Emily Wilson, now arguably the most famous translator of Homer, is understandably concerned with promoting the Odyssey. In her LRB review of Christopher Nolan's new film, she acknowledges that her translation is " flying off the shelves", but I suspect she worries that many of those sales will be for the purposes of bookshelf adornment and Instagramable content rather than engagement with the text. Her review is a plea for that engagement. In contrast, Nolan is making a film that necessarily fillets the book to provide a primarily visual narrative in which there is little verbal poetry but a fair amount of clunky exposition. It is An Odyssey rather than The Odyssey. Wilson is not a Nolan fan: she finds most of his work boring, grandiose and superficial, her one backhanded compliment to his film being that her teenagers enjoyed it, but she does pay him the respect of engaging critically with his films, noting the common themes of discontinuities in time, vengeance and recovery, and a strange preoccupation with drowning. In her review, she consequently emphasises what Nolan does not - the sex, the humour, the glory - to remind us that there is much more to the book.
But the difference in the media is ultimately all that their difference in opinion comes down to, despite the best attempts by the press (another medium) to talk it up as a fight or even as more grist to the "culture war" that started with the illiterate ravings of Elon Musk when he discovered that Helen wasn't played by an Aryan (presumably he'd have been OK if Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong'o had swapped roles). Ironically, "talking up a fight" is pretty much at the core of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, something that Nolan makes explicit when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, tells Penelope, his doting queen, that the war is really about trade routes (i.e. access to the Hellespont and thence the Black Sea), not honour. The exchange highlights that the film is really a conflation of the two books. That in turn explains why even at 3 hours a lot of the second book was never going to make it to the screen (Telemachus's visit to Nestor, the extended sojourn with Circe, the Nausicaa episode).
One lesser known scene that remains is the raid on the Cicones, on the coast of Thrace, after Odysseus and his men have first left Troy (this is improbable, as they're meant to be heading south, but anyway). Nolan has a captured local speak unintelligibly to the Ithacans, actually in modern Greek. This is an early sight of a key theme of the film that originates hors-texte: that the returning Achaean Greeks were actually the feared and mysterious Sea People. There is no historical substance to this, but it works as a device in a film that places much emphasis on the tropes of disguise and misdirection. "You have the eyes of Athena" is a phrase that approaches cliché, as does the sometimes laboured explanations of Zeus's Law (xenia) being justified as a beggar might be a god in disguise. You might think that Nolan is making broader points here about hypocrisy and class injustice, but a simpler explanation is that he is using those parts of the epic that lend themselves to the screen: impersonation, double-crossing, revelation. The same principle applies to the Trojan Horse, which doesn't appear in the Iliad and is only mentioned incidentally in the Odyssey.
The two works are quite different. Not only was Homer a collective effort, spread over centuries, but there were two distinct collectives, unrelated but with overlapping influences, representing different oral traditions. The Iliad is an ethnic origin legend that seeks to root Greek culture in the mythos of Mycenae, not unlike the way that Europeans long sought to locate their own racial genius in Classical Greece, a tendency that persists among suburban Americans with their Molon labe bumper stickers. In contrast, the Odyssey is a patchwork of Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern tales that echoes Gilgamesh and foreshadows the Arabian Nights. As a quest (actually two, that of Telemachus and his father) the Odyssey would influence Medieval literature and later, as a collection of incidents centring on food, sex and hubris, the emergence of the picaresque novel in the sixteenth century, from where you can trace a straight line to Modernism and the epic and bathetic retelling of the adventures of Odysseus and Telemachus in James Joyce's Ulysses.
But enough about the literature; what about the film? Nolan's decision to combine the two is interesting because The Iliad isn't particularly cinematic, as Wolfgang Peterson proved with his Troy in 2004. Warfare is actually an often dull subject on the screen: an impressive spectacle (Ridley Scott is arguably the pre-eminent director of this genre, as in Kingdom of Heaven or Napoleon) but one that struggles to connect emotionally (Scott's notable exception being Gladiator). 10 years before the walls of Troy is grim in anybody's book. The tendency to foreground the individual isn't just about the limitations of the budget, as Homer himself proved with Achilles and Patroclus. The Trojan Horse is a ridiculous plot device to a modern audience (surely the Trojans couldn't be that stupid?), and in Nolan's hands an improbable feat of artistry as well as engineering. It certainly doesn't look like it was fashioned from broken ship planks. But we accept it as the symbol of deception (of both the Trojans and Sinon), and as a portent of the coming divine vengeance as it burns in the conflagration of Troy. It's also worth noting that the Trojan scenes owe more to Virgil's Aeneid (such as the character of Sinon) than to either of Homer's works. Likewise, the film's ending owes more to Tennyson's Ulysses, which in turn links it cinematically to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings.
Nolan's syncretic approach bears fruit inasmuch as the film has a clear narrative line. Amusingly, it is less convoluted in its chronology than the original poem, which is full of flashbacks and tales within tales, and thus something of a departure from his earlier time-bending films such as Memento and Dunkirk. What it shares with those films is a focus on story over style. Nolan is interested in the technology of filmmaking, not only in his use of IMAX but in his dedication to "real world" illusion (The Prestige), to editing as time manipulation (Interstellar) and to the construction of narrative (Oppenheimer). But that last is very much about the construction, not the quality of writing. Nolan had been nominated for his screenplays but has never won a major award. His Oscars and BAFTAs are for best picture and best direction. In his interview with Christopher Frayling in Sight and Sound, Nolan states "What I was trying to do, actually, was to get through the text and have it disappear and get to the events." That comment comes after his admission that while he read Wilson's translation, he read many others too. So, no love lost there.
In that interview he cites Akira Kurosawa's Ran (an adapation of Shakespeare's King Lear) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (the biopic of a Medieval icon painter) as influences on the film, the one for its spectacle and grandeur, the other for its historical immersiveness. But I think you could make as good a case for Kurosawa's Yojimbo. That also makes more sense when Nolan cites Sergio Leone, who adapted the tale of a trickster warrior as A Fistful of Dollars, both in the stylised confrontation of the assault on Eumaeus and in the use of a diegetic sound that punctuates the drama: in Leone a pocketwatch (For a Few Dollars More) and in Nolan's film a plucked bowstring. Nolan also admits that the final scene of The Planet of the Apes was an inspiration for the setting of the Trojan Horse, listing to its side and part-buried in the sand like the Statue of Liberty, but again the bigger influence of that film may be in the theme of a desperate desire to return home only to discover that you were the alien all along.
Frayling attempts to broach the subject of Uberto Pasolini's 2024 film The Return, which covers the same ground as the second half of Nolan's film, but the director politely shuts him down. However, that film lingers in the background in Frayling's next question about the choice of a consistent accent: contemporary American ("Mom" and "Dad" both feature in the dialogue). While Nolan swerves the convention of the baddies in a sword-and-sandals film being RP-speaking Brits, it means his film lacks any real class dimension. Jon Bernthal's Menelaus, the King of Sparta, could have appeared in The Godfather, if he'd improved his table manners, while the social hierarchy that protects Antinous and exploits Sinon has to be patiently explained. In contrast, The Return employs a range of accents. We know Eumaeus and Eurycleia are slaves because they have non-English accents.
Pasolini's film is the superior drama, informed by Fiennes's Shakespearian chops (see his 2011 version of Coriolanus), Binoche's familiarity with Greek drama (she has appeared on stage as Antigone), and their evident screen chemistry (Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, The English Patient). But the most striking comparison between the films may be in the role of Antinous, played in The Return by Marwan Kenzari as an Iago-like character, whereas in Nolan's film, which is actually truer to Homer, Robert Pattinson thoroughly enjoys himself as a cowardly braggart. Nolan's casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus (like Jason Bourne, a resourceful character who must recover his memory) makes cinematic sense. We must identify with Odysseus sufficiently to excuse the climactic mass murder (incidentally, Telemachus killing the slave women is unsurprisingly omitted from the story because, well, it's Tom Holland). Equally, we must identify with Penelope's faithfulness, as played by the doe-eyed Anne Hathaway. The ambiguity and suspicion about her husband's return that Binoche displays is nowhere to be seen.
In Homer, Odysseus is semi-divine: he speaks with the gods; he is deceitful, as they are; he shags around, as they do. Nolan's hero is more like a desert hermit, with Calypso as an occasional temptress rather than a long-term lover. His visions of Athena (played by Zendaya) are presented as symptoms of PTSD, as he recalls the Trojan temple girl beheaded before him and other war crimes. Odysseus is guilty of dishonouring xenia, Zeus's law, by the gift of the wooden horse. His long journey home is an extended lesson in hospitality and the consequences of breaching it. Insofar as Nolan's film has a politics, it is founded on the liberal ideal of carefully-calibrated generosity to those less fortunate, the recognition that all we have to fear is fear itself (the Sea People are us), and a refusal of the supernatural in favour of rationalism. That last might appear odd in a film based on a text in which the gods are everywhere and decisive, but Nolan's Odysseus regularly defies them and he just as regularly disenchants his credulous crew.
Nolan's film is a good watch. I've seen it twice now, once on IMAX (I am intimately familiar with Anne Hathaway's pores in a way I never expected to be) and would recommend that bigger frame if you can manage to see it. It is big enough and bold enough to bear the weight of all the cultural history and the modern criticism thrown at it, which is why I think contributions like Wilson's are ultimately more helpful than hindering. It is a fascinatingly rich and rewarding subject, and while I don't think Nolan's interpretation is the most adventurous or challenging, it has every right to expect to be the definitive version for the next few decades (I doubt Elon Musk's mooted AI version in the original Greek will prove a hit). My chief regret is that Nolan didn't cast Fiennes and Binoche before Pasolini did, but that would likely have resulted in a smaller budget and Nolan is probably no longer capable of making a film under such constraints. He reached his cinematic apotheosis with Oppenheimer and doesn't look likely to return to the realm of the mortals just yet. He is on his own odyssey.
