Second Odyssey post
I withheld some of this in my first post about seeing Nolan's Odyssey because I was kind of trying to avoid "spoiling" what is so 2026 about that movie. I've had enough annoying conversations with people this week that I figure I should just talk about it here and spoil all the new stuff Nolan added to the plot without guilt.
In my opinion, it's deranged to make "accuracy" your core pillar of critique for this movie. The movie is a version of The Odyssey without gods. No gods involve themselves in Odysseus's journey in an unambiguous, active way. All of Odysseus's dialogues with Athena are about his difficulty believing in absentee gods. Odysseus is an agnostic in this story, basically. And in the final act, we learn that the Athena he's been seeing is just a figment of his own imagination, conjured to process his wartime PTSD. She isn't the goddess Athena... she's a priestess of Athena whom he saw beheaded during the sack of Troy.
This story is not attempting to adapt da Odyssey as written! It's just not trying. If it's not trying to do that, we gotta ask ourselves what it IS trying to do, and critique whether it's succeeding at that thing.
The final act involves Odysseus giving the camera a pretty direct monologue about how he regrets winning the Trojan War via a trick. He then recalls (mostly in visual sequences, unspoken) that winning a brutal war of invasion via a trick unleashed a horror of rape and violence against civilians which gave him megatrauma. He then says out loud that this horrible victory has now echoed throughout the world, and dissolved the social bonds between all peoples. This has caused the civilization he was a member of to fall - he straight up uses the word "civilization" several times, and I think the word "empire" too. Future generations are doomed to live in a dark age of collapse. He has destroyed an international culture of decency and acceptance to strangers, replacing it with mistrust and cruelty.
It's pretty unambiguous that this is meant as commentary on our modern world! I don't know how to help people who don't immediately recognize this stuff in a direct-to-camera monologue about war trauma, imperial collapse, and the unforgivable moral crime of invasion. He's even delivering it in an American accent, for crying out loud. The reason the story is so warped from the original is to facilitate this metaphor and turn Odysseus from a horny trickster god into a traumatized soldier bro. Nolan absolutely made all these decisions on purpose. We should be talking about whether his aims were successful, not whether he "correctly" adapted the material in The Odyssey. If he didn't put the gods in, he very obviously was not even trying to do that.
I haven't actually read a lot of online conversation about this movie. Every time I dip a toe in, I am so baffled by everyone's focus that I put down my phone and go do something else. In this post, I'm mostly responding to real people I have been talking to in real life, in social settings, who want to talk to me about Emily Wilson's essay but haven't seen the movie (or saw the movie and did not understand it).
Nolan is a heavyhanded guy. His movies are full of Themes, and he'll shoot you with a gun if you miss them, goddamn it. I think part of the reason people react so intensely to his thuddingly obvious themes is that people do care about theme, and they want to see it, and they want to be able to recognize it. They're not getting these themes from other blockbusters, but Nolan is giving it to them, so they react.
Is subtlety valorous? Do we deserve it? I don't think it's valorous, I don't think we "deserve" it, and I don't think directness is condescending. That's a whole other blog post I've been cooking on for about two years. Audiences today are allergic to directness - they prefer stories to be about unfolding secrets, and they want convoluted Plots which involve them in a process of discovery. They can sit and watch movies like The Substance, or The Odyssey, where characters state their themes directly to the camera, and still not notice or understand those themes. Nevertheless, they have endless attention and patience for the kind of convoluted puzzlebox plots you find in prestige TV dramas. Audiences have been trained by the last 20 years of high-budget television to analyze plot, but not to analyze theme. This stuff frequently makes me feel completely insane.
I actually think Nolan's themes in The Odyssey were extraordinarily unsuccessful, mainly because the cultural conversation about his movie ended up not being about those themes. I think if he'd toned down the degree to which the characters speak directly about the Bronze Age collapse, the themes would get more attention from the audience and hit more successfully. It would also be less obnoxious!
Also: do I like these themes? Also no! But it's crazy to me that so few people I know are talking about them at all. I don't think that imperial collapse has to be seen as a tragedy in this way, but I have nobody with whom to talk about this because they're all talking about the sea people!!