Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” Finds the Monster Within Its Hero

Tell me about a complicated man,

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost,

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy…

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t merely a spectacular adaptation of Homer’s epic—it’s a story about a man trying to survive the consequences of the lie that won a war. Nolan’s real subject is the notion of xenia, also known as Zeus’s Law, the ancient Greek custom of hospitality that enabled civilizations to rise and sustain themselves. Xenia allowed travelers to trade and commingle with people from faraway islands and lands because they could count on their mercy. By transforming a gift into a weapon through the Trojan Horse, Odysseus becomes the architect of a broken world where trust and mercy have collapsed.

The adaptation has all the hallmarks of Nolan’s abiding obsessions—a father trying to get back to his family (Inception, Interstellar); an epic love story thwarted by ambition (The Prestige); a coming-of-age story (Following); a revenge story (The Batman). Nolan had almost gone down the Greek epic road before—he was in the running to direct the 2004 film Troy, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles and based on Homer’s “The Iliad,” but the job ultimately went to Wolfgang Petersen. Yet an image Nolan conjured from that near miss would become the bedrock of The Odyssey 22 years later: the Trojan Horse “listing over in the sand,” as he told The Los Angeles Times‘ Kenneth Turan. It’s an intentional echo, Nolan revealed, of the iconic shot of the Statue of Liberty in Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 film Planet of the Apes.

At the outset of The Odyssey, Nolan shows us what Odysseus is being forced to leave behind—his beautiful, wise wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and his infant son, Telemachus (played by Tom Holland as a young man). In one of the film’s low-key humorous moments, Odysseus explains to Penelope what’s about to happen—because Menelaus’s (Jon Bernthal) wife, Helen (Lupita Nyong’o), has run off with the Trojan prince, Paris—his brother, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), the commander of the Greek forces, summons an army to get her back and to sack Troy in the process. Penelope, reasonably, asks why they’re starting a war when Helen wanted to leave.

Such are the timeless inanities of men. Odysseus can do little more than cede the point to his wife, but nonetheless—the war is coming regardless of the lunacy of its origins, and Odysseus will be gone a long time, if he ever makes it back at all. For the next two decades, Penelope will have to use her wits to fend off a slobbering group of suitors vying for her hand and her land, none more despicable than Antinous (a very game Robert Pattinson), who will eventually plot her son’s death.

After establishing what Odysseus is giving up to fight in the Trojan War, the story is off and sailing, leaping years into the future with an adult Telemachus making a clandestine trip to find word of his father from Menelaus, while Odysseus wanders the shallows of Calypso’s (Charlize Theron) beach, now an aged amnesiac long lost at sea and in a tortured peace with the beautiful goddess who has kept him there for years. But it’s Calypso who prods the foggy war hero about what he remembers of his past, a framing device that allows the film to sweep back into Odysseus’s recent past and his many awful adventures trying to get home.

That homeward journey would never have begun had Odysseus not come up with the plan on the shores of Troy to trick the Trojans into opening their gates. Only the Trojan Horse of Nolan’s film isn’t wheeled easily and without incident through the gates of Troy (in actuality, the Trojan Horse is only alluded to in Homer’s epic—the lasting literary rendering comes from Book 2 of Virgil’s “Aeneid”) but rather dragged bodily through the sand by hundreds of men after being found, as Nolan had imagined two decades ago, “listing over in the sand,” while Odysseus and a small platoon of soldiers, including Menelaus, struggle to survive within sweltering, claustrophobic darkness, covered in their own filth.

Filming the entire epic in IMAX was a monumental feat of technical mastery, requiring an appetite for risk and the accumulated filmmaking knowledge to avoid catastrophe. Yet Nolan’s becoming the first filmmaker to shoot an entire movie using IMAX cameras is perhaps the least surprising cinematic feat he’s achieved with The Odyssey, given how long he’s been deploying the notoriously noisy premium-format cameras. He used them for the bravura opening bank-heist sequence in his 2008 middle-trilogy installment, The Dark Knight, and has been using them with increasing facility ever since.

Eleven miles of IMAX film weighing in at 530lbs later, the wait was worth it; the material in Homer’s epic is more appealing in its relatively pared-down, human-centered drama than that of The Iliad—albeit one with gods, monsters, witches, and sirens. 

Spielberg famously told Waterworld director Kevin Reynolds to avoid filming on the open water at all costs—he’d learned the hard way on Jaws—but Reynolds wasn’t filming on the sea with IMAX cameras. Nolan is not one to be daunted by past failures. The cameras required novel updates before filming took place to make them quieter and lighter, which was key, considering the cast and crew spent months filming on an actual boat, an authentic Viking ship called the Drake that they sourced in Norway. Despite Spielberg’s wise counsel, Nolan and his team filmed on seas across the world, including the Mediterranean, the waters off Iceland (for the Hades sequence), and the North Sea off Scotland.

Filming on the open water with IMAX cameras might sound like the toughest feat, but it was the quieter scenes that required the most ingenuity. IMAX built a specialized soundproof housing around the camera that would allow Nolan and his trusted cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema to film close to the actors while capturing usable live sound. Yet the soundproof housing, nicknamed the blimp, created a new issue—the camera was now so large that, for intimate scenes, the actors could not maintain a direct line of sight. This necessitated another workaround, a clever mirror hack, so that Damon and Hathaway, for example, could maintain the necessary intimacy their scenes required.

There was one more wrinkle the new IMAX cameras imposed—the film magazines only allowed three minutes of shooting before they had to be changed, which meant doing so in the middle of intensely emotional scenes. The fix was a system in which everyone, cast and crew, remained silent during the changeover. It became clear to Nolan that the method was working when an intense 8-page scene between Odysseus and Penelope, which they filmed at the start of the shoot on a soundstage in Los Angeles, worked.

A Pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave

With heavy hearts we sailed along and reached

the country of the reckless Cyclopes,

lacking in customs…

The first truly terrifying sequence is one of many instances in The Odyssey where Odysseus and his men meet monsters. Nolan is at once mesmerizing us with indelible images and seeding the deeper meaning of his adaptation through these epic clashes.

There’s a beautiful economy to how Nolan sets up the first monstrous encounter. We quickly go from Odysseus and his men seeing a sheep grazing on the island to following it into a cave. The cave belongs to a shepherd, Polyphemus, a colossal cyclops and the son of Poseidon, who tends to his flock with a gentleness that belies his great strength.

Nolan stages the unfolding horror with a nightmarish beauty. Polyphemus might look somewhat familiar to art lovers, especially fans of Goya—Nolan modeled him on the Spanish painter’s “Saturn Devouring his Son,” a stunning grotesque. Trapped and cornered, Odysseus’s men panic, and Polyphemus smashes and dashes a few, and then grabs a few more as easily as you might pluck fun-sized Snickers from a plate. With the untidy slothfulness of a baby, he shoves them screaming into his mouth and crunches down (the incredible sound design in The Odyssey requires its own story), limbs and heads rolling off his chin. The carnage is lit by firelight, with Polyphemus coming in and out of shadow.

Polyphemus is played by Bill Irwin, who last worked with Nolan when he voiced the robot TARS in Interstellar. His single eye hangs crooked above a horribly twisted nose and mouth, both placed laterally on his face. He is not the muscular giant of popular imagination but a misshapen, gangly creature who is all the more terrifying for his monstrous frailty. To create the Cyclops, Nolan and his team relied on animatronics, robotics, and puppetry, with Irwin, a trained mime and clown, giving the creature its lumbering but somehow graceful physicality.  So who is it here who is lacking in customs, the shepherd unaware that strangers have infiltrated his cave, or the strangers themselves, ready to take what they want?

Nolan’s approach to filming Odysseus’s encounter with the Laestrygonians is another example of their rude, desperate intrusion into somebody else’s world. Odysseus and his men find a child in the woods. She begins screaming—she doesn’t know who these bedraggled, armored strangers are demanding food and shelter. The little girl dashes off into the forest, and within seconds, a terrible, beautiful sight—the giant Laestrygonians, many times the size of Odysseus and his men, marching toward them in their own armor.

It’s a slaughter. The colossal Laestrygonians brandish swords the size of a ship’s prow. Odysseus’s men are clobbered, dismembered, tossed like stones through the trees.

Perhaps the most surprising and satisfying role in the film belongs to Samantha Morton. As Nolan recently told Turan, it hadn’t been since Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight that his crew had applauded after a scene the way they did for Samantha Morton’s turn as the witch Circe in The Odyssey.  

Here, Nolan and his masterful special effects team conjure the most horrific sequence in the film. As Odysseus’s men eat Circe’s feast with a grotesque fervor, they become literally pliable to her command. Circe begins disfiguring them with her hands, shoving her fist down their throats to the elbow, pulling apart their skulls, and fashioning them as a potter does with clay, molding them into squealing pigs.

Hades has been rendered a thousand times or more in countless stories and films, and Nolan’s approach, as was Homer’s, was to make the land of the dead a forlorn island. Odysseus and his men arrive to seek out Tiresias, but first they come across Sinon (Elliot Page), the young soldier who sacrificed himself to make the offering of the Trojan Horse. Page has only a few minutes of screen time, but makes the most of them, delivering a haunting performance of rage and regret. Odysseus is then confronted by the shade of Agamemnon, having returned from the Trojan War victorious only to be felled by his own wife, Clytemnestra (also played by Lupita Nyong’o). Finally, Tiresias (James Remar) appears and offers Odysseus his vision, and it’s terrible. More death and destruction for Odysseus’s men.

Nolan’s approach to the six-headed Scylla is a passionate doff of the cap to the work of Guillermo del Toro, who has built an Oscar-winning career out of imbuing monsters with humanity. Although the Scylla was mostly created with visual effects, the six-headed beast still feels, in Nolan’s telling, like a creature infringed upon, attacking Odysseus and his men in a defensive, territorial rage as they sail beneath its cliffside lair to avoid the whirlpool.

Odysseus’s return, at last, to Ithaca offers a violent comeuppance for the loathsome suitors, but the catharsis is bittersweet. In Nolan’s epic but earthy telling, Odysseus’s original sin, the Trojan Horse and its violation of xenia, spread outward, transforming him from a hero into the unwitting architect of a civilization’s collapse. The sack of Troy isn’t rendered as a thrilling, ingenious victory but a pillage and a slaughter. (This is where Zendaya’s Athena becomes the film’s totem of xenia defiled.) Throughout the film, Penelope and Telemachus worry over rumors they keep hearing about invaders from the sea sacking cities and kingdoms. It’s for this reason Penelope feels she must give up the hope of Odysseus’s return and place a suitor on the throne so that Ithaca can raise an army and defend itself. But a disguised Odysseus, speaking to Penelope on the night before he will vanquish the suitors and rejoin his queen, tells her a much sadder story—the invaders who have rejected xenia and brought about the beginning of the end of civilization were Odysseus and his men. It was Odysseus, after all, who hid death inside a gesture of goodwill.

For all the sweeping beauty and terror of Nolan’s adaptation, he’s brought Odysseus and his world into our own with embodied performances and relatable terrors. More so than the gods and monsters, it was this long-delayed personal reckoning that kept Odysseus away from home. For all the beasts that he slew or outwitted, it was the one within him that he had to face.

Featured image: Matt Damon is Odysseus in THE ODYSSEY, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.