In “The Odyssey,” the latest summer blockbuster from filmmaker Christopher Nolan, two of the best scenes have nothing to do with Homer’s Greek epic of the same name.
Instead, they pull from Homer’s other classical poem, “The Iliad,” and the bloody story of the Trojan War.
We’ve all heard of the Trojan Horse. But have you ever wondered what it was like to be a soldier hidden inside the horse, with Odysseus, the great king of Ithaca, as he waits to be brought inside the fortified city walls? How would you breathe? What would you eat? Was there a toilet?
“The Odyssey” answers, in brutal detail, each of those questions. It was a thankless assignment – almost more thankless than the lone soldier left outside the trick horse – and Odysseus, to his credit, was right there in the s*** with his soldiers. It explains why they would (almost) follow him to the ends of the earth. There is nothing he asked of them that he himself wouldn’t do.
Like its source material, Nolan’s film is an epic tale of men, monsters, duty and sacrifice, and his screenplay rarely strays from the story as it was first shared 3,000 years ago. It is beautifully shot and staged, as expected, and told in grand declarations about the gods, fate and family. At nearly three hours it is also butt-numbingly long. You literally feel the pain of those soldiers stuffed like fleshy marbles inside the horse.
Matt Damon, looking jacked and yet haggard as the lost king Odyssesus, leads an army of big-name actors. There is Tom Holland as his son, Telemachus, lost and lean without the commanding authority of his father. There is Anne Hathaway as his queen, Penelope, sad and withdrawn as hordes of suitors, led by a slimy Robert Pattinson as Antinous, eat, drink and fight on her dime. There is Zendaya as both a doomed Trojan woman and the goddess Athena.
Charlize Theron plays Calypso, the most enigmatic of Homer’s women, and a nearly unrecognizable John Leguizamo plays Eumaeus, the pig farmer and slave reminded often that he is nothing more than that, despite his deep ties to the royal family. To see him kicked and beaten by the graceless suitors reminds you how far this grand kingdom has fallen. Ithaca, like all grand kingdoms, is no better than its people.
“The Odyssey” leads us faithfully through every tragic misstep on the king’s long journey back to Ithaca, from the Cyclops in his cave, to the animals of Circe’s Island, to the undead soldiers of Hades. On every new beach and island, we are reminded that men are fallible and greedy creatures, running and killing and pillaging in hordes, while women are solitary and often vengeful creatures not to be trusted, unless of course they are a queen waiting 20 years for her king.
Nolan tries, here and there, to bring nuance to these Characters (with a capital C), but he is more concerned with staying faithful to the source material. That isn’t a dig, except to say that the source material has always been about Mankind, not individual people, and each tragic vignette is better at telling than showing.
In this odyssey, Calypso’s magical lotus flower is a thin yet powerful metaphor for depression and addiction, while Circe’s horrific magic reminds us how men are slaves to their appetites. “Too much is never enough,” she observes.
So much of this story is told in grand observations. You find yourself waiting for the next one between lines of rote dialogue, mostly from Holland’s prince, about what is happening and who’s going where. Naturally, the grandest observations come from Odysseus, giving us verbal tattoos like:
- “The gods help those who help themselves,” in a moment of doubt
- “The power of the sacrifice is in the cost to the person making it,” in a moment of pain
It is poetic, then, that Odysseus is struck silent during the second grand moment borrowed from “The Iliad,” when his men have set fire to Troy. The battle itself is spread across the entire film, but that final image, of the king watching in awestruck pain from the steps of a burning city, is Nolan’s most powerful. It confirms the director’s interpretation of the Odyssey, and why one of our greatest living directors felt compelled to tell these old stories yet again.