Nolan's 'Odyssey' opens to $264m but critics say it drains Homer's moral ambiguity
Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic took $264m globally in its first weekend and drove translations up bestseller charts, but some classicists find the film scrubs the poem's moral complexity and divine machinery.
Box office and cultural surge
Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey earned $264m (£196m) during its opening weekend, according to The Guardian, and is sold out at London's BFI Imax screen into September. The nearly 3,000-year-old poem has seen translations surge up bestseller lists, creating what the newspaper calls "an Odyssey frenzy." The New York Times notes that the film has lured audiences back to theaters and spiked book sales of Homer's epic, which runs over 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter verse composed in the seventh or eighth century B.C.E.
Nolan's structural homage
Nolan follows the original poem's twisted, non-linear structure with a complex design of parallel timelines and flashbacks, an approach The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins praised as faithful to the spirit of the work. The director told Stephen Colbert, as cited by The New York Times, that he used every trick in the book to achieve the visual effects. Yet the film strips away the meddling gods that Homer's epic presents as the framework for all events, leaving only a mournful Athena (Zendaya) as Odysseus's conscience.
Moral ambiguity drained
The New York Times argues that much of the moral ambiguity has been drained to make Matt Damon's protagonist more likable. Odysseus, a loquacious rhetorician and charming liar in the poem, becomes a grim and agonised figure on screen. By omitting the major gods, the film reduces the ancient world's depth to people struggling within themselves, losing the epic's force. The Guardian questions how far modern moral sensibilities should influence adaptations of classics, noting that Nolan inescapably reads the Odyssey through contemporary prejudices.
Gender and modernity
Le Monde frames the film's challenge as lying in its depiction of gender, with women present everywhere in the construction of masculinity. The newspaper connects this to the #MeToo context, nearly a decade after the movement, and sees the all-star cast and technical feats as part of an ambition to give our era an epic that matches its scale.
