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The Odyssey is a smash hit with critics and on course to make over $1 billion at the global box office, but some have questioned changes made by Nolan for his adaptation of Homer’s epic poem.
Warning! Spoilers for The Odyssey follow:
For example, Greek translator Emily Wilson, who is behind the 2017 translation of The Odyssey that Nolan reportedly credited with inspiring his take on the poem, has questioned the absence of the gods Zeus and Poseidon in the movie, and called the film’s anti-war and anti-cowardice message “incoherent.” She was also critical of Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, saying the role was so reduced it endangered “any possibility of believing in this marriage.” Neither did she like the scenes with Odysseus’ dog, Argos, which she said “catered towards modern sentimentality.” Overall, Wilson said she thought Nolan “was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.”
In an interview with Time Magazine, Nolan explained some of his changes around Helen of Troy, Athena, and his new ending — although he still left much to audience interpretation.
For a start, Nolan wouldn’t confirm that Athena — played by Zendaya — is actually the god Athena, as she is in the poem, or a manifestation of Odysseus’ guilt over the Trojan war. Referencing how he learnt his lesson from explaining Memento, Nolan refused to define the experience. But he did talk generally about his take on The Odyssey and the question of whether the gods exist in his adaptation, insisting that “we view the gods the way that people at the time might have viewed them. So they’re seeing evidence of the gods in nature. They’re seeking and finding gods and the influence of gods in the people around them.”
One of the big changes Nolan makes is to Helen of Troy, played by Lupita Nyong’o, with the suggestion that Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) deliberately scarred Helen’s face upon her return to Sparta. In Greek mythology, Menelaus forgives Helen. In Nolan’s adaptation, Menelaus and Helen have a toxic marriage, and he forces her to show her scarred face to Tom Holland’s Telemachus, saying: “The face that launched 1,000 ships, or maybe just 500.”
So, why make this change? Nolan said he felt Homer’s poem “didn’t necessarily address what it is for Helen to be brought back by Menelaus and how that would ever work,” saying he felt it would be an “acidic, awful marriage.”
“There’s a lot of s**t that’s happened in that relationship, and we have a very brief moment of time with them in this story,” Nolan continued. “I was looking for a shorthand way to communicate the aftermath of the war and how it’s been traumatic for the entire world.”
Nolan also touched on changes he made in response to the end of Homer’s poem, which he said is “so grim and so misogynistic, I had to exclude some of that material. But I didn’t want to completely take it off the table in terms of what it is saying about men and the way they wage war.”
This is seemingly in reference to the end of Homer’s poem, where Odysseus kills the disloyal maidservants alongside the suitors. My take on Nolan’s explanation here is that he sort of transposes his feelings about the murder of the maidservants into Circe’s motivation for turning Odysseus’ soldiers into pigs. Circe in Homer’s poem is a very different character, and the scene in question plays out very differently.
And, briefly, Nolan discussed his new ending, where Odysseus and Penelope sail away into the sunset while predicting how future civilizations are destined to repeat the same mistakes. This, again, is different from Homer’s poem, where Odysseus remains as king with a little divine intervention helping him out along the way.
“For me, it was important in looking at the ending to try and strike the right balance between pessimism and optimism,” Nolan explained, “pessimism about what might have precipitated the Bronze Age catastrophe and the optimism that positive things will reassert themselves.”
My take here is that Nolan changed the ending to hammer home the film’s overarching message about the horrors of war. Indeed, the final shot of the movie is the burning head of Odysseus’ horse, used to trick the Trojans into opening their doors, and, in the movie’s view, sparking the beginning of the end of western civilization. Watching the movie, I felt some ambiguity over the ending — is it Odysseus’ dying dream? Is it real? But the way Nolan talks about it here, it does feel like something that actually happened, insofar as anything in The Odyssey actually happened.
Is that a bad thing? As I’ve said before, it is entirely possible to enjoy Nolan’s The Odyssey for what it is: a spectacular and emotional blockbuster movie with a message, while acknowledging it deviates from the source material in some fundamental ways.
Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Universal Pictures.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
