“I would be ashamed to have written even part of the script,” Emily Wilson wrote a few days after Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” was released. Most of the elements that made the epic meaningful were missing from the film: "The narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing style of the script is poor. None of the characters have a convincing motivation for their actions or words."
The British-American classical philologist's general reckoning soon caused such a stir that the website of the "London Review of Books" collapsed for a short time. On social media, users were divided into a pro-Wilson and pro-Nolan camp. Excerpts from Homer translations were presented for or against their argument. Wilson herself followed up with an essay in “Atlantic” in which she sought to demonstrate numerous contradictions in the film.
Sparking such controversy is somewhat unusual for a Hollywood blockbuster. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “Toy Story 5,” with which “Odyssey” is currently competing for the title of the most successful film of the year, have certainly not provoked comparable interventions by respected scientists.
Of course, not every one of the more than two million viewers in Germany alone will have gone to the cinema in order to then compare the director's decisions with the ancient Greek original. Some may have been attracted by the star cast, others by the IMAX technology or the hope of skillfully staged splatter. However, it was no different in antiquity: while scholars argued about the morality of the Homeric gods or tried to cleanse the text of false additions, the masses presumably enjoyed the many battle scenes during public recitations or drinking parties.
So it's not that you can see Nolan's "Odyssey" as an action film that's special. What makes it a classic now is that beneath all the blood and sweat you can look for a deeper layer and, in the eyes of many, recognize it: a serious examination of one of humanity's oldest epics. But what constitutes this dispute? And why does Nolan's new interpretation possibly hit a nerve, even though or precisely because it deviates from the original in crucial areas?
Over the centuries, Odysseus has fascinated people as a cunning survival artist. The Odyssey literally stands for a wandering, but this almost always means a wandering with a happy ending. Because the “versatile man”, as Odysseus is called in Homer in the first verse, defies the elements as well as the gods and finds solutions even in the most hopeless situations. For Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, he was the “archetype of the bourgeois individual,” a prototype of the Enlightenment who specifically used his superior practical reason for his own purposes.
There is little left of this cunning and skilful Odysseus in Nolan. His most famous idea does not appear in the film at all: Homeric Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops Polyphemus as “Nobody,” so that his friends, who have been called to help him, leave again when they find out that “Nobody” has injured Polyphemus. In Nolan's case, Odysseus instead misses the opportunity to negotiate with the giant because he mistakenly assumes that he cannot speak anyway, and as he retreats he endangers his team by provoking him with an unnecessary arrow shot.
In general, Odysseus in the film - despite all his honest efforts - repeatedly makes the wrong decisions, especially where he wants to demonstrate autonomy. After leaving Troy, he orders his teams not to take the quickest and most direct route to Greece like Agamemnon: they have already followed the king long enough and would rather see something more of the world.
Unlike Homer, where gods and winds are the drivers, Nolan's Odysseus is primarily responsible for his wanderings. And he doesn't get home from Calypso's island by knowing how to build a seaworthy raft with oars and sails within four days, but by drifting across the sea on a few boards: "To live, you have to be able to let go," the nymph advises him. That sounds more like Zen than sapere aude.
Some antiquarians have taken exception to this depiction of Odysseus. In Nolan's case, the cunning hero has become a "goody two-shoes", a moral apostle who only tricks and cheats when absolutely necessary, said the ancient historian Mary Beard in her podcast "Instant Classic" (which was dedicated to the film in three episodes). In her fundamental criticism quoted at the beginning, Emily Wilson said that Nolan's Odysseus was a "klum" who lacked all the qualities that characterized him in Homer. Others miss sex and humor: Odysseus doesn't crack a single joke in the entire film.
However, especially from Wilson's mouth, the criticism must be surprising. Because it was the philologist from the University of Pennsylvania herself who caused controversy in 2017 with a modernist English new translation of the “Odyssey”. In her introduction she called Odysseus “a soldier with a traumatic past,” and she turned the “versatile” man in the famous first verse into a “complicated” man.
This wasn't necessarily extraneous to the text: the Greek adjective polytropos means that someone has many "ways" in whatever form. At the same time, the strong psychological connotation of “complicated” already contains the internalization of Odysseus' convolutions that Nolan, who liked to refer to Wilson's translation, now thinks through in his film.
Because Odysseus in the film is not an agile problem solver, but that doesn't make him any less complex. It is the guilty conscience, one could even say, a trauma, that bothers him. He carries with him a threefold sense of guilt: towards the young Sinon, whom he allowed to die for his feint at Troy (which is taken from Virgil, not Homer); to his companions, whom he too often put in danger and sometimes could not even bury; towards the Trojans, whose trust in higher laws he violated with the false gift of a horse. The latter offense in particular proves to be fatal, leading to the collapse of order and, as we learn at the end, ultimately to the downfall of civilization. In the collective memory, the Trojan Horse establishes Odysseus's fame - for Nolan it becomes a symbol of the transformation of technology into barbarism.
Odysseus does not then become a despondent pacifist. As always, he routinely kills anything that poses a threat to him. But he knows his responsibility, the cost of his actions, and that robs him of any sense of triumph. “I see the consequences of my failure everywhere,” he says to Athena at one point. Even at the destination of his journey, in the arms of his wife Penelope, he mourns his mistakes.
Within the narrow confines of Hollywood cinema, could there be a more complicated hero than this? Wilson actually recognized this when she explained in an interview that Nolan's Odysseus was an action hero who didn't want to be an action hero. Nolan retains the many “ways and manners” of Homer’s Odysseus, only he replaces the external cunning with an internal turmoil.
But that is precisely why he belongs to our time. Because we have long had doubts about the ability to control the world. While the “Odyssey” is playing in the cinemas, summer outside is out of control and the rule-based order is hardly a chimera anymore. Like Nolan's complicated hero, we are plagued by the feeling that we are somehow responsible. Like him, we struggle through and yet we know that no amount of sophisticated air conditioning or a well-equipped Bundeswehr will save us from chaos and evil in the long term. Like him, we experience a loss of control due to our own failure. This Odysseus is us.
