Never Look a Gift Horse in the mouth

Or the unmaking of The Odyssey

We haven't heard much from the tech billionaire now that The Odyssey has itself become a billionaire. That's pretty impressive for a historical drama. Chris Nolan's magnum opus has grossed more than The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, adjusted for inflation, films that commanded a huge audience in their day and became long-running syndicated movies on television. It makes you wonder if Elon will really risk making his own AI version given it is not likely he will top those numbers. Money has a way of shutting up people.

Even Ben Shapiro was forced to concede it was "a grand spectacle with a fascinating moral core," although he still reserved criticism for some of the casting, calling Elliot Page a "pebble in the shoe - irritating, bothersome and unnecessary." 

Page had a minor but very significant role as Sinon, a character lifted from The Aeneid that Nolan used to wrap a number of loose ends together in his three-hour epic.

Most of the criticisms today are coming from the academic quarter, namely Emily Wilson who wrote a scathing review in the London Review of Books and has since doubled down with a second harsh review in The Atlantic, calling it "emotionally empty and lacks the vibrant human desires found in Homer's original epic." She provided a new translation of The Odyssey, which Nolan said he used as a base text for his screenplay.

In short, Wilson thought Nolan missed the whole point of the OG by making it about the Trojan War. He turned what were fabulist creations into inner demons that Odysseus was forced to confront after all the war crimes he committed, chief among the Trojan Horse, which Nolan put front and center as the "casus belli" for all his woes. Wilson found this to be a very strange interpretation of Homer's classic and one that didn't hold up under scrutiny, especially since Nolan tried to encase it all within "Zeus's law."

Nolan was very much concerned with the idea of "gift giving." When Odysseus turned it into a weapon of mass destruction, he had violated this "law" and couldn't bear to confront his wife Penelope and grown son Telemachus with all that blood on his hands. So, he drifted around the Mediterranean Sea, encountering even more demons, the walking dead, and a witch who turned some of his men into swine, wondering if he could ever escape this curse he placed himself on top of his head. 

Not content with what Homer's epic poem had to offer, Nolan tossed in The Iliad, The Aeneid, Hesiod's Theogony and reduced it to a slow boil to give us this consomme he called The Odyssey. Many people love it. Others find it reductive to a fault. Wilson called it "sexless."

She wasn't just referring to the lack of sex in Nolan's tale but also the reduction of women to little more than a "tableaux of female victims." What few lines they were given rang emotionally hollow and she felt Nolan missed a grand opportunity, especially when it came to Calypso, whom he had reduced to "an unpaid therapist" forced to listen to Odysseus' woes, rather than the "wonderfully outraged" goddess we met in the the OG, who railed against Zeus for making her give up her boy toy. Zeus didn't even do so directly. He sent her son Hermes to deliver his ultimatum.

Nolan did away with gods almost entirely. We see a few brief glimpses of Athena, but she seemed more like Odysseus' moral conscience than his divine protector. Ultimately it is her head we watch roll off a statue in front of a temple built in her honor with no reference to her being the one who chose the Spartans over the Trojans and had allegedly given Odysseus the idea of the Trojan Horse. The entire war was instigated by the gods, but Nolan was having none of that. He wanted Odysseus to carry the full weight of the Fall of Troy, a fictional war by the way.

Yet, many believe it to be true and archaeologists have found remains in the layers of Troy that indicate that some battle took place roughly 3200 years ago, but there is no historic record of it. What we get instead are myths, which Homer rendered beautifully in The Iliad. I'm slowly making my way through it now.

One must remember that Homer was writing about a war and a warrior 400 years earlier, when men were men and you should have seen us then, to quote Aristophanes. Everything was larger than life, including Cyclops and Laestrygonians. It's fantasy with a whole bunch of capricious gods leaving mortals to suffer the wrath of their petty quarrels.

I was asking a Greek friend I met on Medium why these gods were so capricious given we remember Greeks mostly for their reason and early understanding of math and science. Maybe to show the folly of our belief in them, he opined. 

To some degree, Nolan seemed to be conveying this himself. Odysseus doesn't have much belief in gods even if he couldn't explain how Calypso kept him entrapped for so many years. He was forced to build a raft himself from discarded timbers that had washed up on the shore. All she did was provide him a favorable wind to get back to Ithaca, bypassing Phaeacia in the movie, but then that could be explained easily enough.

Nolan's account is stripped bare of all the wonderful trappings found in Homer's epic. The sirens no more than seal women poised on treacherous rocks. We don't even hear their enticing songs, only Odysseus' account about all the things you wish you never wished for like the Fall of Troy.

In both accounts, Odysseus didn't want to go to war. He wanted to stay home but was compelled to do so by Agamemnon. I suppose he thought he could cheat the prophecy he was given by taking a circuitous route home, only to have that prophecy fulfilled just the same. There's no escaping the gods, Homer seemed to be saying. In Nolan's account, there is no escaping your actions.

I suppose if you take Nolan's account on its own terms, one can accept that. It is a very modern reading of the epic poem that speaks more to our present-day wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iran than it does the Fall of Troy. Chris seemed to be searching for a way to frame the frustration and anger many of us feel regarding this unending violence, which is probably why the film has been so successful.

For those of us looking to see the epic poem writ large on IMAX screens it wasn't so satisfying. It just left me with an empty feeling like I get when I see my favorite story turned inside out and made to feel guilty for ever liking it. Thanks for nothing, Chris. I prefer to remember The Odyssey the way I want to.