Why The Odyssey was the only story big enough for Christopher Nolan
The timeless themes of Homer’s epic – a fine but flawed hero and a longing for home – turn out to have been at the heart of much of the visionary film-maker’s work
Imagine, for a second, being in the shoes of Christopher Nolan. For 20 years you’ve been arguably the biggest film-maker in Hollywood, racking up such critically lauded hits as superhero gamechanger The Dark Knight trilogy, the dazzling dream-heist thriller Inception and soulful space epic Interstellar. And then you become even more powerful than ever: Oppenheimer, your tense, weighty, three-hour drama about the race to develop nuclear weapons during the second world war, has been rapturously reviewed and has bagged seven Oscars. It has also made close to a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.
For your next project, you can make anything you please. What do you do? Well, Nolan surprised everyone when he announced that his 13th feature would be an adaptation of Homer’s poem The Odyssey. And has he delivered in spectacular style. He brings to the screen, at a scale and level of artistic ambition never achieved before, the ultimate heroic epic, a literary work regarded as the foundational text of western culture. But really it’s no surprise at all. What else could it be? The Odyssey, created, it’s believed, in the eighth century BC, is a spectacle-heavy, thrill-packed, action epic. It’s the only thing big enough for the writer-director at this point in his career.
“Whether it’s the narrative through-line of Odysseus or the singular episodes that make the entirety of the epic, The Odyssey underpins almost all of cinema,” Nolan has said. “It’s certainly there in every movie I’ve ever done, to a degree I never before realised. It was a fun thing to discover as I got into the work of adaptation.”
He’s not wrong. The Odyssey follows the aftermath of the Trojan War, tracking battle-worn Odysseus (played in Nolan’s film by Matt Damon), King of Ithaca, on his long journey home to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). But this is no simple voyage: Odysseus’s homecoming takes 10 years and, en route, he encounters man-eating monsters, capricious gods, spirits of the dead, a voracious whirlpool and mellifluous sirens intent on luring passing sailors on to jagged rocks. It makes for a transformational journey, our questing hero besieged not just by external threats but by inner demons.
As Nolan says, it’s all there in his previous movies, be it Shelby’s search for identity in Memento, Bruce Wayne returning to Gotham in disguise in Batman Begins, the heroes of Inception and Interstellar, Cobb and Cooper, striving to make it home, or the boats under attack in Dunkirk. Odysseus can variously be described as soldier, strategist, wanderer, survivor, ghost, beggar and king; he’s a fine but flawed man, riven by trauma and guilt. Is that not the mythic exemplar of every Nolan protagonist, their heroic profiles stained by the shadows of shame?
And it’s not just Nolan’s movies. Or, indeed, the superhero franchises that now dominate our screens, their caped crusaders often cited as the modern-day equivalents of mythological gods and monsters. Perhaps your favourite movie is The Wizard of Oz? Or Citizen Kane? Or Seven Samurai, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rocky, Star Wars, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo, Harry Potter, One Battle After Another? All, and countless more, are indebted to the hero’s journey that’s charted in The Odyssey. There isn’t an action sequence in cinema that hasn’t sprung from Odysseus’ hair-raising, beard-bristling encounters, and that place of enlightenment and peace that’s so frequently attained by our tested heroes is rooted in his homecoming.
Nolan has long displayed an uncanny knack for placing his finger smack on the cultural pulse (look at how The Dark Knight riffed on the “war on terror”), and it’s surely no coincidence that he’s now chosen to build a vast version of The Odyssey from the ground up. Yes, he’s in the best possible place to do it: Oppenheimer’s success meaning he can shoot in far-flung locations, oversee the construction of mighty practical effects and mightier sets, and pour thousands of extras into the colossal battle scenes. But there’s something to be said for Nolan now turning to Homer’s foundational tale at a time when AI is threatening the human act of storytelling. This is a film-maker who’s long preached the importance of the cinematic experience over streaming endless “content” that can be watched on phones, and he’s now settled on the OG story to provide viewers with a supercharged hit of pure cinema: soul and spectacle. “I made a decision when I was writing the script that I wanted the film to be accessible,” Nolan says.
“Sometimes, Chris will throw it out to the whole family and ask: ‘What should I do next?’” says Nolan’s producing partner and wife, Emma Thomas. “All our kids are into classical mythology, but one of them, Oliver, really loves these stories. And Oliver said: ‘What about The Odyssey? Nobody’s really done that in a big movie form.’ As soon as he said it, Chris and I both looked at each other, clearly thinking the same thing: He’s absolutely right. Here’s a big story that’s been with us forever, that appeals to kids, that has had timeless appeal across generations, but nobody has really addressed it in modern times as an epic action movie before.”
Until now. Such myths are timeless for a reason, and this ancient story that has always been a part of us will now be seen, like never before.