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TThe excitement surrounding Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film Odyssey has been well known this week with the launch of a new trailer and the director appearing on Stephen Colbert’s talk show in the US to give a rare interview.
With new information coming in about the film, which is set to be released on July 17, it’s important to read up on what we know about Nolan’s take on Homer’s Greek epic, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus. And how can it be faithful in the original poem?
Details about the film have been trickling in over the past 10 months since a teaser was shown in theaters ahead of Jurassic World Rebirth in July. A six-minute “introduction” was included a similar theatrical release in December and he was followed closely by the cart he launched on the Internet shortly before Christmas. More footage was revealed by Nolan at the CinemaCon trade show last month before the new trailer hit the internet this week.
So we know that most of the famous characters of the Odyssey are the events shown in the film: the scenes show us the Cyclops, the whirlpool Charybdis and Odysseus calling the spirits of the dead. The troubles on Odysseus’ home island of Ithaca are shown in the latest trailer, Robert Pattinson is very badass as Antinous, the most disgusting of those who want to tell Odysseus’ wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and torture his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland).
Nolan could not resist including the famous wooden horse, a trick used by Odysseus to get the Greeks to enter Troy, which is in the first trailer and the theme of the beginning of December.
Homer does not tell the story of the horse in the Odyssey, but it is mentioned: Odysseus asks the bard to tell the story and the Spartan king Menelaus mentions it when Telemachus visits him to ask about his father.
We have yet to see how Nolan portrays the sorceress Circe turning men into pigs and back again, or hear how writer Ludwig Göransson will make the Sirens. But it looks like not all of Odyssey’s triumphs will be brought to life on screen, although Odysseus’ dog, Argos, is making the rounds in a new trailer.
Nolan – who has been Hollywood’s go-to creator of cerebral thrillers since he helmed the Dark Knight trilogy – is a natural fit for Odyssey, with its big screen and timeless themes of family relationships, homecoming and revenge.
On Monday night, Nolan told Colbert: “You’re always looking at something that hasn’t been done before, and explained what drew him to the project. “And Greek mythology … had never really been done on an A-budget, big studio, throw anything on the screen and see what works…
It’s perhaps surprising that Odyssey hasn’t been given definitive video support in the past. The great development of the 1950s and 1960s was inspired by the Bible and ancient Rome rather than Greek mythology, although there is a “peplum” light Italian movie Odyssey from that time: Ulysses (1954) with Kirk Douglas. Last year The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, looked at the last part of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus plans to take revenge on the couple, and left behind some very beautiful things. The richest films of the story have been TV: eight episodes of Italian television from 1968 and the 1997 mini-series by Armand Assante and Greta Scacchi.
Nolan’s interest in Odyssey can be traced back to the last major film itself adapted from Homer: Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004)which played on – and took great liberties with – Homer’s classic epic, the Iliad.
Nolan was slated to replace Petersen when the German director turned his attention to producing the Batman v Superman film; After the mission, Petersen returned to Troy. Nolan’s consolation prize for the delay was working on Batman Begins, a blockbuster that would catapult him into the big league of Hollywood directors and solidify his reputation as a blockbuster actor.
But Nolan never lost his desire to create a Greek epic. “It was my favorite country to explore,” she told Empire last year. “So I’ve been remembering it for a very long time. Some pictures, mostly. How I wanted to copy the Trojan horse, things like that.”
One aspect of The Odyssey that must have appealed to Nolan is its narrative complexity, an oddity in classic novels. “It’s a linear original story,” as Nolan explained to Colbert. The director has been interested in this form of storytelling ever since he managed the low-budget sequel, and used it to great effect in his breakthrough film Memento (2000). A fascination with the science of time underpins the head-spinning direction of Inception, Interstellar and Tenet.
The poem does not narrate or chronology, but consists of several stories, and at one point alternates between the stories of Odysseus and Telemachus in a way that hopes to overlap. Most of the famous events – Odysseus’ encounters with the Cyclops and Circe, his meetings with the spirits of his old friends and his brushes with the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis – are told in flashback, by Odysseus himself, when he is a guest of the Phaeacians. Some stories are said to be fictional or confusing.
Nolan has confirmed that the action of the film will begin in Ithaca, without Odysseus, as it is in the poem. In another sign that he tried to be faithful to the original text, he seems to have kept the gods, and Zendaya said that he plays Athena, who has an important role in the poem as Odysseus and Telemachus’ helper and supporter.
When Colbert asked if his film had any gods, Nolan did not answer directly but said that it will show the divine nature of Odyssey: “This is a world where people see gods in everything, everywhere – so the thunder, the waves coming, the wind blowing.
Modern adaptations of the Homeric poems have struggled with the idea that the gods directly intervene in human affairs, either directly or indirectly. Petersen’s Troy contributed, as did The Return, but it’s an essential element of the original script.
Whether or not Nolan includes some of Odyssey’s more challenging elements may depend on how his taste in complexity is balanced and what distributor Universal is prepared to tolerate in a regular release. Will we see Odysseus having sex with Circe and Calypso, as he does in the poem? Will the subject of slavery be addressed? Many of the poet’s enslaved characters – the nurse Eurycleia and the pig Eumaeus, for example – are slave laborers. The civilization of the palace depicted in the Odyssey depended on human trafficking and forced labor.
Will both spouses be killed? Will there be mercy for any of them? Homer’s picture has some, but it does not save any of them from a violent death.
And most controversial of all, will Nolan show the 12 slave women who had sex with their spouses, perhaps against their will (the text is unclear on this), being killed by Telemachus? Being on the list of unfaithful people, Melantho – played by Mia Goth – shows that it is possible, if not impossible (the previous versions did not go there).
This tragic story provides one of the most memorable images of the Odyssey, when Homer tells of how the hanged women “struggled with their feet for a little while, but not for long”.
Such attention to imagery shows how Homer’s work can translate so well into film. One of the most striking moments is when six of Odysseus’ companions are kidnapped from their ship by the fierce Scylla. “I saw above me their hands and feet as they were lifted up,” recalls Odysseus, a picture-in-picture that only foreshadows the future film director. As Scylla eats the men, Odysseus hears them scream and sees them reach out their hands to him. It will be interesting to see what Nolan makes of this and many other amazing moments.
