Nolan, good, evil and us. A film that stays true to the poem and triumphs

“The best parts of Christopher Nolan’s *The Odyssey* are those in which he simply tells the story of Homer’s original poem,” writes Stephen Kavlan in the *Free Press*. “That may seem like setting the bar low. It isn’t. Over the years, it has proved strangely difficult for contemporary filmmakers to adapt this gripping epic without distorting it, stripping it of its charm or presenting a ‘modern version’. The legend of Odysseus’s decade-long journey home after the Trojan War is so beloved and so often retold, so brazenly heroic in its scale, that modern directors sometimes seem almost embarrassed to give the Odyssey its due without trivialising it or adding a touch of irony. Nolan does not do this. He takes numerous deviations from the original material, but remains largely faithful to its overall structure and spirit. To his great credit, his cinematic blockbuster – released in cinemas worldwide – largely allows Homer to be Homer.

Having seen the film twice, I could cite numerous scenes to illustrate this point. But there is one sequence in particular that many contemporary interpreters struggle to render correctly, and which Nolan gets spot on: bringing it to the screen without over-softening or justifying it. This sequence takes place near the end of the poem, when Odysseus unleashes a bloody vendetta on the men who have abused his family in Ithaca. During Odysseus’s twenty-year absence, his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus were persecuted by a pack of opportunistic predators led by the sinister Antinous. ‘You dogs,’ Odysseus tells them in the epic, ‘you have squandered the wealth of my house and raped my maids’. Then he makes them pay… by executing them en masse. It is a shocking episode, without a doubt. But it is also deserved. The suitors not only devoured Odysseus’s provisions and raped his maidservants: they also plotted to kill his son. In a particularly slimy speech, Eurymachus – Antinous’s accomplice – hints that Antinous was courting Penelope merely as a pretext to seize the throne. ‘It was not so much that he needed or desired marriage: he had other things in mind, which Zeus did not allow him to carry out: to reign as king over the people of Ithaca with their beautiful homes, laying snares for your son to bring him down.’

In other words, these are the villains. Homer certainly leaves plenty of room to wonder whether Odysseus is going too far in venting his fury on those who betrayed him. But the poem also makes it perfectly possible to conclude that the answer is no. After all, Odysseus is judicious to a certain extent. He spares the minstrel Phemios because he only collaborated with the suitors under duress, and the herald Medon for his kindness towards Telemachus. Then the faithful nurse Euriclea reports that, although many maidservants were taken by force, some collaborated voluntarily with the suitors: ‘They showed no respect for either me or Penelope’. Odysseus spares the innocent, but to restore order to the palace after twenty years of anarchy, he decides that the guilty must die.

It is perfectly legitimate to shudder at the severity of this imposition of justice. But it is also possible, out of misplaced compassion, to feel too much sympathy for the suitors. For example, in Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 film "The Return" – a stubbornly sombre take on Odysseus’s homecoming – Ralph Fiennes, playing Odysseus, cuts down innocent, whimpering figures with his bow and arrows as they flee in terror or desperately try to defend themselves. Marwan Kenzari, on the other hand, plays an extremely likeable Antinous, who sits calmly and offers his neck to Telemachus’s (Charlie Plummer) blade. ‘Is this the love you wanted?’ he asks reproachfully of Juliette Binoche as Penelope. Horrified, Penelope pleads for Antinous’s life before Telemachus cuts off his head. The message: Odysseus should have been kinder to the men who harassed his wife and plotted to kill his son. Whatever this scene is, it has little to do with the world of Homer’s epic.

Nolan, on the other hand, does not indulge in such ambiguous pseudo-intellectualism. He is happy to have us root for the heroes and against the villains. At the start of the film, the faithful swineherd Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) sets the tone by saying that he shudders at the thought of what Odysseus will do to the suitors when he returns home. Antinous, played with masterful duplicity by Robert Pattinson, gives the audience and the other characters every reason to hate him. And they do hate him. Anne Hathaway delivers an intensely moving performance as Penelope, who seethes with rage against the men who have imprisoned her and fantasises about burning them alive in the palace. And when Odysseus (Matt Damon) finally returns home, he is conflicted about many things – but not about the fact that the suitors must die. As he says in the poem: ‘They have shown no respect for any man on Earth’. In Homer’s original, Antinous is the first to die, struck by an arrow in the neck just as he is raising a cup of ill-gotten wine to his lips. Nolan saves Antinous’s death for last, but has another suitor die first in a very similar manner, his words cut short mid-sentence by a punishing wound to the throat. When I saw that moment in the cinema, the audience applauded. It makes perfect sense. When staged by a truly talented director like Nolan, this scene is not as complicated as our modern anxieties make it seem. People want to see justice done. It is part of storytelling and of life. It is neither virtuous nor kind to let marauders exploit the weak indefinitely. It is not charitable to allow brigands to subvert the order of a palace or a society. There is nothing compassionate about letting villains go unpunished. We know this intuitively, except when we pretend to ponder it in university lecture theatres. Emily Wilson, in the introduction to her acclaimed translation of the Odyssey, expresses concern that the handmaidens who die for having favoured the suitors ‘presumably had little choice in their treatment’. But the poem makes it clear that most of them chose to resist, whilst a minority (12 out of 50) did not. Wilson describes the scene as ‘one of the most horrific and disturbing in the entire poem’. Yet the nurse Euriclea, who has remained steadfastly loyal to the household, does not seem to see it that way: she goes ‘giggling’ with joy to announce Odysseus’s return to Penelope after the massacre. Nolan does not shy away from the fate of Melantho (Mia Goth) either, the handmaiden who is shown kissing Antinous joyfully whilst passing on information to help him murder Telemachus. It is Penelope, in Nolan’s version, who pushes Melantho into the carnage when the slaughter begins: ‘Your place is certainly over there,’ she hisses. Nolan’s Penelope and Odysseus are united in the belief that the intrigues and betrayals have gone on for far too long. This, too, seems right. It should come as no surprise. When we truly immerse ourselves in a story – not as a rare artefact of ‘high culture’, but as the kind of exhilarating tale that the Odyssey was meant to be – we instinctively feel that justice is a good thing. In his seminal work of literary criticism, the Poetics, the philosopher Aristotle wrote that the plot of the Odyssey ‘ends in opposite ways for the good and the bad characters’. This is what makes the poem’s conclusion more akin to the happy ending of a comedy than to the heart-wrenching conclusion of a tragedy. Aristotle noted that the audience has a ‘weakness’ for this sort of thing. And they do. Judging by the sold-out cinemas and rave reviews for Nolan’s "Odyssey", people still find it satisfying when thoroughly evil characters are defeated and noble ones triumph. It is a foolish claim to think that stories of this kind cannot also raise difficult moral questions or feature flawed heroes who make mistakes. Nolan’s “Odyssey” is quite complex, and Homer’s is even more so. The poem is vast enough to allow us to question its darker moments, including some of Odysseus’s murders. But there is a difference between complexity and moral relativism or cowardice. It is true that life is complicated. It is also true that there are such things as right and wrong. The greatest artists are able to recognise and portray both these truths simultaneously. That is what Homer does in his poem, and Christopher Nolan was extremely clever – not to say courageous – to take Homer seriously. All other things aside, the result is a great story.” (Translation by Giulio Meotti)