The release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film, “The Odyssey,” has sparked a flood of criticism. Classicists from all over the world have joined the debate to defend Homer from Hollywood. The director has been accused of clumsily reimagining Odysseus as a troubled, guilt-ridden, 21st-century metropolis, stripping the Bronze Age hero of his complexity and his thirst for glory. What’s more, he has stripped away the humor, the sex, and the feasting, which, as Emily Wilson, one of the most renowned translators of the Odyssey, has indignantly written, have essentially taken all the fun out of it! (And, in fact, she’s right: the film is pretty bleak.)
Time and again, the battles that have erupted after the premiere over the meaning and value of the film have reached epic proportions. Renowned writers have responded at length to other renowned writers, who in turn have responded to Nolan’s nearly three-hour cinematic critique of many of the previous reimaginings of The Odyssey.
The pace of this literary duel recalls the intensity of the battle scenes in Homer’s other great poem, the Iliad. And then there are the more subtle attacks on the film from “anti-woke” warriors like Elon Musk, who has condemned Nolan’s racially insensitive casting, saying it “desecrated” Homer.
But don’t be discouraged by these quibbles. The democratization of Homer has been going on for nearly 3,000 years. The Odyssey is set in the late Bronze Age and was composed centuries later, most likely in the 8th century BC. Since then, it has inspired many of the greatest Western writers. Virgil, Dante, John Milton, and James Joyce were all inspired by the storm-beaten wanderer. And they all, too, reimagined the way Homer had portrayed him.
Two thousand years ago, Virgil was harshly criticized, in private conversations of course, by his contemporaries for conforming to the imperial spirit of the time, giving Aeneas, his Aeneid character, the features of an ideal Roman. For those who do not approve of Matt Damon’s Odysseus, is Leopold Bloom, the antihero of Joyce’s Ulysses, really more “Homeric”? There is a reason why Homer’s poem has survived. Even more than the Iliad, it is the story of humanity. It is a tale of a long-delayed homecoming, of a complicated marriage, of a difficult father-son relationship, of the hospitality of strangers, of fate. It is a fascinating story of misfortune on the high seas: surely the poor crews of tankers stranded in the Strait of Hormuz could find themselves in Odysseus’s, when he was stranded by adverse winds.
It is a story about power. Odysseus had to find a way between the dictates of rival and, at times, capricious gods. Isn’t this also the fate of many “middle powers” of our time, trying to find a way to reconcile the desires of China and the United States?
In a broader sense, there is something incredibly comforting about a nearly 3,000-year-old poem that continues to speak to our lives. Some have suggested that the age of uncertainty described in the Odyssey echoes our own age of anxiety, in a time of mass migration, climate change, and war. Nolan somewhat clumsily conveys this idea in his dialogue, where characters repeatedly refer to marauding “sea peoples.” There was no need. History is a timeless reminder of the continuity of the past, but also, as Wilson says, of how different it is from the present.
To paraphrase the gentle play on the words of the Roman poet Horace and the idea that even the greatest can stumble: “even Nolan dozes sometimes.” Its final scene, in which the hero is allowed to sail off into the sunset, is weak. Homer’s Odyssey, by contrast, ends in a grim way. But we shouldn’t argue about box office numbers. It’s already a $1 billion film. It contains extraordinary cinematic scenes: the claustrophobia inside the wooden horse; the righteous anger of Circe. It was a kind of Homeric summer, and an implicit homage to one of the greatest poems of all time. We should celebrate it. (Financial Times)
The release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film, “The Odyssey,” has sparked a flood of criticism. Classicists from all over the world have joined the debate to defend Homer from Hollywood. The director has been accused of clumsily reimagining Odysseus as a troubled, guilt-ridden, 21st-century metropolis, stripping the Bronze Age hero of his complexity and his thirst for glory. What’s more, he has stripped away the humor, the sex, and the feasting, which, as Emily Wilson, one of the most renowned translators of the Odyssey, has indignantly written, have essentially taken all the fun out of it! (And, in fact, she’s right: the film is pretty bleak.)
Time and again, the battles that have erupted after the premiere over the meaning and value of the film have reached epic proportions. Renowned writers have responded at length to other renowned writers, who in turn have responded to Nolan’s nearly three-hour cinematic critique of many of the previous reimaginings of The Odyssey.
The pace of this literary duel recalls the intensity of the battle scenes in Homer’s other great poem, the Iliad. And then there are the more subtle attacks on the film from “anti-woke” warriors like Elon Musk, who has condemned Nolan’s racially insensitive casting, saying it “desecrated” Homer.
But don’t be discouraged by these quibbles. The democratization of Homer has been going on for nearly 3,000 years. The Odyssey is set in the late Bronze Age and was composed centuries later, most likely in the 8th century BC. Since then, it has inspired many of the greatest Western writers. Virgil, Dante, John Milton, and James Joyce were all inspired by the storm-beaten wanderer. And they all, too, reimagined the way Homer had portrayed him.
Two thousand years ago, Virgil was harshly criticized, in private conversations of course, by his contemporaries for conforming to the imperial spirit of the time, giving Aeneas, his Aeneid character, the features of an ideal Roman. For those who do not approve of Matt Damon’s Odysseus, is Leopold Bloom, the antihero of Joyce’s Ulysses, really more “Homeric”? There is a reason why Homer’s poem has survived. Even more than the Iliad, it is the story of humanity. It is a tale of a long-delayed homecoming, of a complicated marriage, of a difficult father-son relationship, of the hospitality of strangers, of fate. It is a fascinating story of misfortune on the high seas: surely the poor crews of tankers stranded in the Strait of Hormuz could find themselves in Odysseus’s, when he was stranded by adverse winds.
It is a story about power. Odysseus had to find a way between the dictates of rival and, at times, capricious gods. Isn’t this also the fate of many “middle powers” of our time, trying to find a way to reconcile the desires of China and the United States?
In a broader sense, there is something incredibly comforting about a nearly 3,000-year-old poem that continues to speak to our lives. Some have suggested that the age of uncertainty described in the Odyssey echoes our own age of anxiety, in a time of mass migration, climate change, and war. Nolan somewhat clumsily conveys this idea in his dialogue, where characters repeatedly refer to marauding “sea peoples.” There was no need. History is a timeless reminder of the continuity of the past, but also, as Wilson says, of how different it is from the present.
To paraphrase the gentle play on the words of the Roman poet Horace and the idea that even the greatest can stumble: “even Nolan dozes sometimes.” Its final scene, in which the hero is allowed to sail off into the sunset, is weak. Homer’s Odyssey, by contrast, ends in a grim way. But we shouldn’t argue about box office numbers. It’s already a $1 billion film. It contains extraordinary cinematic scenes: the claustrophobia inside the wooden horse; the righteous anger of Circe. It was a kind of Homeric summer, and an implicit homage to one of the greatest poems of all time. We should celebrate it. (Financial Times)