The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – I suggest you don’t read this until you have seen the film.

In an interview published in the Radio Times, Christopher Nolan said that for him the most significant part of the film was the conversation between Odysseus and his wife at the end. He tells her how he is appalled and saddened by the bitter realisation of his own savagery, at who he is and who his men are.

There is a hint of something disturbing all the way through the film, but we don’t know what the revelation will be. The hint is that Odysseus is accompanied sporadically by a young woman who plainly only he can see.

When Odysseus is confessing to his wife, there is a long flashback of the sacking of Troy by he and his men.

We see Odysseus and his men cutting their way through the Trojans. And we see him looking at the young woman of his visions, and now she is on her knees begging, as one of his men slaughters her.

We see that this is the beginning of his awakening.

All the way through, Odysseus has been hearing about the dreaded Sea People who bring terror wherever they go. Now he realises it is they who are the Sea People.

The writing was on the wall when Odysseus foils Circe, when she tells him that his men are savages, and deserved to be turned into the pigs they are.

Does Odysseus’ recrimination get through to the audience no mater how little they might know of the Odyssey story?

Well if it does, it is undermined by the fact that in the end it is a shoot-em-up. Imagine if there had not been a big fight at the end, and Odysseus had talked the suitors into going home.

No fight, no crescendo, no release? Oh how we would have been disappointed.

And in that case there is no real moral to the tale at all.

Where the film differs from films like Shane or A History Of Violence is that in those stories the hero is reluctant to fight until the fight is the only way forward.

Of course, even there, we are watching and waiting for the spectacle, for some version of the Roman arena that will give us the release that makes the experience fulfilling.

Here in the Odyssey, Odysseus doesn’t seem to doubt for an instant that the fight is the proper course of action. There’s no soul searching about whether it is OK to fight in these circumstances.

Either way though, we get our bloody fulfilling of our bloody lust.

And that is really the bottom line – that for all the recriminations, it is still a fight – the fight, any fight – that we want.

Will we as a species ever not want that?

And

I read an interview with Matt Damon’s stunt double. She is very small and she and friends were pitted against big men – and that is how it looked to us in the audience that Odysseus and his men were fighting giants.

As a film, there are a couple of bits that didn’t carry me with it. Three times we watch the Greeks running back to the boats to escape some evil. Once is dramatic, three times begins to look more like Monty Python.

The final scene of the crowning of Telemachus and of Odysseus and his wife Penelope sailing off into the sunset and their self-imposed exile was so disjointed and rushed that I had to smile.

As a side note, the film was worth seeing just for long scene where Circe turns the men into pigs.

I asked a friend who knows Classics what he thought. He says that in the original poem all the suitors are killed, and Odysseus has absolutely no problem with killing them all. And it is the suitors’ relatives that Odysseus persuades to go home when they come for revenge the following day.