Every time a Christopher Nolan movie comes out, it is a cultural as well as a cinematic event. Millions of people go along to see it, and it is a big hit at the box office. People talk about it.
When his last movie, Oppenheimer, hit our screens in 2023, it was released at the same time as Barbie, and together they were dubbed “Barbenheimer”. The idea that audiences should go to both movies caught on. Teenage girls who would have been a natural audience for Barbie also went along to watch a film about the detonation of the first atom bomb and Oppenheimer’s feelings of guilt afterwards. It was a major marketing triumph to induce this audience to go and see a movie they would normally have had no interest in.
Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey, based on Homer’s epic poem, is currently in cinemas, and it looks set to gross more than a billion dollars at the box office. Nolan might well be the last director alive who can automatically draw a huge audience to his films regardless of the subject matter.
Not even a Steven Spielberg movie is an automatic hit anymore. His latest one, a sci-fi story called Disclosure Day, did quite poorly at the box office. It has yet to break even. Everyone who likes going to the cinema should be grateful that there is still a director whose films can attract a big audience.
The Battle Before the Movie
Perhaps The Odyssey was helped by all the controversy it generated before its release. Essentially, it got caught up in the culture wars when it was announced that the black actress Lupita Nyong’o would play Helen of Troy, who is described by Homer as “white-armed”, and Elliot Page, a “transgender man” – which is to say, someone who was born biologically female but now identifies as male – would play a Greek warrior.
This was Diversity, Equity and Inclusion casting at its finest. Culture warriors on the right didn’t like it at all. If this is a Western civilizational story, then everyone should look like they belong to Western civilization. A lot of so-called race-swapping goes on in historical dramas today. It can be jarring to see this. It would be like picking me, a fair-skinned Irishman, to play a part in a story set in ancient China. Why do this?
It was doubly jarring for them that Nolan went along with the idea that Elliot Page (previously Ellen) is now a man.
They were also annoyed that Nolan seemed to be drawing on a recent translation of Homer’s Odyssey by Emily Wilson that is regarded by some as more feminist than previous translations.
Culture warriors on the left loved the DEI casting, of course, and the fact that Nolan was drawing partly on the Wilson translation.
In any event, now that the movie is out, some prominent conservative commentators have said they like it a lot, including Melanie Phillips of The Times and Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire. Shapiro gave it a score of 8.5 to nine out of 10.
Shapiro thinks the movie is Christian-themed. Something called “Zeus’s law” is continually quoted in it. Zeus’s law says you must welcome the stranger. This rule was part of ancient Greek culture, but in the film, it is beefed up to resemble something like Jesus’s instruction to do to others as we would have them do to us.
Odysseus, as played by Matt Damon, is suffering from a severe case of war guilt and trauma because he is the one who came up with the idea of the Trojan Horse that allowed him and his band of warriors to smuggle themselves into Troy, open the gates and allow the rest of the Greeks to enter and slaughter the Trojans. Was this kind of war guilt really a thing before Christianity?
In Homer’s version, Odysseus does not suffer from guilt about this at all. He is delighted that he can claim the glory of being the man who came up with the trick that beat the Trojans.
I have also seen comments to the effect that the message of the movie is quite socially conservative in that it shows the effect having an absent father has on his son, Telemachus, who is only a baby when Odysseus heads for Troy and is 20 when his father finally returns from the war and his odyssey.
The Trouble Is Not the Casting
Personally, I don’t think the DEI casting got in the way of the story, and I wouldn’t have cared about the big liberties Nolan takes with Homer’s poem if the movie had been good enough. It just wasn’t, not for me anyway.
The big set-piece action scenes, like the encounter with the Cyclops, were cinematically impressive, but somehow lacked excitement, unlike the action scenes in Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
Emotionally, the movie lacks impact. Damon’s Odysseus is not the glory-hunting, macho, vainglorious, god-defying trickster of Homer’s tale who needs to learn a bit of humility. The film fails to show Odysseus learning humility; Damon’s character never transitions from vainglory to wisdom through suffering. Instead, he begins the story guilt-ridden, depressed and traumatized. Therefore, while he is on a physical journey, he is not on a moral or emotional one.
Even Homer’s Translator Is Unconvinced
Ironically, the aforementioned Emily Wilson has written a scathing piece about the movie for the London Review of Books which sets out similar concerns. No one can accuse her of being a cranky conservative.
She says the movie “lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth”, and that its vision is “too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants”.
Wilson came away disappointed and not simply because Nolan took so many liberties with Homer’s poem. She just thinks he flattened too many of the main characters, including, it should be noted, the goddess Calypso, played by Charlize Theron. She lacks allure. It takes a special kind of talent to make Charlize Theron unalluring.
But perhaps those carping about the film are being one-eyed, like the Cyclops. More likely, that description fits Nolan’s adoring audience. Star-struck by the director, they have lost their objectivity, refusing to see when his work falls short of the high expectations they rightly set for it. All culture-war considerations aside, Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is simply not as good as it ought to be.