential for its imperfections. There is meaning to be found from the lies that history regurgitates into myth if we are willing to stare them in the face and contend with what we see. Time comes for us all; it is the equalizer of all things. Yet sadly, it seems we are doomed to repeat atrocities we have wrought upon this world, the ones we choose to forget or ignore in favor of telling ourselves bedtime stories to scare away the monsters we know ourselves to be.
Distrust the myth, remember the truth, honor the dead.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Odyssey” is playing in 70mm film at Prytania Uptown and digitally at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place and The Broad Theater.
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