Hello, χαίρετε, and welcome to this bonus episode of Epic Greek History. I’m Scott Emmons. 

Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited film “The Odyssey” is finally out. After all the months of online chatter and then the reviews over the last couple of weeks, I don’t know who needs to hear yet another take on it. But since I’m doing a Greek history podcast, I feel almost obligated to contribute something to the conversation. So these are just a few thoughts, quickly thrown together after getting back from the multiplex. One word of warning. I’ll be mentioning a few specific scenes in the movie, so if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to spoil any surprises, you’ll want to hold off listening. 

First off, I thought it was magnificent — as a movie. And that’s an important qualifier. One very gratifying moment for me was when the end credits started to roll and the first thing that appeared was the phrase, “Based on the Odyssey by Homer.” Based on Homer. Nolan and company make no bones about it, this is not an attempt to translate Homer’s Odyssey to the screen. It’s an adaptation. A retelling of the story in a way that works as a modern cinematic experience. 

I’ve never agreed with the old platitude that the book is always better than the movie. Sure, there are plenty of failed attempts to adapt literary works for the screen. But movies and novels are two very different media. Movies and epic poetry even more so. Sometimes a story can be told badly in a book but very well in a film. They’re two distinct art forms, and each should be evaluated on its own merits. The Homeric epics, in my opinion, are masterpieces of narrative poetry. They create their effects through word choice, the sounds of words, rhythm, and narrative structures that are too expansive to be captured in even a three-hour film. Christopher Nolan is not an epic poet. He’s a filmmaker, whose language is primarily visual. As important as dialogue is, he has to tell his story through images, sound, special effects, music, all the elements that combine to make it a compelling film. 

I’ve read quite a few complaints that Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t historically accurate, or quote-unquote “authentic.” And yes, there are plenty of anachronisms — the warriors’ armor and the classical-style statue of Athena to name just a couple. But by making those choices, Nolan isn’t doing anything different from what classical vase painters did when they depicted Homeric heroes in hoplite armor. He uses images that are visually arresting and recognizable to a contemporary audience as ancient Greek. If what you’re really looking for is authenticity, the film should be 16 hours of a rhapsode chanting the story in dactylic hexameters. How many tickets would that sell? 

But what about the story itself? Those who know Homer’s Odyssey well are going to notice major structural changes, a lot of things the film adds, and other things that are missing. I’ve seen a few comments complaining that Nolan left out Odysseus’ famous trick of telling the Cyclops his name is “No one,” so that after he’s been blinded, he cries out to the other Cyclopes, “No one has hurt me!” and they all say, “Okay, then, stop making such a racket.” It’s a folktale element with a kind of humor that works very well in the epic, because Homer’s Odysseus has elements of the classic trickster archetype. But that scene in the movie is so tense and horrifying, I can’t see how Nolan could have included the trick without destroying the effect.

I’ll admit, not all the new material worked for me. I found the constant references to “Zeus’s law” simplistic and overdone. Other dramatic touches are a lot more interesting. In Nolan’s version, Helen’s face has been injured, presumably during the destruction of Troy, so now she’s disfigured. It’s a dramatic reveal when you see it. There’s nothing like it in Homer, but there’s no rule saying a creator can’t take some license with his or her source material. There are no canonical Greek myths. They take different forms in different ancient works. Here’s a perfect example. The Greeks had an alternative version of Helen’s story where she never went to Troy at all. The Helen that Paris took to Troy was a phantom image created by Hera, and the real Helen was spirited away to Egypt for the duration of the war. That version appears in a fragment of the early lyric poet Stesichorus, and we have it fully fleshed out in one of the surviving plays of Euripides. It’s perfectly plausible that a version where Helen’s face was disfigured could have developed in ancient Greece. For that matter, it’s not out of the question that an ancient author could have made Helen look like Lupita Nyong’o. So you can tell where I stand on that controversy.   

A much bigger story change is the depiction of Odysseus as suffering from PTSD, struggling to recover memories of his traumatic adventures and racked with guilt for his part in causing so much death and suffering. This is not Homer’s Odysseus. He’s an Odysseus for a modern audience, an introspective, self-critical character with empathy for those he’s killed or whose lives he’s destroyed. The film takes the theme of destruction a step farther by hinting at the Bronze Age collapse and making the Greeks at Troy one of the Sea Peoples who brought it about. The fall of Troy is the beginning of the end of civilization. The message I get is that civilization is a precarious thing, and our foolish, violent nature can bring it down.  

At this point, we’re a long way from Homer. But again, we shouldn’t be expecting Homer. Nolan’s film is its own thing. The Athenian playwright Aeschylus was quoted as saying his tragedies were slices taken from Homer’s banquet. But that doesn’t mean he served up Homeric entrees as he found them. He did his own slicing and dicing, added his own seasonings, and cooked up something new.  Nolan has taken his slices from Homer and given us a thrilling, visually stunning, suspenseful, compelling, and ultimately quite moving story for our time. Also, some of the performances are outstanding. Robert Pattinson is a deliciously slimy Antinous. And for the rest of my life, my mental image of Eumaeus will be John Leguizamo. In conclusion, if you want a good adventure movie based on Homer, by all means see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. If you want Homer’s Odyssey, you’ll never find it in a movie. Read the original. 

Thanks for listening as I add to the chatter. If you have your own observations about the movie, I’d love to hear them. You can reach me at scott@epicgreekhistory.com or leave a comment on my Facebook or Instagram. As always, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.