The Odyssey — the Twisted Epic We Deserve

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey sells IMAX, not cinema. Billed as the biggest of big movies (Titanic meets The Lord of the Rings with some Megalopolis thrown in), it continues the corruption of modern movie culture that Nolan started with The Dark Knight, which upped the scale of nihilistic violence to satisfy a hipster’s misconception of original filmmaking. Since then, he’s trained several generations to embrace mere action-spectacle as cinema, which, alone, can be stomach-turning. But it’s not cinema, which enlivens kinetic imagery and emotional response.

Homer’s ancient Greek poem The Odyssey is beside the point of Nolan’s ambition. Adapting the story of Odysseus — the king of Ithaca making an extended journey home after the Trojan War and encountering various natural and supernatural forces along the way — Nolan departs from his regular focus on moral futility. The casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus (rather than an ambiguous figure like Gerard Butler’s feral King Leonidas in 300) lets us know that this makeover is meant for liberals.

This version of The Odyssey as an adventure spectacular goes against notions of survival, quest, intelligence, masculinity, civilization — foundational principles of the West that Nolan’s previous films all destroyed through his emphasis on chaos. Here, Nolan indulges chaos once again.

Conservative pundits who have loudly complained about the unorthodox casting choices in The Odyssey don’t understand Nolan. What they mistook for “artistry” in Nolan’s Batman films, his pseudo-intellectual sci-fi sagas, and his meretricious Oppenheimer was a political compromise. Those films anticipated the woke chaos of this adaptation. (Oppenheimer’s self-doubting American history exemplified a kitsch version of RINO sanctimony, gratified by the Oscars. Maybe this twisted, cartoonish version of The Odyssey is the epic we deserve.)

Film-watchers should realize that Nolan is a creature of the ’90s film movement, in which cynicism ruled, making the high/low combination of art-film and pop-trash into a new order of generic grotesquerie. Indeed, we’re meant to read trans actress Elliot Page’s androgynous Sinon and black actress Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen of Troy as revisionist versions of Western hegemony. (Extolling Nolan’s “craft” is a way of affirming his politics.) Thus, The Odyssey is remade specifically to please leftists and declare a new cultural perspective on morality, civilization, patriotism, masculinity — all the issues now out of favor. The result is the usual and emotionally hollow, unheroic Nolan epic.

Nolan’s use of scale (the overmarketed IMAX viewing platform) perverts classical cinema as well as the literary classics. Nolan’s insensate followers — the Nolanoids — don’t appreciate great composition; their sense of aesthetics has been dulled. In their fascination with new technology, they forget what was achieved by David Lean’s enlarged aspect ratio in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago — the singular perfectionist visual craft as in Lean’s earlier small-scale movies.

Nolanoids exhibit the least sophisticated responses to image and sound, even when Nolan’s storyboards are essentially unimaginative, as in the sequences of the long-shot connecting Odysseus to Telemachus, the building of the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops that’s more Peter Jackson Halloweenish than Ray Harryhausen fantastic, and Odysseus strapped during the sea storm with the sirens. These don’t match the grandeur of any Zack Snyder set piece or rival the Homeric spectacles of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, the statuary opening of Raymond Bernard’s Les Misérables, from 1934, or the magnificent storm in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter. Those sequences were not just flashy; they were emotionally expressive and visually powerful.

Great cinema often disturbs TV-bred Millennials who resist cinema’s spiritual and erotic impact. That was the issue when Zack Snyder’s 300 was misinterpreted as a defense of the Iraq War rather than a revival of mysterious mythology. Nolan’s The Odyssey doesn’t resolve resistance to Western mythology but trivializes it. Both conservative fear and liberal enthusiasm for the film reveal a deeper moral and aesthetic crisis. This confusion peaked with the lugubrious Oppenheimer, which took advantage of both conservative and liberal perspectives about the atomic bomb. Yet the cultural demoralization was already catastrophic when The Dark Knight illustrated Nolan’s insensitive response to 9/11. Going back to Homer, Nolan kills the roots of visual narrative.