Counter to Nolan’s usual ostentatiousness, the simultaneous threads of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and the crises he faced in the decade that followed the Trojan War are cut together without ceremony. Yet there’s a powerful synergistic effect: At certain times, you can feel the recollections straining toward unreliability, but never quite getting there—the non-Laestrygonians, Menelaus’ unfounded certainty as he explains the world, the whirlpool that might not have been quite so symmetrical but certainly existed in some form. (The most beautiful shot in a film full of them sees the Sirens, through mist, lounging on the rocks of their isle; it’s at once The Odyssey’s most painterly frame and the one that looks most like a 60 frames-per-second digital video.) We are not receiving scraps of necessary plot, puzzle pieces that will add up to a whole: these are character notes, comforting lies people tell themselves to make things manageable.
Most reviews of Nolan’s film note that he has rearranged things to underline the guilt Odysseus feels over the destruction of Troy, and specifically the Trojan Horse gambit that facilitated it. This is true, and of a piece with what has already come into focus as a filmography about humankind grappling with what it has wrought. But there’s something more elemental here than one man’s conscience, or even the critique of Western empire, embodied in Odysseus’s confirmation to Penelope that the spectral “people from the sea”—a looming terror Greeks have begun to fixate on, boats full of anonymous soldiers wreaking mythic levels of violence—are, in fact, he and his men. When, in that same conversation, he recounts what happened in Troy, it’s as if he witnessed an evil he did not previously know existed. It recalls the atom bomb—not the way it’s rendered in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but rather in Twin Peaks, where it’s a singular moment of rupture in the fabric that once kept the universe in balance.
And so The Odyssey becomes a uniquely effective anti-war movie. In 2017’s Dunkirk, even as Nolan homes in on the tragedy and hypocrisy of war, he valorizes acts of heroism within it. This is easy enough: Dunkirk is about an evacuation. Here, though, the entire enterprise is vile, and futile, and irredeemable, made worse by the self-delusion of the people who prosecute it. Even though it would be two millennia before people put this language to it, throughout the movie I found myself thinking of American wars of “liberation.” The most forceful argument to this end comes during a sequence in Hades, when Sinon (Elliot Page, giving the film’s best performance) essentially spits on Odysseus’s ethical and narrative framework for the world. He can pluck his bow before firing an arrow if he wants, but the deer still gets killed.
In 1826, a French inventor named Nicéphore Niépce pointed a camera obscura out of a window in his estate and, over the course of about six weeks, produced an image of buildings and countryside. Basically everyone agrees that it’s the world’s oldest surviving photograph. And that’s the point: surviving. An ephemeral record is no record at all. And while photography, like any other artistic or journalistic medium, is subject to all sorts of editorial judgments—and therefore has the capacity for dishonesty—there are guardrails: you can stage a photograph, but you can’t exactly fake one. What appears inside the frame, at one point, existed.
Obviously, that era is over. In historical terms, it’s a blip: two centuries of objectivity in images. But as we drift back toward an environment where anything can be claimed as true, The Odyssey argues that those narrative flourishes can only fool us for so long. At a certain point, you’re going to have to look into a mirror. Without surveillance footage, or a blurry picture, or even so much as a written word, Odysseus realizes that what has been done is irreversible, no matter how it’s reframed or explained.
