Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey had a reported budget of $250 million.  So, it needed to put a lot of bums on seats if its director was going to be trusted with similarly ambitious projects in the future. (If you add in a reported marketing budget of $125 and the cut taken by the cinemas, then the film needed to take between $650 and $725 million just to break even).    Indeed, 15-rated (R-rated) movies have never had this big a budget before because the commercial risks are so high.  The film has made a profit of around $100 million at time of writing.  And it is getting many stellar reviews from professional film critics and paying audiences alike.

We can draw two conclusions from all this.  First, the film was clearly made with an eye on the broadest possible global audience, not a relatively small crowd of Homer-savvy readers, students or classical scholars. Second, much of that broad audience likes what they have seen. They are recommending it to others and they are returning to cinemas to watch it again.

And there is much more at stake here than Chris Nolan’s own future plans or his reputation. The success of the Odyssey movie demonstrates the viability of a certain style of commercial film-making which is now rare.   With its IMAXian scale and spectacle, its non-CGI realism and its preference for shooting internationally and on-location (with local crews, craftspeople and extras), The Odyssey is 2026’s answer to landmark blockbuster epics which pre-date the digital age.   One thinks of Camerini’s Ulysses (1954), Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959),  Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia  (1962), Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Less obviously, Nolan’s epic owes something to pre-digital war films such as Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998).There are good old-fashioned horror-film tropes in this film too.

What the film delivers, and it does so reasonably well in my view, is the sort of collective and shared cultural experience which is increasingly hard to come by in our age of home streaming, digital devices, half-empty pubs and eye-watering ticket prices (for sport, music, festivals and theatre).  Of course, a trip to the cinema is also too expensive for many people these days and that is in itself a scandal for a form of entertainment which was always supposed to be for the masses, and not for the few.   But it is clear that an awful lot of people have somehow found the time and money see The Odyssey. As a result, both the film and the ancient narrative on which it is based are being experienced as stories which nearly everyone can know, interpret and discuss.  It is easy to lose sight of the significance of this amidst all the arguments about the director’s choices, the film’s overall quality and depth or its fidelity to its source text.

In the ancient Greek-speaking world, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey also had this status of being stories which were loved and known by all.  These two poems were often performed before large audiences at religious festivals, for example.  And as soon as these stories were fixed in writing, poets and playwrights started to create new works which offered different ‘takes’ on, and various sequels or prequels to, what we find in the Homeric poems themselves.

An average Greek citizen who’d heard rhapsodes performing The Odyssey at (say) a festival in honour of Athena in the fifth century before the birth of Christ might be a bit surprised to learn that Nolan’s version contains no scenes of the gods bickering on Mount Olympus and that it completely misses out Odysseus’ time spent on the island of the Phaeacians. But because he had also seen parts of the ‘Trojan cycle’ epics reimagined in lyric poems, and in tragic plays or satyr dramas, he would also understand that changes of medium and genre entail changes in content.  Our putative ancient citizen would  also be pleased to discover that the film has been true to the original poem’s capacity to hold a crowd and to establish itself, both as a piece of shared culture and as a universal reference point.  God knows, and the Greeks knew, that we need some shared stories, experienced collectively, if we are to prevent our communities from disintegrating completely.

This is not to deny that Nolan’s project has its problems.  Some poor ethical and political decisions were clearly made during the film’s production process.  And the final product is undoubtedly flawed from the perspective of many classicists (including myself) and other readers who know Homer’s Odyssey inside out.  It is also the latest in a series of Nolan films which centre on male preoccupations while leaving its female characters underdeveloped and somewhat sidelined.  This is particularly regrettable given that Homer’s original poem lends a great deal of agency and complexity to the story’s extensive cast of women and goddesses.  The film also contains some telling omissions and areas of emphasis in relation to the depiction of violence and peace in Homer’s original.  I explore these in a separate post.  

However, when it comes to commercial cinema, we should always remember that such shortcomings often say as much about failings or blind spots within the culture and values of its target audiences as they do about the individual film director who is aiming to entertain them.

It is also worth remembering that even Homer had his critics. In Plato’s Republic, for example, the philosopher Socrates argues that Homer’s poems represent the gods and heroes falsely, and in a way that promotes impiety and bad behaviour.  That didn’t stop people from reading, performing and enjoying Homer then and Nolan’s film is ultimately to be praised for fostering more and wider enjoyment of the Iliad  and Odyssey now.

Many classicists have pointed out that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey lends Matt Damon’s Odysseus a level of war guilt and post-traumatic stress which is just not there in Homer.  In this regard, Nolan has given us a very twenty-first century inflection of this Greek hero.  This is largely true.   But it isn’t completely right to say that there are no hints of this supposedly modernizing characterization in the original text at all.  A brief episode in Book 8 of the poem has the disguised hero weeping as he hears a bard sing about the ruse of the wooden horse (which Odysseus himself conceived and led) and of the dreadfully violent sack of Troy which this ruse precipitates. Homer describes the hero’s distress as follows:

Odysseus was melting into tears;

his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman

weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around

her husband, fallen fighting for his home

and children.  She is watching as he gasps

and dies.  She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing

upon his corpse. The men are right behind.

They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead

her to slavery, hard labour, and a life

of pain. Her face is marked with her despair.

In that same desperate way, Odysseus was crying.   (Odyssey 8.521-531, trans. Wilson).

As Elton Barker (a classics professor) puts it, ‘Homer shows Odysseus weeping as if he were one of his own victims.’  In Nolan’s film, we do not have this specific episode, but it clearly informs the entire film’s construal of Odysseus.  At one point, when Damon’s Odysseus has returned to Ithaca in the disguise of a beggarly veteran of the Trojan war, he remarks to his wife Penelope that he cannot hear bardic songs of the war without weeping.

So, while some may have issues with the extent to which Nolan has expanded upon Book 8’s hints of trauma and guilt, it is only fair to acknowledge that this ‘take’ on Odysseus does have some basis in the film’s ancient source text.  This speaks to a more general principle of interpretation which has stuck with me since I was taught it back in the Bronze Age (aka the early 1990s): always question your own and others’ assumptions about differences between ancient texts and values and modern ones.  Sometimes things are less clear-cut: we find aspects of the ancient in the modern and vice versa.

Other important considerations when discussing a modern retelling of an ancient text include the genre and target audience of that retelling.  And what are the material, cultural and economic conditions which shape that retelling?  In another post, I explore these issues a little and I conclude that the failings and blind spots of a mass-cultural product like Nolan’s Odyssey say more about the priorities and values of our own wider culture than they do about any individual director’s vision.

For the rest of this post, I want to explore one particular problem with our value system which is revealed by the film’s treatment of its source.  This is a problem to do with a certain type of violence and a particular vision of peace.   And, as far as I know, it hasn’t yet been discussed in the way it needs to be.

Let’s start with the violence.  I have already mentioned a dominant view of the film, namely that it turns Homer’s Odysseus into a modern soldier who is racked with guilt and trauma in response to the wartime ultra-violence which he has authored, enabled, witnessed and participated in.  This is Odysseus as Robert Oppenheimer – the inventor of the atom bomb and the subject of Nolan’s previous film – or as the traumatized and guilt-laden military veteran whom we may have met in person or whom we know from films, books and documentaries about conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  An attentive viewer of the film will even discover that the goddess Athena (played by Zendaya) who constantly watches over him is actually appearing in the guise of a defenceless young Trojan woman whom Odysseus has seen decapitated as the Greeks sack the city.  Elton Barker articulates the ambiguities, implications and impact of this aspect of the film very well:

‘With just this one death, Nolan brings out the horror of the sack, its genocidal impulse. This is how war ends. And it haunts Odysseus. This girl is his Athena. Whether Athena takes on the face of the slaughtered Trojan, or whether Odysseus projects her face on to the god’s to “see” Athena, or whether Athena herself is simply part of Odysseus’s imagination — as though Athena represents his reason or conscience, an allegorical reading which is already present in antiquity — it’s impossible to say. But it’s deeply moving and one I hadn’t expected.’

However, the now-archetypal narrative of haunting, guilt and trauma wherein the military scientist or soldier is also himself a kind of victim threatens to overwhelm and displace a correlated but different story which also exists within the modern experience of war.  This is the darker, more hidden tale of soldiers who, despite their elite training and apparent codes of honour and discipline, act as calculating, psychopathic perpetrators of atrocities and war crimes against unarmed civilians or against disarmed enemy combatants who have been wounded and/or captured.  These things happen in every war and they have been proven or alleged to have occurred during recent and ongoing conflicts globally.

Just a couple of examples which are close to home: evidence from whistleblowers with respect to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan alleges that members of UK special forces may have been responsible for as many as 80 unlawful executions.  And the 2020 Brereton inquiry found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by (or at the instruction of) members of Australia’s special forces which were subsequently covered up.  This inquiry reported that junior soldiers were sometimes required by their superiors to murder prisoners to get their first kill, a practice known as ‘blooding’.

We like to think of atrocities and war crimes such as these as aberrations.  Yes, they happen, but ‘our’ soldiers commit them less than the ‘other side’.  Central to this thinking are the narrative and associated values of heroic and honourable service, of discipline, bravery and self-sacrifice.  Guilt and trauma can also be part of this narrative: soldiers have to do, see and suffer horrible things; mistakes get made in the ‘fog of war’; combatants suffer inadequate support or treatment when they return to peaceful society.  But the war criminals don’t belong in the same narrative.  They are the few ‘rotten apples’ who need to be removed from it.  We do not face up to the real story of war which always contains appalling episodes of atrocity as well as those of great heroism and bravery.

Homer’s Odyssey arguably does face up to this real story.   Book 22 of the poem tells of an Odysseus who is largely unmerciful and indiscriminate with the vengeful violence he metes out to his enemies on Ithaca.   With his bow and arrows safely acquired, he doffs his beggar’s disguise and shoots Antinous through the neck just as he is about to drink from his goblet of wine.  Homer’s ancient audience surely wasn’t meant to feel much pity here. Antinous is the ringleader of the suitors who have both preyed upon Odysseus’ palace and pressured his wife Penelope towards remarriage in his long absence.  He has also plotted (unsuccessfully) to kill Odysseus’ son Telemachus in an ambush.  Once the suitors hear that Odysseus intends to kill them all if he can, the bravest among them draw their swords in an effort to fight back.   A battle ensues.

The suitors are aided and abetted by Melanthius, an Ithacan goatherd who had sided with them against his master; he gains access to the weapons and armour which Odysseus and his son Telemachus had removed from the hall in preparation for this confrontation.  But Telemachus has also managed to retrieve weapons and armour.  He and Odysseus are joined on their side by two loyal slaves, the herdsmen Eumaeus and Philoetius.  These two prove to be deadly with a spear.  The goddess Athena also lends a hand by diverting the course of incoming spears from the suitors.

Odysseus and his three-man kill team end the lives of all 108 suitors between them.  The old slave woman Eurycleia later recounts to Penelope that their bodies ‘lay on top of one another, sprawled across the solid floor’ (23.46-47).  Odysseus himself is left covered in the suitors’ blood and gore.

During and after this ferocious massacre there are three instances of what most readers would regard as war crimes, atrocities or unjustified killings by the lights of modern values. I’ll deal with these in ascending order of horridness.

First, we have one of the nicer, less hubristic suitors – a priest named Leodes.  He begs for mercy from Odysseus via a ritual act known as supplication. He says that he tried to stop the others from abusing the women of the palace.  Odysseus hears him out but then replies that Leodes must have prayed many times for Odysseus to not come home.  He decapitates the priest on the spot.

Secondly, we have the disloyal herdsman Melanthius.  Alongside his acts of disloyalty, he had mocked and physically abused the disguised and beggarly Odysseus.  While the fighting is in full swing, Odysseus explicitly orders Eumaeus and Philoetius to apprehend Melanthius and gives them precise details for how he is to be tortured. They catch him and truss him up so that his hands and feet are bound painfully behind his back.  They then hoist his body into the roof rafters.  Once the battle is over, Telemachus and the two slaves take him outside and proceed to chop off his nose, ears and genitals. ‘Still full of rage’, we are told, they then hack off his hands and feet (22.477).

Finally, and most shockingly, we have twelve young slave women of the palace who have slept with the suitors and done their bidding.  Odysseus instructs his son to ensure that these girls first remove the bodies of the suitors from the hall and then wash the blood and gore from the chairs and tables. Once they have completed these grim tasks, Telemachus is to put them to death with his sword.

The girls are brought into the hall.  They are huddled together as they cry and weep.  After they have been forced to remove the suitors’ bodies and they have washed down the furniture, Telemachus and the two herdsmen lead them outdoors into a narrow passageway between an outbuilding and the palace’s courtyard wall.   But instead of butchering the girls with his sword as instructed, Telemachus rigs up a ship’s cable between the outbuilding and a pillar and  then hangs them from it.  He declares that he wants to deprive them of a ‘clean death’ with a blade because ‘they poured down shame on me and my mother, when they lay beside the suitors’ (22.462-4).  Homer’s description of the girls as they die is unbearably vivid and full of pathos:

As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly

home to their nests, but someone sets a trap –

they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;

just so the girls, their heads all in a row,

were strung up with the noose around their necks

to make their death an agony. They gasped,

feet twitching for a while, but not for long.  (Odyssey 22.466-472. Trans. Wilson)

The narrator’s description here invites us to notice a tension between his viewpoint and that of ‘team Odysseus’.  On the one hand, we have a furious impulse to visit vengeance on the suitors and those of household who have been disloyal – even those young slave women who presumably had little choice in the matter.  On the other hand, we have a very clear and disturbing image of what such acts of revenge entail.  These young women are likened to innocent and delicate creatures who have been ensnared.  They are dying in agony.

Now, to an extent, Nolan’s film acknowledges the atrocities of war and it does so in a number of ways which I won’t labour here. Part of the point of its modernized ‘guilt and trauma’ narrative is to stage such an acknowledgement.  Nolan also recognizes something else important which is suggested in Homer’s text, namely that the killing of the suitors is an excessive punishment and that their relatives within the wider Ithacan community will seek redress for it.  Nolan highlights and resolves this issue by having Odysseus go into self-imposed exile with his wife while Telemachus inherits the kingship from him.  In Homer, things play out very differently indeed, as we will soon see.

But if you have seen the film, you will already know that Nolan somewhat sanitizes the killing of the suitors.  Some of them kneel in submission during the final battle scene and appear to be spared.  And while there is a hint that the treacherous young slave woman Melantho will come to a bad end, there is nothing remotely comparable to the three episodes of atrocity in Homer’s original which I have just highlighted.

What are we to make of this sanitized treatment of the original?  Well, I think it is unfair to expect Nolan to include these horrendous acts of torture, mutilation and execution of prisoners and non-combatants in a very expensive multiplex blockbuster.  To be sure, the film is 15-rated (R-rated).  But mainstream globalized culture of the twenty-first century cannot really cope with a heroic protagonist and his son defeating the baddies but committing horrific war crimes in the process.  That is especially true when those atrocities are perpetrated against a priest and defenceless slaves within his own household.   Even if Nolan had wanted to include these episodes, there was no way that Universal Pictures were going to let him.

However, this difference between what is in the Homeric source and what it is possible to represent of, and say about, warfare and heroism in a commercial mass-market film needs to be interrogated further.

For a start, I think it shows us that all the talk about The Odyssey being the archetypal story which we always return to is overly simplistic.  For the truth is that our retellings never fully return to the shape, tone and texture of the archetype.  Thus, in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, atrocity and excessive, violent vengeance are integral to the heroic warrior’s impulse and actions.  For sure, that propensity for ultra-violence and atrocity is sometimes framed as problematic by other characters or by the shape of the narrative itself.  And the gods occasionally deflect or put a stop to such excesses.  But at other times they positively encourage and facilitate them.  For example, the Homeric Athena helps Odysseus to kill the suitors and Zeus acts to ensure that his acts of retribution and atrocity have no bad consequences for the hero or his family.

This means that Homeric atrocities and excessive acts of violent reprisal are neither sidelined nor separated out in the manner of modern framings of war and its aftermath.   In Homer we find very little of the modern drive to depict, narrate and consume warfare and soldiery in terms of what we think they ought to be like, rather than in terms of the messier, darker and more troubling realities which always emerge via inquiries and prosecutions. Because it is an adaptation of Homer which has to operate within our realm of mainstream modern understandings, Nolan’s film discloses what that realm chooses to cover up or gloss over.  But it only does so when we go back to Homer and consider these ancient poems’ rather different view of war and what comes after it.

Nolan’s film is equally revealing about modern understandings of peace.  In Homer’s poem, Odysseus does not get home via the raft which he builds on Calypso’s island. (A direct journey from that island to Ithaca is strongly implied by the film, although some clever editing from Nolan leaves room for Homer-savvy viewers to insert the missing narrative for themselves).  Instead, he loses the raft in a Poseidon-sent storm and washes up on the island of Phaeacia (sometimes called Scheria).  He spends three days receiving hospitality from the Phaeacians and in return he tells them the engaging story of his adventures and encounters and how he lost all his men and ships in the process.  Across four books of the twenty-four-book poem, both the Phaeacians and we the audience get to hear about the Cicones, the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, the land of the Dead, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Cattle of Sun debacle, and Calypso.

But there are a further three-and-a-bit books where we learn about the Phaeacians and their unique society.  It is a society which constitutes a bridge between the human world and the realm of the gods.  For while the island they inhabit is remote and far from the world of other humans, we learn that the Phaeacians are descended from Poseidon and remain close to the divine.  Their king, Alcinous, even reveals that the gods attend their feasts openly, without using human disguises (7.200-206). There is something of a ‘golden age’ utopia about how and where the Phaeacians live. For example, their orchard, vineyard and olive groves produce fruit all year round (7.113-127).  And their queen and Alcinous’ wife, Arete, holds considerable political power and influence (7.68-77). This is not a straightforward patriarchy where a male king calls all the shots.

Most importantly, Phaeacians are a peace-loving people rather than a race of warriors.  We are told that their ancestors moved to remote Scheria from the land of Hyperia to escape constant raids by their overbearing neighbours, the Cyclopes.  The isolation of Scheria seems to protect them from warfare and invasions.  As Nausicaa, the young princess who first encounters the naked, shipwrecked Greek hero, explains to him, the Phaeacians ‘do not care for archery; their passion is for sails and oars and ship’ (6.270).  Indeed, the Phaeacians are extraordinarily skilled sailors and that skill is augmented by supernatural seafaring powers: their sentient ships have no pilots or rudders and navigate by reading the thoughts of the crew; Phaeacian vessels never suffer damage or shipwreck; they also have unmatched speed.

To their own cost, it is the Phaeacians’ capability as sailors, along with their generosity as hosts, which ensure that Odysseus gets back to Ithaca. Even before he knows the hero’s identity, Alcinous orders his subjects to equip a ship to take him home.  And while Odysseus’ time on their island is not entirely free of tension, jeopardy and conflict, the overall impression of Phaeacian life and society which Homer leaves us with is that it is very peaceful and harmonious. This is a land of abundance, and of time spent in feasting, dancing and sports.

Nolan completely cuts out Odysseus’ visit to this peaceable, utopian society.  And it made sense for him to do so given his focus on Odysseus’ experience as a warrior and leader, and the need to be selective when condensing a twelve-thousand-line poem into a three-hour action movie. The omission of Phaeacia also fits with a film whose opening title card reads ‘in a time of apparent magic’.  The sceptical, ambiguating approach towards religion and the divine which this phrase heralds, is key to understanding the film’s rationalizing response to the ancient poem. But the excision of the peaceful Phaeacians also means that the film is a militarizing response.  In contrast to the ancient poem, it contains no vision of a society which lives peacefully and which has no desire for armed conflict or conquest.

I think this says a lot about where we mainstream cinemagoers are at, politically and culturally speaking.  Fighting is fun; peace and harmony are a yawn.  And while the film genres of science fiction and fantasy certainly do sometimes depict utopian societies without pain or conflict, these visions are usually undercut by more sinister goings-on or prices paid: everyone’s minds are being controlled or they’re pacified with drugs; perhaps everything is lovely until you reach a certain age and you get bumped off for the greater good; maybe the peaceful utopia can only exist for a chosen few or on the back of terrible conflict which is taking place elsewhere.

Somehow, I think we have lost the idea that human communities which are free of war and conflict might be both possible and interesting to imagine or explore in their own right.

The ending of Nolan’s film is also coy about peace, or rather, about peace-making, when we compare it to the ending of the Homeric original.  In Homer, a civil war breaks out on Ithaca as the community divides between Odysseus and his supporters on one side and the relatives of the suitors who want revenge for their slaughter on the other.  The first man to die in this war is Eupeithes, the father of Antinous.  Zeus and Athena quickly agree that further bloodshed is not acceptable.  Odysseus is to become king again and the relatives of the suitors are to forget what he has done to their brothers and sons.   Peace and friendship must return to Ithaca.  With some difficulty, Athena persuades Odysseus to cease his bloody pursuit of the Ithacans who have taken up arms against him.  Had she not intervened, we are told, Odysseus and his son would have killed them all.  The poem ends with the goddess brokering an enduring peace agreement between the two warring sides.

As we have already seen, Nolan’s film avoids this complicated ending altogether.  Damon’s Odysseus does the work of Homer’s aggrieved relatives by punishing himself with exile before a civil war can break out.  The community accepts Telemachus as his heir and we are left with the hope (voiced by Anne Hathaway’s Penelope) that ‘civilization will rise again’.  This is a nice and neat ending in terms of the film’s construal of the Trojan war and its aftermath for Odysseus as forms of moral corruption and whole-societal collapse. But once again, the change from Homer’s ending is rather telling.  For it reveals what we don’t want to think about or face up to when we watch our stories of war and revenge.  The truth – as found in Homer – is that violent conflicts motivated by cycles of grievance and vengeance rarely end of their own accord.  More usually, a third-party authority has to act as an honest broker or else use the threat of superior force to bring about ceasefires and peace agreements which will last.  Sometimes, as is the case with Athena’s role at the end of the Odyssey, the third party is needed to prevent one side from completely annihilating the other side.

What can we conclude from this discussion of the ways in which Nolan’s film sidelines or changes certain aspects of the depiction of violence and peace in Homer’s original? Well, first and foremost, I’d suggest that we need to expect less of Christopher Nolan and other directors and more of ourselves if we want mainstream cinema to offer a more authentic and challenging treatment of violence and peace in its storytelling.  Secondly, I hope to have shown something of the value of returning to Homer’s poems. They offer us a means of isolating the ways in which modern storytelling about war, violence, peace and peace-making often delivers what is comfortable for us to watch and hear and rarely delivers what is harder to face but much more true.

As my excellent St Andrews colleague Professor Alice König points out in her published research and through various elements of her Visualizing War and Peace project, ‘war stories are world-shaping’. That is to say: the way that war is narrated may reflect reality to a certain extent. But those narratives also shape reality by creating certain expectations and values in us to do with armed conflict and its aftermath. The same goes for the stories we tell about peace: how possible it is to broker or maintain; how we lose it or get it back.  And just as these stories about war and peace influence how we think, feel and behave, so it is that those thoughts, feelings and beliefs in turn shape the decisions of our future storytellers.  That is why discussion of Chris Nolan’s Odyssey should not just about the director’s choices or what’s in Homer. It must also be about what we think and believe and what might be wrong with that.