.jpeg)
There is a primal quality to this most ancient of tales. It speaks to a deep seated fear of the ancient traveler, that these things you have, your wife, your family, your property, your place in the community, can be taken away by usurpers behind your back as soon as you are far enough away to be unable to defend them. What makes men respect the possessions of a man called to war across the sea, where fate and/or chance can delay or prevent his return. Well, there is this most well known and oft-told story of a hero of the Trojan War, one Odysseus, King of Ithaca, who was lost for almost ten years after the Fall of Troy (gone from home home twenty years in total), but did indeed come back, stronger than ever, and with vengeance for all those who sought to take advantage of his absence.
The Odyssey is a long convoluted tale with a lot of different set pieces. I believe it would be exceedingly difficult to parse this ancient material, honor those elements that are famous, and keep a core through-line. Christopher Nolan’s masterful adaptation not only does this, but adds material that enhances and develops his themes, making the movie version of the story, in important ways, superior to the original text. This movie is not only easier to follow, it means more, because it knows better what the story is about than the original text (or it is at least clearer what Nolan wants the story to mean).
Everyone knows the various encounters that disrupt Odysseus’s return home, the island of the cyclops, the sirens, Charbydis and Scylla. In many tellings, these well-known set pieces overwhelm the scenes at home because, in Ithaca, there is no action, just subtle political intrigue. The strength of this movie comes from Nolan’s focus on first establishing the Ithaca subplot, developing it in an important and dramatic scene in the center of the movie (in the Land of the Dead), and then paying those scenes off in the climatic ending.
How Nolan does this is entirely his addition to the story. He adds two characters not in the original text. In the beginning they are teenage boys, subject to the Ithaca draft for the Trojan War. One, Antinious, draws the short straw, but since he is the only son of his family, Odysseus (Matt Damon) allows another boy, Sinon, to take his place. Antinious promises to Sinon to take care of his family while he is gone.
At the end of the Trojan War, Antinious (Robert Pattinson), we learn, has broken his vow to Sinon and not taken care of his family. Indeed, we find him squatting with a bunch of other suitors in the home of Odysseus, putting pressure on his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) to choose another husband. The situation is fraught with danger. Penelope intuits, I think correctly, that any man she chooses to be her husband would eventually see her son (Tom Holland) as a political threat and kill him. And she can’t just crown her son the king, because, not being of age, he again, would be a target for assassination. The best thing she can do is what she does here, proclaim her confidence in her lost husband’s survival and stall for time. Realistically, she can only do this until her son comes of age. Then her son will have to claim the throne and all hell will break loose.
Sinon (Elliot Page) dies at the beginning of the movie (i.e. the end of the Trojan War), but comes back onto the screen at the midway point in the Land of the Dead to warn Odysseus of the dangers at home. He speaks of Antinious' pledge to support his father and how, when he showed up in the Land of the Dead, his father was the first to greet him. Sinon provides Odysseus a token that Antinious will recognize as the promises he didn’t keep. This exchange is paid off handsomely in the final scenes. Again, there is nothing in the book that provides the character arcs of these two added figures. In the text, Odysseus doesn’t know any of the suitors by name. Nolan added Sinon and Antinious and they do much to hold together the frame of the movie while Odysseus goes on his many journeys between the flagposts.
It is also a testament to Nolan that he puts much effort into strengthening the weaker segments of the journey, as opposed to omitting them entirely or gliding over them, so that all scenes have their merit (a good idea in a 3-hour movie). A particularly good example is Odysseus' encounter with the land of the giant cannibals. The text is unsatisfying. Odysseus loses the majority of his men, and all of his ships but one, in the space of a few pages against a foe with no special characteristics. In the movie, these beings have been transformed into truly terrifying armor-plated giants that have mystifying control over the forest they dwell in. They look so cool, that this usually forgotten part of the story is being used for the movie poster. The scene is also a good example of Nolan’s use of practical effects as opposed to digital trickery. (It involves casting 7 foot tall actors as the giants, and using a 4 ft 11 inch stunt double for Matt Damon. An old Hollywood trick)
The world of 1000 B.C. was an unforgiving place, and within that unforgiving place was an even more unforgiving element, sea travel. One could see a person off on a sea voyage and not only have no idea if they would ever come back, but really have no idea of what actually befell them when or where. Once the boat passed the horizon literally anything could have happened to them. On the open sea/ocean, there are no witnesses. It is no surprise that in Shakespeare there is a consistent trope of shipwrecks and miraculous survivals. Since there was no way to tell if someone died in a shipwreck, there always existed some hope that they could come back someday. This primal hope of the return is as deep-seated as the fear of the traveller mentioned above.
The solution to this anxiety is to instill in society a “Golden Rule” culture, which extends hospitality to strangers. In turn, those strangers are to respect the house and possessions of those extending the hospitality. In The Odyssey, this is known as “Zeus’s Law” and it is mentioned frequently in the movie. Nolan adds one more thing that the writers of the Odyssey could not have possibly known. The story was born in a period of darkness, between the collapse of the Golden Age of Egypt and the Near East (of which Troy was a principal city) around 1100 B.C. and the revitalization of Ancient Greece, circa 600 B.C. One of the cited causes of this first dark age were invasions by “Sea Peoples”. (This phrase comes from contemporaneous Egyptian Heiroglyphs). Nolan makes a connection that the original Trojan Horse is a violation of Zeus’ law since it takes advantage of hospitality, and also makes a connection that the sack of Troy is an invasion by “Sea Peoples”. This is not ahistorical per se (the Mycenaeans did invade by ship) but it would certainly be a surprise to the Mycenaeans to be described as such. Nor would anyone in Ancient Greece conclude that the Trojan Horse was a harbinger and/or the cause of the dark times to come. Instead, they celebrated Odysseus’ cunning. Again, this is an addition by Nolan, but it is not unwelcome. Really the most satisfying element in this movie is Nolan’s ability to meld modern morals onto this ancient tale and still keep and earn its climatic ending, that most primal of cautionary tales. I bet this tale lasts another 1000 years.
