The Secrets of the Odyssey

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SCR205: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has everything you would expect from him: IMAX photography, practical effects wherever a camera could capture them, and a soundtrack built to shake the theater. It also has an Odysseus Homer would barely recognize. This Odysseus is not humbled for forgetting the gods. He is haunted by what he did to Troy and by the sacred law of hospitality he broke there.

Jeff Haecker, Fr. Bryan Shackett, and Patrick Mason take on Nolan’s summer adaptation of Homer and the question that follows anyone who knows the poem: how much can you change The Odyssey before it stops being Homer’s story? They start with what works. The Trojan Horse is finally seen from the inside, as a cramped and terrifying trap. The Cyclops is less a monster than a creature, which makes his cave far more frightening. Practical effects carry the Cyclops and the Laestrygonian giants, and the whirlpool started as jet skis churning the water in circles. Patrick explains why Nolan treats CGI as something that should build on the real rather than replace it.

The performances get their due as well. Anne Hathaway gives Penelope a slow slide from devotion to sheer survival. Robert Pattinson makes Antinous so loathsome that the panel counts it as a triumph, and John Leguizamo steals his scenes as Eumaeus. Matt Damon is strongest at Circe’s hut, where Odysseus works out what has happened to his men. Not everything lands. Fr. Bryan could not get past the 21st-century American accents, especially from Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal, and Patrick points out that both came straight from a Spider-Man film.

The longest conversation is about the film’s moral center. Nolan’s Odysseus is punished for violating Zeus’s law, confesses his guilt over the sack of Troy, and learns that the dreaded “sea people” were the Greeks all along. Fr. Bryan and Patrick both see a Christian idea of remorse and conversion placed inside an ancient Greek poem, and they disagree about whether that improves the story or betrays it. It makes for a moving confession scene with Penelope. It is also not who Homer’s Odysseus was.

Along the way: Hades as a place where the dead are starving for news of the living, a seer whose prophecy costs more than it is worth, the old dog Argos, and the bowstring habit that finally gives Odysseus away. Whether you are comparing The Odyssey movie and the book or deciding if the film is worth your time once it reaches home viewing, this is a conversation about what a great adaptation owes its source.

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