Opinion
Medievalists must be jealous. Classicists are having a moment on social media, happily discussing whether Odysseus was “polytropos,” “polymetis” or “polymechanos”. And that’s very cool. Thank you, Mr Nolan.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a throwback to the days when Hollywood big shots fearlessly took on literary classics, undaunted by the challenges of bringing vast, thorny tales to the screen. Conjuring the Civil War in Gone With The Wind? Re-creating the desert battlefields of World War I in Lawrence of Arabia? Depicting the Russian Revolution in Doctor Zhivago? Why not?
Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as his protector, the Greek goddess Athena. In the poem, Athena asks Zeus to intervene to make Calypso give up Odysseus, her sex slave. That is removed from the film. Nolan’s portal to ancient Greece has lured audiences back to theatres and spiked book sales of Homer’s The Odyssey, over 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter verse composed in the seventh or eighth century BCE.
Nolan has turned one of the foundational works of Western literature into an entertaining adventure saga.
Nolan told Stephen Colbert that he used every trick in the book to achieve his stunning visual effects. (The Mediterranean was ready for its close-up!) Yet the director failed to capture the essence of the man of tricks and twists, Odysseus, who delighted in storytelling and feigned identities.
In keeping with Gene
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