The horse! That great military ruse, that glorious deception, that immaculate trick that continues to inspire us even today was, to its originator, nothing but original sin. In a rueful third-act speech, Odysseus laments that the cleverness of his tactics destroyed the natural bonds between people. The people of Troy were trusting and grateful for the gift, and he repaid their civility with death and destruction: He has become death, the destroyer of worlds.
If the sentiment—heck, even some of the exact words—sound familiar, it’s because Nolan has pondered them once before, in Oppenheimer, another film about another clever chap grappling with the aftermath of his destructive ingenuity.
All of this makes for great, modern drama. It also turns Odysseus into a great modern hero, a universal figure whose journey can be adapted and understood by anyone, anywhere, because it is, after all, a sojourn to understand those common creeds that make us all human. But Homer’s Odysseus, hallelujah, was never anything of the sort. He was a very specifically Greek hero, who lived by and fought for highly specific Greek virtues like kleos, or “glory,” and timē, or “honor,” virtues that, for centuries, guided and inspired the rest of Western civilization as well.
But to believe in such virtues, and to sacrifice so much to protect them, we must also believe that they are uniquely ours and that other cultures espouse other values that are sometimes incompatible with our own. We must believe, in short, that at any moment we may be overtaken by invaders who come from afar, from outside our borders, from outside our culture, who desire nothing but our subjugation and destruction, and that resisting them is key to our survival. Nolan’s Greeks spend much time fretting about such invaders—“the people from the sea”—only for his Odysseus to deliver the perfectly postmodern observation that the only real ruinous invader was he himself. If you’re wondering how this noble-sounding insight holds up to reality, pick up any book of ancient Greek history.
Nolan, sadly, picked up a very different book, Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey, a project dedicated entirely to making Homer’s heroes come across as a gang of preening, pathetic poseurs afflicted with terminal toxic masculinity and in dire need of a smart woman to save them all from their superabundance of penis. That’s why the movie speaks in godawful modernese: In Wilson’s translation, for example, a timeless line like “Sing to me of the man, muse, the man of twists and turns” was flattened into “Tell me about a complicated man,” as if one was pleading not to the gods, but to one’s therapist; similarly, in Nolan’s film, Telemachus calls his father “dad.”
It’s a sin worthy of the gods’ ire, if the gods, that is, were anywhere to be found. Nolan banished them all off-screen. Sure, Zendaya has a few charming moments as Athena, but the world unfurling on-screen isn’t Homer’s world, with its pantheon of rageful, resentful, and magnificent deities moving the plot along. It is ours, a disenchanted world, a world in which some bearded zealots may offer a few prayers to some unseen eminence in the sky but that nonetheless rolls along of its own accord, with men, not gods, at the very center of things.
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