Twenty plus years ago, Christopher Nolan was set to direct Troy, but Warner Brothers ended up going with Wolfgang Petersen, who initially developed the idea. Apparently there were no hard feelings, especially since WB gave Nolan Batman Begins, but Chris just couldn't shake that Trojan Horse out of his head. He's been mulling it over for two decades and finally got the chance to pull it off in The Odyssey all these years later.
Chris didn't go back to Warner Brothers. He chose Universal instead. He was still chafing over WB's decision to release Tenet simultaneously on the big screen and HBO Max. He demanded his films get a full theater run first, which he got with Universal when it backed him on Oppenheimer. A very risky move given there isn't a huge audience for biographies but Chris filmed it mostly in IMAX with A-list actors and the end result was pure cinematic gold. Warner Bros. must have really been regretting its decision despite the limitations COVID placed on theaters at the time.
I like Chris, but he's an arrogant prick despite coming across relatively modest in interviews. He loves telling how much preparation he puts into his movies. If he is using a text source, he cites it and tells everyone how much he pored over it to get it right. No exception here. Chris proudly announced he read Emily Wilson's 2017 translation, as well as others, but set them all aside and wrote his script based on his memory and the emotions he felt rather than drawing directly from the texts for his narrative. This would be Chris Nolan's Odyssey, not Homer's epic poem.
I've written about this on Medium, so will keep it short, relatively so anyway. He essentially made The Odyssey into his personal Trojan Horse to give us a tale of a PTSD-ridden warrior, so thoroughly guilt-ridden that he couldn't bear to face Penelope and their grown son, Telemachus, given the war crimes he committed. Chris put a lot of stock in Zeus' Law, or xenia as Emily Wilson pointed out, that didn't hold up well under scrutiny. Wilson wrote a scathing review in the London Review of Books that earned her the enmity of Nolan fan boys. Joyce Carol Oates also felt Wilson had gone too far, calling her review "the crude language of MAGA folks," even though Joyce hadn't particularly liked the movie either.
However, Wilson had a point. This film Nolan insisted we all watch on IMAX screens around the world wasn't The Odyssey. It was something else entirely, and she was none too pleased by it, especially since he made a point of using her translation as a base text. Many thought she should be more grateful as this plug pushed her translation to the top of bestseller lists and made it this year's best summer read. I read it again myself and also watched the movie on the lone IMAX screen in Vilnius.
Wilson was mostly upset with the script, which she called "abysmal." Banal would have probably been a better choice of words, but she doubled down in The Atlantic with a second harsh review, calling it "emotionally empty and lacks the vibrant human desires found in Homer's original epic." Needless to say, Chris won't be inviting her to any dinner parties at his lavish adobe house in LA.
You do have to wonder why he stripped down the language so much given that Emily had already reduced it quite a bit with simple, declarative translations of the Homeric Greek, which she said in an interview with Walter Isaacson any first-year classical Greek student could understand. Matt Damon shouting "Ten years on this fucking beach. Let's go home!" is rather pedestrian.
As we know, Odysseus took the long way home, no longer wanting to follow in Agamemnon's wake, but as he lost more men to Poseidon's angry sea, he began to have more and more misgivings, eventually washing up alone on the shore of Ogygia, where Calypso soothed him back to health with her oils and lotus flowers until he could regain his memories, which Wilson found incredibly trite.
Not only that but Chris skipped Odysseus' time on Phaeacia all together, having him drift back to Ithaca on an improvised raft that looked like something from Cast Away with nothing to his name. Ironically, this was the way he had washed up on the shore of Phaeacia, but the young princess Nausicaa took a liking to him and introduced him to her father, who gave him a ride back to Ithaca on one of his ships along with treasures to make up for everything he had lost.
Nolan wasn't interested in this. He wanted Odysseus to feel the full weight of the violence he had inflicted on Troy by finding a clever way past their impregnable gates. It doesn't matter that this war was fictional, as told in The Iliad, Chris wanted it to stand for all the wars fought in the name of misplaced honor. He obviously still had scenes from Dunkirk flashing through his mind, although Chris Hedges has opined it is the modern wars today that Nolan was striking out against.
Nolan fan boys will shout that Chris Nolan can interpret The Odyssey anyway he sees fit, since he is their cinematic version of Achilles in their minds. However, much was lost in Nolan's translation, says Mary Beard, who felt that what makes The Odyssey so endearing is its distinctly feminine quality. At the heart of all these great adventures is a family drama, played out with Odysseus' deep yearning to return home to Penelope and connect with his grown son Telemachus. It's really not about war at all.
Yep, Chris had made his own Trojan Horse in an effort to tell us what war is all about. Oddly enough, we had already seen this in Uberto Pasolini's The Return, with much finer actors in the lead roles. Nevertheless, it was fun to watch Circe turn his men into swine and a number of other special effects that were truly dazzling, not least of all pulling that Trojan Horse up from the beach with all those men trying not to groan inside as they were jostled about.
However, I wish he had just stuck to the original script and not gotten on his didactic high horse. You can be such a prick, Chris, for no reason at all.
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