Christopher Nolan’s Long and Winding Road to The Odyssey

The Odyssey may be set three millennia in the past, but it’s among Nolan’s most contemporary works as a tale whose focus may as well be the destruction by, and blowback towards, modern imperialism (that his actors all speak with American accents is a pretty pointed clue). Zeus’ law is charitable kindness, but it’s also divine permission to ransack villages and extract spoils, not unlike the Evangelical fanaticism that has come to define modern U.S. politics and foreign policy.

Nolan seems to view America now much like Ithaca then — as an empire in decline — so his version of Homer’s epic leans into the real historical context of its 12th century BCE setting: the Bronze Age Collapse and the alleged “Sea People” who some speculate may have caused it through their conquests. As a moral darkness spreads through the Mediterranean, characters like Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and Telemachus (Tom Holland) speculate about these seafaring plunderers only to later learn that these legends may have been told about their beloved Odysseus and his men.

Although the classic hero has a more upstanding stature in the poem (not to mention the favor of Zeus), Nolan’s more conflicted version is born of a more trepidatious reading that hesitates to glorify a man of twists and turns and military conquests. In fact, this particular interpretation of Odysseus subsequently defines the film’s approach to Greek gods and the supernatural at large, resulting in a magical, mythical film with distinctly human grounding.

A Guilty Homecoming

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, the siege of Troy takes thundering, harrowing form, but its moral underpinnings are distilled to a single admission: “What if he knew exactly what he had done?” Odysseus, in disguise as a beggar, admits this to his wife Penelope upon his return, in a speech whose corresponding flashbacks reveal a surprising layer to Nolan’s adaptation, even though it ought to be the most predictable outcome as yet another movie driven by remorse.

From regret urging Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) to rewrite his own history in Memento, to the slow unraveling of accidental killer Will Dormer (Al Pacino) in Insomnia, to the survivor’s remorse driving Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins, guilt has been a central undercurrent in most of Nolan’s work. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Inception, where the dead wife of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) forms an unscratchable itch in his subconscious and manifests as a destructive femme fatale while constructs like freight trains pummel through his subconscious, preventing him from getting home.

Dom, in this sense, forms a prototype for Nolan’s incarnation of Odysseus. Where the poem frames the Greek hero as a man lashed between the whims of several gods — chief among them Athena, who sets both his and Telemachus’ journeys into motion — the movie hints at a wrinkle early on, when Athena (Zendaya) appears as a vision only Odysseus can see. Like Dom’s wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), she’s a specter — a splinter in his mind driving his actions and inactions alike.

Athena’s true nature eventually comes to light, but first, a divine song from the mythical Sirens forces Odysseus to finally put words to this version of his journey: the idea that, deep down, he may not actually want to go home. As departures from the source material go, this one is particularly fundamental, but the pieces all fall into place. Where Homer tied his hero’s fate to the clashing desires of Zeus and Poseidon, Nolan backgrounds these primary deities in favor of psychological impetus. The gods of Olympus, whether or not they exist here, have their will transposed onto Odysseus’s psyche — one defined not by a single regret, but a multitude of them accumulated across decades.

Zeus is the ego rationalizing his journey and driving him homeward out of a guilt of leaving his family behind. Returning to them is his duty as a father, husband, and king. Poseidon, god of the sprawling ocean, is his cavernous id — his deep-seated fears forcing him to turn elsewhere, if only to avoid losing (or betraying) even more men. He has enough blood on his hands, and enough spirits who bear witness to his journey. And Athena, goddess of wisdom, is the superego, ever negotiating between the two, as Odysseus battles both external and internal forces. Like Mal, Athena is a manifestation of Odysseus’ remorse; she takes her specific form, as it’s revealed, because of an innocent Trojan woman (also Zendaya) who fell victim to Ithacan blades. Her face is practically burned into his mind (alongside the tumbling head of Athena’s defaced statue) as a pair of eyes bearing witness to his worst possible self.

Tying all this guilt together is the movie’s inevitable final image of the Trojan horse keeling over in flame like a once-grand symbol of trust now corrupted and brought to its knees. However, all these ideas wouldn’t be half as impactful if they weren’t also wrapped in some of the most chilling and debonair filmmaking of Nolan’s career.

The Big and the Bold

As the first Hollywood feature shot entirely on 70mm IMAX, The Odyssey takes advantage of its scale through lingering landscape shots that highlight above all else isolation via moments of characters alone on beaches or lost at sea (à la Inception, Dunkirk, Interstellar, and so on). This use of empty, expansive space is almost counterintuitive to such an enormous canvas one can fill in all directions, especially in a film with the scope of a David Lean historical epic, but Nolan’s more recent works are far from obvious in their framing and finish.

Up until The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan’s work with cinematographer Wally Pfister was one of careful blocking and framing, and photochemical washes in primary colors. But ever since collaborating with Hoyte van Hoytema on Interstellar, his films have taken on more visceral hues. His images and surfaces have been rougher and grainier, which suits The Odyssey’s lived-in world and withered spaces. But just as important as the images themselves is how they’re assembled, in this case by Tenet and Oppenheimer editor Jennifer Lame.

Early in Nolan’s career, cutters like Dody Dorn (Memento, Insomnia) and Lee Smith (Batman Begins, Inception) helped him carve out intuitive connective tissue in the form of bursts of memory and sensory input. These sudden audiovisual flickers were jolting interruptions to the flow of their respective films, highlighting the overpowering nature of the characters’ flashbacks and all that troubled them. However, a film like The Odyssey is made largely of these impressionistic pieces, which cut through the edit like knives.

Nolan’s screenplay turns the poem’s many oral retellings into a matryoshka doll narrative, wherein Telemachus hears of a virtuous man, but an amnesiac Odysseus gradually remembers a more complicated, more troubling past, filled with stormy seas as tumultuous as his own inner workings. The film is aesthetically chaotic, cutting between haunting close-ups and physical pandemonium on an enormous scale. Nolan, although he’s been known for non-linear storytelling, has still largely stuck to linear moment-to-moment continuity until now. But upon watching The Odyssey, it’s hard not to recall the lush poetry of filmmakers like Terrence Malick (The New World, A Hidden Life), whose elliptical cutting emphasizes mood and environment above chronology.

The film, by and large, still comes together in the style of a classic Hollywood epic, but it’s peppered with more moments, anecdotes, and disasters that take the form of sensory fragments not unlike the isolated reminiscences from early in Nolan’s career. Here, they’re a more defining tapestry, and they work in tandem with the rougher texture van Hoytema helps create. The result is a film that, although it follows a prototypical adventure, plays out as a series of visceral, piercing memories. This is nothing if not fitting for a tale Nolan frames as a song passed down through rose-tinted recollections concealing a repentant truth, as though he were returning to the source code of western storytelling to see what form it might take today in order to capture the world not as it once was, but as it is and ought to be.