Criticism of The Odyssey goes back to the beginning of Western civilization. Plato contemplated banishing poets like Homer, as their “siren song” might lead people away from virtue. He also declared there was an ancient war between philosophy and poetry, the former investigating the real being of originals, the latter concerned with appearance, showings and images.
Plato was unable to write more than a few paragraphs without quoting Homer, and his writings were almost all dramas with characters, dialogue, jokes, metaphors and double entendres. Their relationship was like lovers, not enemies, with Homer eternally sailing tariff-free in the trickster father of philosophy’s mind.
Homer’s Odyssey poses a question about what Plato depicted as proto-philosophers, as he calls them in the Republic, lovers of sights and sounds: Is a life devoted to adventure and curiosity better than a home life? Is it moral to leave behind your home, city, kingdom, spouse, children, responsibilities, and to endanger your crew, to see what’s over the hill or on the next island or in the next sea? It’s similar to Plato’s subjects: whether philosophers can live in the city peacefully with other citizens, and whether the weird life devoted to investigation of the great ideas is higher than all the lives of the citizens, including the rulers.
Director Christopher Nolan doesn’t answer or consider these questions. The theme of his Odyssey is that if you’re disrespectful to others bad things will happen to you. Odysseus’ strategic role in destroying Troy (and subsequent crimes) leads to the deaths of his crew and his 10 years lost in the wilderness while his wife and son suffer back home in Ithaca.
The movie isn’t the same story as the poem. It has many of the same characters, and some of the same settings and events. The poem has 14 stops between the war in Troy and the return to Ithaca, including highly advanced civilizations, like the floating island kingdom of Aeolia and the kingdom of Phaeacia, which has robots (“automatons”) and supplies Odysseus with his final—automated, crewless—ship that takes him home (was Homer a clairvoyant or a time traveler?). The movie has only five stops filmed variously in Greece, Italy, Morocco, and Scotland.
Lots of artists have copied and borrowed from Homer. Jonathan Swift has his Gulliver jumping on ships and leaving behind a wife and children who live in the Jewish quarter of London, to sail off and be shipwrecked at weird destinations, including a floating scientifically-advanced city, a land of giants (though not cannibalistic ones like the Homer’s Cyclops), and a society where horses talk and rule and humans are work animals. L. Frank Baum re-wrote Odysseus as a teenage girl and had her tossed, not by Poseidon’s waves but by Kansan tornadoes, to a strange land with an advanced magical city, evil witches, and poppy fields that like Homer’s lotus blossoms befuddled the mind. Dorothy though doesn’t take so long to decide that there is “no place like home,” and her Toto survives the whole ordeal travelling with her, while Odysseus’ aging Argos stays alive in Ithaca until his master returns, and then once recognizing him passes away (possibly the best scene in the current movie).
Much has been said about the woke/DEI character of the current movie. Lupita N’yongo’s performance as Helen is great. It was wrong to cast an actor whose previous best-known role was as a female Urkel in Wakanda Forever as a Greek and the most beautiful woman in the world. But here she’s a disfigured Queen of Sparta suffering from guilt about her role in causing so many deaths in the war (in the poem she is an aging alcoholic trying to forget this). Anne Hathaway is a somewhat more feminist, Medea-like Penelope, who wishes for the deaths of the parasitical suitors trying to cajole her into declaring Odysseus dead and picking one of them to marry. I can see both of them, along with Tom Holland as Odysseus’ son Telemachus, getting nominations.
I can also imagine that Himesh Patel (one of Odysseus’ crew), Ellen/Elliot Page as “Sinon” (a Greek warrior who isn’t in Homer, but is borrowed from an earlier Odyssey remake, Virgil’s Aeneid), and Robert Pattinson as Antinous (the lead suitor, here given an extensive criminal backstory not found in Homer) will receive nominations as supporting actors.
Matt Damon’s performance isn’t bad, but nothing about the Odysseus in this movie suggests he’s that clever, even though the Trojan horse was his idea, and many characters say how smart he is. The scriptwriters apparently couldn’t figure out how to dramatize superior intelligence, so Damon didn’t have to act it.
Nolan’s working in the confines of the new racial haiku regime. You can’t do just any kind of poetry anymore, no sonnets or limericks or epics. Only haiku. You must follow an imposed pattern of so many LGBTQwerty actors and so many actors of color, and see what you can make within those confines. It’ll be interesting to see if Nolan can get Charlize Theron to finally come out openly as a lesbian to increase his chances of fitting the new DEI haiku requirements.
Although the actual story of Homer didn’t survive the witches and cannibals and angry gods and monsters of Hollywood, Nolan did navigate his ship to make an entertaining movie.