The Editor-in-Chief of L’Osservatore Romano, Andrea Monda, comments on Christopher Nolan’s recent film The Odyssey.
By Andrea Monda
“Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; / Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, / But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge”.
It is Odysseus who says these words to Dante in the celebrated Canto XXVI of the Inferno. It is this Odysseus — more than Homer’s — that comes to mind while watching Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation about the great hero. The film director has taken on an immense challenge and has succeeded in handling Homer’s masterpiece, even while reshaping it. Such manipulation is inevitable whenever a written text is adapted for the screen: cuts must be made here and there, and the filmmaker inevitably adds something of his own, carrying the timeless story of the King of Ithaca a significant step forward.
In fact, one could argue that Nolan’s ‘additions’ are more successful than his omissions, not least because whenever he departs from the poem, one cannot help but recognize that Homer’s version is the better one. The most obvious example is the absence of the episode of the Phaeacians — Nausicaa and Alcinous, their hospitality, and the scene in which Odysseus breaks into tears as he listens to the bard sing of his own exploits. Likewise, cutting the exchange between Odysseus, calling himself ‘Nobody’, and Polyphemus, or portraying Menelaus as Helen’s crude and violent husband, are choices that were perhaps avoidable and certainly unfortunate.
What’s new?
So what, in a positive sense, has Nolan added?
Let us try to say something while the impressions are still fresh, bearing in mind that this Odyssey is a film that deserves to be rewatched, so rich is it in suggestion and in meanings, both obvious and hidden.
First of all, Odysseus is no longer a great hero — perhaps not even a hero at all — but simply a man, a tormented man. A real human being struggling to rise above his own bestial nature, striving not to “live like brutes” but to pursue virtue. Yet he often fails. For every human being stands perpetually on that threshold, forever on the verge of becoming “evil”: a prisoner of his lowest, most animal instincts. From this perspective, the sequence in which the sorceress Circe transforms Odysseus’ soldiers into pigs — sculpting them with her own hands — is particularly effective. She does so because, as she says, they are already “swine”, while Nolan shows them greedily devouring their food. In reality, her judgement is an understandable but unjust prejudice. Odysseus arrives and explains that his men are not predators or monsters, but that they simply want to go home.
That longing is the human condition itself. Homer’s Odyssey is the most famous of the nostoi, the tales of the homecoming of the Achaean heroes after their victory over Troy. Victorious, yes — but also, in truth, predators and monsters. Beginning with their leader, Agamemnon. As Odysseus tells his wife Penelope about the tragic sacrifice Agamemnon imposed upon his daughter Iphigenia, she exclaims that he’s a monster, to which Odysseus replies that he’s devout.
Throughout the first part of the film, Odysseus comes across as a ‘secular’ leader, almost an ‘atheist’, someone who has already moved beyond the religiosity of his contemporaries, grounded as it is in fear, ignorance, and sacrifice. He resembles an Enlightenment ruler ahead of his time, ready to mock the superstitions of his subjects.
Yet his attitude is not simply contempt for religion. It is the search for something truer, something more deeply human. At first, he seeks it by believing only in himself, relying on his own strength and celebrating the weight of his own free will. Gradually, however, he is forced to reconsider. The nymph Calypso — both his temptress and his healer — guides him towards a genuine act of faith: surrendering control and allowing himself to be carried by the tides that had always overwhelmed him whenever he tried to master them.
This act of surrender coincides with accepting his own limitations, his wounds, and the monsters within himself. Indeed, this 21st-century Odysseus is a man surrounded by monsters: the external ones, familiar to the billions who have read Homer’s ancient poem, and the internal ones, discovered by the many viewers of Nolan’s film.
Zeus’ law
One monster in particular, as already noted, is Agamemnon, the mighty king of all the Achaeans. He is portrayed almost as a man-machine. We scarcely see his face: only briefly just before he is killed and later in Hades, in one of the most powerful scenes of the entire film. The king of Mycenae symbolizes power pursued for its own sake, a man who has replaced the rule of law with the law of force. He is the “brute” whom the reluctant Odysseus is forced to serve and whose conduct he tries to oppose at every turn.
Agamemnon is not interested in restoring the honour of his brother Menelaus, betrayed by Helen; he merely exploits the situation, with ruthless cynicism, to expand his own power. The law he tramples underfoot is repeatedly referred to in the film as “Zeus’ Law”, the principle that governs civilized coexistence, the same golden rule echoed later in the Gospel: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. It is a law founded on respect, loyalty, pietas, and hospitality. Agamemnon violates it openly and arrogantly, and Odysseus, despite opposing him, violates it as well, though more subtly, by devising the terrible deception of the Trojan Horse.
Hence the anguish that haunts him like an unrelenting Erinys. The slaughter at Troy weighs heavily upon his heart, and the audience gradually comes to understand why, as Nolan slowly reveals the horror of that massacre through the hero’s troubled memories. In Odysseus’ own eyes, he is no less monstrous than Agamemnon — indeed, even more so — because through his cunning he deceived others, shattered trust, committed sacrilege, destroyed the rules governing relations among people, and even profaned Athena herself, the goddess who helps him throughout the story.
A mirror into today’s world
Here the film’s painful relevance becomes evident. Ancient Greece mirrors today’s world, scarred by a fragmented global war and by walls raised against migrants, a world in which hospitality is rejected, international law ignored, and the rules of diplomacy mocked and trampled upon every day. Nolan portrays a civilization in decline — that of the Bronze Age collapse, from which the Homeric epics emerged as collective memory.
It is a world in which the few people who still possess a conscience struggle to remain human amid a tragic historical turning point. Odysseus’ moral dilemma recalls that of Oppenheimer, the protagonist of Nolan’s previous film. Just as the scientist is tormented by his role in creating the atomic bomb, so too is Odysseus haunted by having conceived a weapon that is as dishonourable as it is devastatingly effective.
Nolan has given the Homeric hero the burden of conscience — perhaps even what Hegel would call an “unhappy consciousness” — which finds solace and redemption only in transcendence, passing into a realm that can exist only through love. Dante’s spirit is felt once more in the closing moments, as Odysseus sets sail beyond the horizon, toward the place where the sun disappears — not alone, but together with Penelope. If Dante imagined Odysseus’ “mad flight” as driven by curiositas, here the Trojan veteran’s final voyage is one of atonement and healing.
It is an exile which, though justified by the logic of purifying sacrifice, resembles an exodus: a surprising departure towards a horizon yet to come. In this respect, it strongly recalls Frodo’s final journey in The Lord of the Rings. Unlike his friend Sam, Frodo cannot simply return home. He is destined to go beyond, to seek that “straight path” which breaks the pagan cycle of the world and gives it a purpose and direction — a path leading ultimately to happiness and salvation.
Fatalism and freedom, superstition and reason, conscience, psychology, power and diplomacy — all these themes are woven into Nolan’s three-hour film, which takes on Homer’s monumental epic with confidence, fully aware that a story like this will always remain compelling and deeply moving. As Jorge Luis Borges observed, “Throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha”. In Nolan’s Odyssey, the first story is retold in the light of the hope to which the second points. Its success, then, seems assured.
