‘The Odyssey’ and the consequences of war

Christopher Nolan draws on surprising sources—including the Gospels—in his blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s epic.

Written for U.S. Catholic

Toward the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Matt Damon’s Odysseus has a despairing line clearly influenced by an aphorism from the Talmud memorably quoted in Schindler’s List: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” The Talmud also sees absolute significance in the destruction of one life; this is more the sense of Odysseus’s lamentation.

Giving a pagan Greek hero a line adapted from later Jewish wisdom is an interesting choice; more centrally, Nolan reinterprets a key theme in Homer’s work in terms overtly drawn from one of the most revered of Jesus’ sayings. The ancient Greek precept of hospitality or xenia, here called “Zeus’s law,” is repeatedly summarized as treating strangers and others “as you would be treated.” Yes: “Zeus’s law” is equated with the Golden Rule, first recorded in this positive form in the Gospels.

Nolan is almost the last filmmaker working in Hollywood today whose very name establishes any new release as a global cultural event, and he has tackled one of Western civilization’s most culturally significant narratives (and most spectacular and cinema-ready) in the grandest possible style. The Odyssey is the first feature film ever shot entirely in IMAX 70mm, and was filmed in eight countries and territories with the largest marquee ensemble cast of Nolan’s career. Given the director’s preference for minimizing reliance on computer effects, the physical scale of the production was immense.

Nolan chose this, by his own account, out of his own affinity for this story: the tale of King Odysseus of Ithaca’s harrowing voyage home from the Trojan war; his belated reunion with his wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus; and his deadly reckoning with the horde of suitors plaguing his household in his absence and seeking Penelope’s hand and the throne. Nolan has called Homer’s epic “a very strong foundational text for me,” since, in his words, “I’ve been telling this story in all my films for years. It’s a family story, a love story, a revenge story, a war story, a coming-of-age story.”

Nolan’s film is also about a theme that he’s previously circled but seldom engaged with such directness: what his Odysseus calls “the fragile bonds between men”; the moral codes that hold societies and civilizations together. Perhaps the nearest precedent in the director’s work is The Dark Knight’s climactic set piece: the Joker’s memorable ferry-boat social experiment, in which stranded civilians and convicted criminals must each decide whether to destroy the other or be destroyed themselves.

Heath Ledger’s Joker believes that people are “only as good as the world allows them to be,” and that, “when the chips are down, these civilized people” will “eat each other.” The Joker’s experiment fails, if barely; the verdict of Nolan’s Odyssey is both grimmer and more high-minded. Like the filmmaker’s last work, Oppenheimer, The Odyssey has a downbeat, apocalyptic bent—but, unlike Oppenheimer, or any previous Nolan film, the new film is also centrally about what human beings owe one another.

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