WOOD: I Didn’t Watch The Odyssey

I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I didn’t like it. I assume the people who did aren’t fans of the Odyssey.

I say that knowing I’m in the minority. The film opened to $124.5 million domestically and $264.1 million worldwide, Nolan’s biggest global debut ever, with a 95 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Its second weekend has held exceptionally strong. This isn’t some art house curiosity a handful of purists are grumbling about. It’s a genuine cultural event, and half its opening weekend audience was under 35. That’s exactly why it matters.

I keep hearing the same line: “the casting doesn’t matter, it’s all a myth.” For generations, many scholars treated Troy as merely legendary until archaeology uncovered a great Bronze Age city at Hisarlik, the site long associated with Homer’s Troy.

I did not love the contempt for history, where he leaned so heavily on calling it “myth” he remade whatever he wanted. The armor is wrong. Plate armor instead of more CGI that he used for the cyclops, and even an opening with armor that doesn’t work for the Trojans. The Trojans as villains (and victims later) are clad in white and possess no lines to establish pathos (very unlike Homer). I was granted no understanding for Trojans from the script but tremendous sympathy for anyone who wants to tell his friends that he really is the third guy on the galloping horse, or the man cut down right before the arrow in the eye. The costumes made them as inhuman in battle as the giants. Trojans are supposed to matter to us and be seen as people, but the many in Homers story who do are erased.  

The ships are wrong, with Greeks somehow sailing Viking longships to Iceland (Hades).

The casting isn’t my chief complaint, but it’s worth saying plainly. The men of Ithaca, warriors from a real place in one of the most ancient tales we have, are cast as a five foot tall woman, a Korean man, an Indian man. Good Will Hunting is now using his American accent yet again to talk out his pain but now he has a grey beard. He cast almost anyone, it seems, except Greeks.

And then there’s Helen. One of the most famous women in history, someone we have no photograph of but do have more than two thousand years of artistic tradition depicting, is played by the same actress who plays Clytemnestra. Helen and Clytemnestra are sisters in Greek mythology, although the traditions surrounding their parentage vary. But Nolan turns them into apparent identical twins, allowing the same casting decision to stand simultaneously as historical continuity and conspicuous modern diversity. It is difficult to see the choice as anything other than calculated.

I also expected a visual feast. With Nolan you’re supposed to be able to count on that much even when everything else goes wrong. Instead I got snow showing up randomly throughout, for no reason I could locate in the story. Poseidon’s wrath at sea was red and white strobe lights flashing on close ups of grimacing faces. I have seen far better storms filmed with a fraction of the budget. Then at the climax, stone towers collapse and burn and seem to explode by something like magic, no siege engines, no explanation, just spectacle standing in for meaning.

The most absurd moment in the entire film is Odysseus talking about the Bronze Age. Not living through its end, talking about it, as a concept, like he’s read a book on it. He says this to what is apparently his therapist, or his hallucination, or Athena, it’s never quite clear which. No Bronze Age Greek knows he is living at the end of the Bronze Age. That’s our historical category, not his. For Odysseus to speak that way is as jarring as George Washington lamenting “the decline of the Early Modern Period.”

I will give the film this much credit. It doesn’t reach for cheap sex or nudity, and the violence, even the monsters, is restrained compared to what it could have been. That restraint is real, and appreciated.

But none of that, casting, costuming, or visuals or restraint, was ever my real focus. My real problem is what the film does to the story and, underneath that, to the truth about who the Greeks actually were.

Start with Agamemnon. At one point it is deeply jarring to hear him criticized in the film as having gone to war to dominate a trade route. That framing works fine for Americans marching against Vietnam. It makes no sense for that age. Men wanted fame, the immortality of having their great deeds recounted. They craved war. Helen gave them an excuse to go after a rich enemy for revenge and honor, not to fight and kill each other over shipping lanes. Her abduction, and the deception that got her away from her husband’s home, is what makes the Greeks heroes in their own eyes rather than mere pirates or raiders. It is the center of the moral arc of the whole story, and every Greek in the audience for three thousand years knew it. Reduce that to a trade dispute and you haven’t updated Homer, you’ve erased the reason the war happens at all.

Penelope fares no better. She gets an “I sat on that throne for twenty years” speech, delivered as a grievance about being kept from rule. That is not the Penelope of the poem. Homer’s Penelope is not a woman denied a crown by circumstance. She is a woman who is supposed to be protected by her husband from the depredations of other men, and the entire tension of the back half of the epic comes from the fact that she isn’t, that the suitors are circling precisely because a woman without a man’s protection was seen as vulnerable and exploitable. Turning that into a modern complaint about access to power isn’t a small tweak. It inverts what her situation was for.

The way he treats the lotus reveals Nolan’s crusade to rework. In Homer, the Lotus-Eaters are a temptation to forget. They are dangerous precisely because they offer relief from longing, duty, memory, and home. Odysseus does not embrace the lotus. He tears his men away from it and binds them to the benches of the ships so they cannot return. Nolan reverses the symbolism. Calypso administers the lotus almost like medicine. It becomes therapy. Forgetting becomes healing. Relief becomes wisdom. Homer treats escape as a temptation to overcome. Nolan treats it as part of recovery.

He took an ancient warning about numbing through pharmacy and turned it into an ad for the psychiatric drugs America consumes at a rate unparalleled in history.

Of course real Bronze Age soldiers could have suffered psychological trauma. That is not the issue. The issue is that Homer does not understand Odysseus through the modern therapeutic framework. Nolan does. The center of gravity shifts from glory to healing, from honor to recovery, from fate to psychology. Homer asks what makes a great hero. Nolan asks what makes a healthy person. Homer’s hero is proud of his role at Troy. He lies constantly, and the poem repeatedly presents his cunning and deception as signs of extraordinary intelligence. His superiority lies chiefly in being more resourceful than the men and monsters around him, not in being morally good in any sense Christianity would recognize.

That difference matters. One reason children should read Homer is that he confronts them with a civilization genuinely unlike their own. The Homeric world admires glory, martial courage, vengeance, cunning, hierarchy, and the pursuit of an undying name. Christianity teaches humility, truthfulness, mercy, forgiveness, and love of enemies. Unless we first understand what Homer admired, we cannot understand either the ancient world or what Christianity changed.

We increasingly assume that every great story must secretly have been about us all along. Ancient epics become stories about trauma. Medieval legends become stories about identity. Shakespeare becomes therapy. We flatten the moral and intellectual distance between ourselves and the past until history becomes little more than a mirror. The result is not greater understanding but less.

Nolan does not merely reinterpret Homer. He replaces Homer’s moral framework with a modern therapeutic one while retaining Homer’s names. Even xenia, the sacred obligations between host and guest, becomes something resembling the Golden Rule, a warm ethic of universal welcome. But Homeric hospitality was embedded in hierarchy, reciprocity, reputation, ritual, and fear of divine punishment. Zeus guarded the stranger. He did not teach the Sermon on the Mount.

Nolan seems to want it both ways. He warns that a dark age has swept over us, that the Greeks have become the sea people, that they stared at the monster too long and became the monster. Fair enough as a theme. But it is not reactionary to notice that we have actually lost something in the telling. A therapized, war-weary culture handed Nolan Homer, and what came back was a veteran managing trauma through guilt, therapy, self-loathing, and even chemically assisted healing. The voyage home is no longer primarily about recovering one’s kingdom, household, and honor. It becomes a journey toward psychological integration. That this is being heralded as brave and brilliant is a trick worthy of Odysseus himself.

Homer deserves better than to be modernized. The Greeks were not proto-Americans waiting for therapy. They inhabited a world that prized glory over mercy, cunning over honesty, honor over humility, and fame over forgiveness. That is precisely why they should still be read. We cannot understand what Christianity transformed until we first encounter the civilization that preceded Christ’s coming. Nolan has given us an entertaining modern myth. What he has not given us is The Odyssey.

I didn’t watch the Odyssey. I watched Christopher Nolan’s version of what twenty-first century audiences wish The Odyssey had always been.