The homework required to process The Odyssey is a key part of the experience. Familiarising yourself with the fabled source material (Homer’s ancient Greek epic) goes hand in hand with re-acquainting yourself with the fabled director’s filmography. If you’ve been watching Christopher Nolan’s movies over the years, you’ve essentially seen the making of The Odyssey in real time. It’s not just the recurring themes of adrift men looking for a way home — to children, to comrades, to companions, to family, to themselves. It’s also in the physical images of Nolan-telling scattered across this narrative.
There are flashes everywhere. A confused man wrestling with memory on the sea-shore (Inception); the piecing together of a disorienting past (Memento); an injured hero returning to rescue a city under siege (The Dark Knight trilogy); a blind worker, twins, and the obsession to win as a plot device (The Prestige); wars fought on hostile water and lands (Dunkirk); Trojan-Horse-coded deception by a Matt Damon character and a father chasing a belated promise (Interstellar); a thinker haunted by the consequences of his genius (Oppenheimer); a sleepless and guilt-riddled veteran (Insomnia); the blurred lines of time and tide (all of them). The film-maker has been adapting Homer for more than two decades. Like the protagonist, he finally returns home with The Odyssey, but not before defying the genre gods and braving the blockbuster elements.
It’s poetic that the culmination of his adventure — the actual 173-minute film — is not so much an adaptation as a diagnosis of our relationship with adaptations. That’s what a great “based on” should be: an interpretation that isn’t afraid to debate the sanctity and endurance of its text. The anti-woke criticism that the trailers of The Odyssey elicited, in fact, emphasises the identity of the film. The modern language, the sharp diversity and inclusivity of the casting (Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy, Elliot Page as a brave Greek warrior), the feminist rage of a witchy goddess, the IMAX filming, the non-linear timelines, the musicality of the drama — they don’t feel like provocative gimmicks because Nolan’s genuinely asking us to remember the porosity of folklore.
The entire point of ancient literature is that it allows for meaning in the context of evolution. The cultural specificity is a ruse; the foundation is inherently democratic. Most of it is designed to evoke the endless loops of civilisation and societal collapse; the reason these tales stand the test of time is because humanity learns nothing and keeps repeating the same mistakes. The important thing, as The Odyssey suggests, is to give these retellings the complexities of the world they are read in, not the binaries of the world they were written for. The film lives somewhere between these versions: liberated from the fantasies of the past but rooted in the horrors of the future.
So you have a spectacle about men who let down their gods and demons. You have the hubris of a resilient war hero reduced to the debris of a remorseful ghost (it’s tempting to connect these anti-war tenets with two of the finest Hindi films of the year: Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis and Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga). You have a supernatural journey that mutates into a paranormal penance: a decade-long atonement for the sins of heroism and politics and masculinity. You have an Odysseus who is mighty because he is capable of pain and vulnerability and a conscience, haunted by the atom-bomb-coded annihilation he devised. You have an Athena who’s a manifestation of guilt, not a path to glory. You have a missing king who’s resigned to his fate of survival, not entitled to the faith of his family; he isn’t lost in treacherous oceans and caves by chance, he chooses to lose himself for permanently altering the canon of warfare and humanity. You have people torn between trusting speculation and distrusting reality. You have a queen who persists under the guise of pining, rules under the guise of waiting, protects under the guise of compromising, and loves under the guise of grieving.
The coup of The Odyssey is that its functionality acts as a Trojan horse of sorts. For two-thirds of its running time, the film is fairly loyal to the beats of Homer’s poem. The journey unfolds as a conveyor belt of bleak and popular set-pieces. There’s the violent desecration of Troy. There’s the one-eyed Cyclops who feasts on hapless soldiers. There are the giant man-eating Laestrygonians. There’s the nymph who ‘imprisons’ Odysseus. There are the encounters with the Sirens, the underworld of Hades, the storms of Poseidon, and the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. And there’s the return to an Ithaca under siege, a dying dog and an array of deceitful suitors.
The legends remain. But what slowly changes is the interiority of the protagonist — he goes from the two-dimensional Odysseus we know to a three-dimensional man who treats every obstacle as the suffering he deserves. The soundscape keeps shifting shape and volume to suit each of his reckonings. Given that we are nearly desensitised to Nolan’s big swings by now, it's remarkable that his craft so visibly supplies this transformation. The trials are by the book, but it’s the perspective that’s different. At no point do the visuals pause to be admired; the editing rejects stillness; the writing remains the busiest aspect of the film.
There has to be a word for the precise moment blockbuster-sized entertainers suddenly reveal themselves to be as existential and anxious as our surroundings. With Nolan, the buildup to this revelation is usually a crescendo: a twist in the DNA of the film. The final third of The Odyssey hits like a ton of marble because it manages to turn a chink in his cinematic armour — his penchant for exposition — into an intimate prayer. It's not that you don't expect the payoff, but it’s cathartic to hear the film verbalise its message through a monologue that belongs on paper. To see it confess that hospitality was supposed to be the cornerstone of civilisation and religion is poignant. To watch it admit that gods are merely the embodiment of the human principles we keep erasing is humbling. Not least because it’s a reminder that myths are often manipulated to fuel our perceptions of morality and mayhem, of old-school valour and new-age immigration.
Evidently, The Odyssey is in direct conversation with the idea of mythology. When you live with celebrated stories long enough, they tend to inherit the shield of truth. They tend to be treated carefully and sensitively, through the lens of history, like holy scriptures that cannot be disrespected. As an Indian, in particular, it’s hard not to be moved by the way this film reclaims the secularism and shapelessness of mythology. (What do you mean it chisels away at the core of an untouchable epic?). It’s difficult not to get emotional when someone like Nolan implies that modifying art is the only way to honour it; that legends are meant to be deconstructed and rebuilt.
In a world that’s increasingly averse to fact, I wonder what it says that a movie feels brave because it interrogates the prestiges of fiction. For all its formal scale and analog sorcery, The Odyssey restores the agency to imagine — and reimagine. That is no small accomplishment. Its imperfections stem from the very visceral urge to be ‘faithful’ by being inquisitive. Just like that, you have a sacred epic within touching distance. You have a director who seems to have reached his destination. And you have a film that reframes the reverence for storytelling as the curiosity for life. After all, “once upon a time” is merely an ending posing as a beginning.