This past weekend, The Odyssey’s box office numbers exceeded even the wildest predictions of the people who prognosticate about such things, raking in more than $260 million worldwide. That proves, if any proof was needed, that Christopher Nolan is one of the most reliable hitmakers in cinema today.
Partly because other studios have been keeping their big-ticket releases out of The Odyssey’s backwash, I don’t have a movie to review this week. It works out for me, though. You see, I had less time to write my review of The Odyssey than I had to actually watch the film. I do think I managed to digest a good deal of it, given the circumstances, but there was much material that I didn’t discuss last week for various reasons. So here are some notes I have from the benefit of time and watching the thing a second time. WARNING: Spoilers ahead.
• Where does this rank among Nolan’s other films? For the record, I consider his best movies to be The Dark Knight, Inception, and his 2002 remake of Insomnia (a minority opinion, I know, but there it is). I rate The Odyssey a rung below those, but above everything else he’s done.
• Among the many things I didn’t get to mention, the biggest one was Antinous (Robert Pattinson), the suitor who seems to have the inside track wooing Penelope (Anne Hathaway). I don’t find Pattinson that good here. The conception of this villain gives room for a lot of mustache-twirling that he declines to do. I rather wish he had, because he doesn’t bring anything to the part that replaces it. The movie also includes a scene where Antinous appeals to Penelope’s pragmatic side when he’s urging her to choose a husband, saying that she doesn’t have to love the new man or forget Odysseus. He’s not persuasive there. He did much better acting in another movie with Zendaya.
• A big change to the epic poem: Antinous is a rich man’s son who’s drafted to fight in Odysseus’ army. Instead of serving, he pays a poor shepherd’s son named Sinon (Elliot Page) to go in his place. Sinon is killed by the Trojans at the film’s outset, when he delivers them the Trojan horse, but that’s not the end of his involvement. His spirit confronts Odysseus in the underworld for sacrificing his life, and he takes no comfort when Odysseus tells him that he helped the Greeks win the war. At the climax, Odysseus gives Sinon’s name to unnerve Antinous and then kills him in his dead soldier’s name. Much like the Trojan horse itself, Sinon does not appear in Homer’s Odyssey but in Virgil’s Aeneid.
• A fair-sized corner of the internet convinced itself that Page (who previously acted for Nolan in Inception) was going to play Achilles, which got all the transphobes good and mad. It was enough that the actor was listed on Internet Movie Database for a while as playing Achilles, which had me imagining what he would do with the role. Of course, it all turned out not to be the case, though I can’t help wondering if someone in Nolan’s camp or at Universal Pictures leaked fake information to get the trans haters to make fools of themselves. If so, it would be a trick worthy of Odysseus himself. The moral as always: Don’t believe what you read on the internet.
• On a similar note, Elon Musk and a bunch of other racists also got mad over Lupita Nyong’o being cast, using a bunch of made-up arguments that a Black woman can’t be the most beautiful woman in the known world. We’ve been through this whole tiresome rigmarole before (notably when Marvel cast actors of color to play Norse gods in Thor), and the only thing that’s changed is that Musk is in charge of the platform formerly known as Twitter and rigged X’s algorithm to make us think millions of moviegoers were planning to stay home because Helen of Troy wasn’t white. The box-office figures showed otherwise. Mmmm, delicious schadenfreude!
• Today Musk says he’s going to use AI to make a “historically accurate” film of Homer’s poem, even though that means as much as a historically accurate version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Even so, I’m legitimately excited to write about Tilly Norwood declaiming in ancient Greek. That sound you hear is me sharpening my critical knives.
• Joking mostly aside, Greek-American writer Katherine Kelaidis has an essay on Salon about why our debates about whiteness don’t apply to Homer, and it’s one of the smartest things I’ve read about the film.
• If you want a fascinating counterpoint to Nolan’s film, check out Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, which only adapts the final chapters of Homer’s epic poem and played in theaters for a week in December 2024. Ralph Fiennes’ Odysseus is also motivated by shame, but of a different sort: He’s ashamed because he’s returning to Ithaca alone, having lost all his men on the journey home. Like the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, he slaughters all of his wife’s suitors at the end, even the ones who have dropped their weapons and are trying to surrender. Contrast this with Matt Damon’s Odysseus, who spares the ones who decline to fight. Both choices are correct in the context of their respective movies — Damon’s protagonist is trying to restore Zeus’ law, while Fiennes’ hero is so broken by his wartime experiences that killing is all he knows.
• More on The Return: Interestingly, the poem has Odysseus start the massacre by killing Antinous, but both movies have him save Antinous for the end. The whole point of The Return is when Marwan Kenzari’s Antinous gives a speech to Juliette Binoche’s Penelope, after she sees all the dead bodies in her dining hall. While calmly sipping from his goblet of wine, Antinous bemoans the waste of human life, tells Penelope that the man she once loved has become a mass murderer, proclaims that he wouldn’t have left Penelope’s side for any war, and then submits quietly to having Odysseus cut his head off. (Zeno the Stoic would have approved.) If Pasolini’s movie has too much dead air to be good, that speech does make it a revisionist take worth visiting.
• To expand on a point I made in the review: We know that Zendaya portrays Athena, but a climactic flashback to the sacking of Troy has her appear as an anonymous Trojan woman whom the Greek soldiers get their hands on, and Odysseus watches as they chop off her head (though Nolan tactfully cuts to a statue’s decapitation to communicate this). Thus when Athena appears to him later in the story, she takes on that woman’s form and silently judges him. Here’s where I think the movie falls short. I have no overwhelming desire to see Zendaya get beheaded, but surely there were other ways to show why the murder of that woman makes a particular impression on Odysseus in the midst of so many other wartime atrocities that his fellow soldiers are committing.
• That brings us to why some other folks are angry at this movie: Nolan sees no glory in this war. Penelope shuts down that bard (Travis Scott) before he can sing about Odysseus’ deeds, and then she learns that the “people from the sea” who are raiding the local islands are in fact the returning Greeks themselves, whose victory has made them into barbarians. That runs counter to Homer, because the poet — or the people we know by Homer’s name — understands how, on some level, it feels really good to stick a spear in your enemy’s chest and watch the light go out in his eyes. Nolan’s interpretation scrubs that away, and for some people that’s a betrayal of Homer and the work. However, the great majority of critics, including myself, see Nolan reflecting a modern audience’s concerns. Every drama, even those adapted from ancient texts, is necessarily a product of its own era. The box office numbers show how Nolan’s take on the Odyssey has resonated with present-day moviegoers.
• The other reason why people are angry with The Odyssey’s success relates to Odysseus disguising himself as a beggar at the climactic feast. He tells Telemachus, “The clearest view of a man is from below,” and while some of Penelope’s suitors cite Zeus’ law as grounds to give the beggar something, Antinous and Polybus (Corey Hawkins) abuse Odysseus, with Antinous going so far as to hit the beggar with a stool. Odysseus and his men are reaping the whirlwind after their own violation of Zeus’ law, with both the cyclops and the Laestrygonians slaughtering the soldiers who are only looking for food. Circe, too, turns the men into pigs for the same reason, though the script gives the witch good reason to think that the Greeks are there to rape and pillage. People only survive by sharing their stuff, and any violation of that, whether the soldiers steal food or the suitors kick beggars at their table, results in cascading losses of trust. That runs against decades of Republican orthodoxy that advocates hoarding wealth and making homeless people into someone else’s problem, but Nolan casts charity as the pillar that holds up civilization.
• Thus, The Odyssey winds up in the same place as Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another: When the world is in such terrible shape, being good really isn’t that complicated. It just involves a little looking out for the other guy, regardless of where that guy comes from or what they might look like. Rebuilding a sense of community starts with helping out someone who needs it. Messages like that are quite common at the multiplex, but we’re fortunate to have two films as good as these to convey it.
Kristian Lin
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