The Odyssey – 7

Forgetting for a moment how Christopher Nolan’s movie compares to Homer’s poem, let me react to the film itself. First, it is encompassing–visually, aurally, dramatically. Despite its 280-minute length (with no introductory throat-clearing), I never considered looking at my watch. That said, it could have been shortened 20-30 minutes without losing much. The scenes with the suitors were weak and repetitive . There was one episode in which Odysseus’s men landed on an island and were repulsed by a troop of armored robots that could have been excised completely. The sack of Troy went on forever and maybe was even shown twice. In fact, the fighting and battle scenes wore me down and were ineffective–certainly not what I had come to see. Then there was this disconcerting oddity: at every stop Odysseus kept losing men, yet when they got back on their ship every oar was still manned.
Now moving on to how the movie clashed with my memory of The Odyssey, I go back to all the battles. I think of The Iliad as the book about fighting, and The Odyssey as the book about our hero’s journey home, his “odyssey.” Perhaps to make his points that war is bad and violence degrades humanity Nolan foregrounds the Trojan War and the deception of the Trojan Horse (taken from the Aeneid!), which takes away the lyrical beauty of the poem that recounts Odysseus’s wanderings across the wine-dark sea and the witches and god-adjacents he encounters. Then there is Odysseus himself: Matt Damon plays him as a stoic super-hero, which overshadows the wiliness Homer gives his hero. In fact, there is little to no character development in Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus or any character despite the many years that elapse. As a result, perhaps, we feel no emotional bond with them, although that may also be partly attributable to our preexisting familiarity with the plot.
The other difficulty Nolan faces is how to dramatize mythic encounters involving “real” people. We are not on a Star Wars alternate universe; we are on Greek islands with warriors returning from a historical battle. If we are able to sufficiently suspend disbelief, we still feel no danger because we know how Odysseus escapes Polyphemus and resists the Sirens’ call. All we can do is weigh how the movie depicts familiar events. It’s almost more like looking at paintings in a gallery. Ultimately, I have to think The Odyssey should not be made into a movie. I also have to think that Nolan was trying to embed modern messages into the story, but heroic Matt Damon was too dull a blade for this purpose. On the other hand, there was Charlize Theron!