Within the rampageous interstices of the Trojan War, we ought to imagine Odysseus the Cunning beneath the banner of heaven. His gaze is fixed upon the constellations, the salt-laden winds mixed with the pungent countenance of the dead brushing against his face as the primitive silence of the natural world summons a torrent of ambrosial recollections. We ought to imagine him in moments of improbable serenity, moments that briefly loosen the vice-like grip of a mind conditioned by war.

This is not a Homeric mythopoeia or divine compulsion. It is the consequence of anthropocentric myth-making: the humanisation of a Greek hero despite his hubris and hamartia. It is a Nolanism of sorts, a somber paean of a quasi-American hero. One already palpable in his biopic of the father of the atomic bomb, where Oppenheimer stares into a pool of water like a pensive Narcissus, watching the first intimations of a nuclear holocaust ripple before him. His sojourn into the classics with his star studded adaptation of The Odyssey comes as no surprise. His cinematic thesis as a filmmaker has always oriented towards the grand, the event and the engineering of spectacularity. But his rendering of the Homeric tale is merely just that —an engineering. He elides the winsome albeit darkly numinous essence of the Mycenaean period; the copious meddling hands of the gods, the hegemony of the arcane, the moral absolutism that binds both divine caprice and the cruelty of human fate. Nolan, for the most part, has no use for the classical sentiments beyond the veil of accuracy. 

The element that most forcefully asserts itself in this summer’s big epic is the subject of war. This is the only time Nolan permits the amoral metaphysics of the universe to play out. War is a feature of existence, it predates our species, older than the polis. Through Odysseus — as played by Matt Damon — we are offered this Cormac McCarthy-esque rendition of war a lá Blood Meridian. He’s a man with the famed twists and turns. He’s Emily Wilson’s complicated man, a sacker of cities whose adherence to the rules of engagement are situational but he also carries himself with the demeanour of an Operation Desert Storm veteran. But unlike the modernized controversial translation, there’s little to know about the mystique and plurality germane to Odysseus. Nolan transmutes him as merely a soldier en route home, afflicted by the wreckage of a Cadmean victory. One cannot say he set out to make an anti-war picture, for that presupposes an informed understanding of war’s ontology. He does however valorize the archetype of the wounded soldier, a baffled mendicant-king inept at composing soothing ballads to stave off the shell-shock. In doing so, he robs the character of his multidimensionality, and with it, his poetry. 

Any attempt to centre the anthropocentrism of the adaptation is undermined by Nolan’s familiar foibles: over-exposition, frenetic editing, and underwritten characters. His devotion to the uxorious hero remains unwavering. In Nolan’s moral cosmology, the highest virtue available to a man is an unquestioning love for his wife; it is his Zeusian law. Even so, one cannot help but wince at the startling absence of eroticism in The Odyssey. An omission that bears the imprint of the miraculous: assembling an ensemble of beautiful actors for an adaptation of an epic renowned for war, lust, love, longing, death, sex, and monstrous encounters only to render it conspicuously sexless. Something essential is stripped out in this sexless ordeal of good men wailing about war and gods interloping sparingly. Homer’s world is one in which eros and boundless violence spring from the same mythic creek; to attenuate one component is inevitably to diminish the other.

Yet all is not lost in the warring Mediterranean Sea. This is still a triumph for cinema — or whatever is left of the seventh art these days. Audiences are expected to shower the blockbusting saviors of cinema with laudatory attention. There is an almost mandated  annual mollycoddling of the Spielbergs, the Scorceses, the Villeneuves or the Ari Asters (if you are a fiend for the weird and the eerie). But Nolan has done a stellar job at placing a necessary moratorium on inane film discourse about power-scaling and men in spandex. For better or worse, he’s one of the last of a dying breed of filmmakers adept at finding the point of equilibrium between art and commerce. The man is an engineer of events. He brings everyone out of their cocoons; academics, dilettantes, purists, philistines. This film is a culmination of all that he stands for — a one-eyed unifying king in the land of the blind. Our age is greatly darkened by recrudescent fascism and corporatized feudalism but one image-maker repudiates the fall of heroes. It means nothing. It changes nothing. But you do leave The Odyssey, for all its flaws, with the primordial desire to find your true North. What’s more Homeric than that? 

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