To start with something else:
Insomnia
The best way to understand what Nolan has done with Homer’s Odyssey is to watch Nolan’s film Insomnia (2002), and then the original Norwegian film Insomnia (1997) that it is a “remake” of. Nolan himself is very fond of his Insomnia, made after Memento (2000) and before Batman Begins (2005):
I’m very proud of the film. I think, of all my films, it’s probably the most underrated. […] The reality is it’s one of my most personal films in terms of what it was to make it. It was a very vivid time in my life. It was my first studio film, I was on location, it was the first time I’d worked with huge movie stars. […] But I think the film holds up very well. That’s not really for me to say, but every now and again I meet a filmmaker and that’s actually the film that they’re interested in or want to talk about. Yeah, very proud of the film.
I recommend this order (watching the remake first, then the original), for two reasons. Firstly, Nolan’s film is much more entertaining. You are less likely to turn it off, or indeed to be “turned off”. It fits into the genre of a cop thriller. (Never seen Robin Williams so completely disappear into a role like that, and not be “ROBIN WILLIAMS!” at all.) Secondly, if you watch Nolan’s film first, there will still be something new and interesting about the Norwegian film. If you watch it in the other order, Nolan’s film will seem like an inferior Hollywoodization that removes a lot of what makes the Norwegian film different. But this is not the right way to look at it. What has happened here is that Nolan has in fact carried a lot from the original film, so much so that the director of the Norwegian film said:
it was quite close, stylistically, to the original. I felt lucky that it’s such a well crafted, smart film and that it had a really good director handling it, because as a remake I think it did really well and it doesn’t hurt any original if a remake is well done. So I felt I was lucky that Christopher Nolan took it upon himself to do it.
And yet by changing a few things here and there, Nolan makes the movie entirely different. The Al Pacino character from Nolan’s Insomnia is much more palatable (and recognizable) to audiences than the Stellan Skarsgård character from the Norwegian Insomnia: the latter’s shooting of a live dog, and (one hopes) his several forays into sexual assault, would land even worse with an American audience. So Nolan has turned it into a Hollywood film with clear moral tones: he carries the visual/stylistic universe of the original, but into a very different moral universe. This was his intention as well, as he says describing his reaction when he first saw the Norwegian film (“twice in one sitting”):
I’d love to do this in a slightly different way. If you take that situation, you can make it into a Hollywood movie with big movie stars. You could make it like Heat.
Similarly, with The Odyssey, he has carried some dimensions from Homer’s Odyssey, and done them really well, while some other dimensions are very far apart. If I had to summarize my opinion in one sentence, it would be that in Nolan’s Odyssey, many of the same events occur as in Homer’s Odyssey, but they happen to a person very different from Homer’s Odysseus.
What is added…
I actually watched The Odyssey two times. The first time was from front-row seats (those were the only ones available), at a showing that was past my usual bedtime, and I kept nodding off (something about its music is oddly soporific to me). I did not like the movie much. The second time, after having meanwhile watched the two Insomnia movies, I attempted to watch The Odyssey more sympathetically. This time I went in not expecting to see Odysseus at all, but instead “stock Nolan protagonist”. I watched it at one of the “true” 70mm IMAX locations, from a good seat, in the daytime. I put aside all thoughts of Homer’s Odyssey, and just tried to enjoy it as a movie in its own right. This time I liked it, as a movie.
In Indian culture, there is a notion of the guru as a boatman (ಅಂಬಿಗ), who ferries people to the other side. The guru is familiar not only with The Other Side and where the disciples are, but is also skilled at taking them along; all they need to do is allow themselves to get carried along (as my father says in this context, ತೆಪ್ಪದಲ್ಲಿ ತೆಪ್ಪಗಿರು). The idea applies to regular teachers too: the best teacher is not necessarily the one who knows the subject best, nor the one who is most friendly with the students (though both of these help), but the one who is most skilled at meeting students where they are, and then taking them along in the direction of the subject. A filmmaker also carries his audience somewhere, but as he does not interact directly with the audience and it is up to the audience to engage with his passive artifact, he is constrained by the target audience: he cannot take them in directions they are not willing to go. So the filmmaker needs to know not just his subject but also his audience. Nolan has over the course of his career succeeded in making films that are interesting to him but targeted at ever-larger audiences, and given his success I’m willing to defer to his intuitions about what audiences will accept.
So having acknowledged that he cannot possibly take his audience to the same place that Homer takes his (fewer) readers, is is still interesting to ask: where does he take the audience? What aspects of the Odyssey are present, and what are lost?
Some of the things he fails to bring across are actually very crucial IMO (more on that later). At the same time, some of the things he has added do not work well. These come from his intellectualization / reading of history, such as about the Bronze Age collapse and the theory of the “Sea Peoples” (neither of which is present in Homer’s obviously). Such injection of “out of universe” ideas into an “in universe” setting is often jarring; many people online have made fun of certain dialogue from the film, like “our age of bronze is collapsing” or Odysseus saying that future generations will sing songs about them because “songs will be all they have”, i.e. they will be illiterate (such a cheapening of the idea of being immortalized in the words of the people!). What I actually found even more jarring was the frequent mention of “Zeus’s law”, which in the film is the idea that one must treat guests and strangers well because any of them may be a god in disguise. Now it is true that Zeus was the god of strangers and that the good treatment of strangers was a deep part of the culture, but obviously anything that is such a deep part of a culture would be not be called by an explicit name each time, and would recede into the background as a shared assumption, the way it does in Homer’s Odyssey. (What adds to the problem is that in English, “Zeus” actually is an unusual word, as English phonotactics goes.)
The moment in the movie that I found the most annoying is when Odysseus tells Penelope that starting the Trojan war over Helen is just Agamemnon’s excuse for breaking Troy’s control over the trade routes. In the Greek tradition, starting the Trojan war over Helen was just Agamemnon’s excuse to wage war, because he (like Winston Churchill) was a warmonger at heart; he was exhilarated by the idea and glory of war. Such warlike ambitions are in keeping with the ethos of the Greek epic, and to replace them with mercantile considerations, even if those could conceivably have been true historically, brings us crashing down from the epic world to the mundane world… the movie swings back again with its portrayal of Agamemnon being a repository of rage wreaking destruction on Troy when the gates open. Nolan tries to have it both ways / ride two horses, and although he is more capable than most at pulling it off, the effect is still unsatisfying.
(Another instance of presenting two views at once is in the same scene of Odysseus and Penelope, and does work well IMO: this is the ambiguity about Helen’s kidnapping vs eloping. Odysseus says one thing, Penelope says the other, and they brush it aside. The Greek tradition is divided on this—Homer himself is somewhat ambiguous, and as I learned from Sumanth’s talk, there was a belief in later centuries that Homer was struck blind by the curse of Helen, the daughter of Zeus, for portraying her abduction as willing elopement.)
…and what is removed
The most conspicuous absence in Nolan’s Odyssey is that of the gods. Homer’s Odyssey opens with a council of the gods: Poseidon is away, Athena speaks to Zeus, they send Hermes to Calypso, then Athena visits Telemachus taking the form of a visitor etc. And throughout the Odyssey the gods are ever-present, always dictating the course of events, frequently taking human form and talking to the characters, etc. Nor are they shy about making their presence known. In the very first book of the Odyssey, after Athena has spoke to Telemachus, she turns into a bird and flies upward, and Telemachus realizes he has spoken to a god. Again this happens in Book 3 when Telemachus and Athena (in the form of Mentor) speak to Nestor and his men: after she speaks to them, she flies away in the form of an eagle, and all are amazed.
(The following is too off-topic even by my standards so I’ll only mention it briefly: some of the accounts that Julian Jaynes gathers for his crackpot-or-genius theory can be reinterpreted, unintended by him, as showing that the ancients really had easier access to their gods, somewhat like Indian accounts of a kṛta-yuga.)
In Nolan’s film on the other hand, apart from the too-frequent mentions of “Zeus’s law” (it is noteworthy that Zeus himself is barely mentioned except as part of this phrase), the only god that appears is Athena, and only to Odysseus as a private apparition. In interviews, when asked about whether the gods are real in his Odyssey, Nolan merely says they are “real to them”, to the ancient Greeks.
Actually Nolan does something clever: in the place in Homer where Telemachus talks to Athena in the form a visitor, Nolan has Telemachus tell the visitor “you have wise eyes… Athena’s eyes”. Later, corresponding to the place in Homer where Athena takes the form of Mentor to accompany Telemachus as he boards his ship, again Telemachus tells him the same thing: “you have wise eyes… Athena’s eyes”. So far, this works as a clever way for the film to allude to Athena taking that form (to allow for the possibility, for those familiar with Homer), without committing to the notion. But all this comes crashing down when Telemachus meets Odysseus and tells him the same thing, to which Odysseus chides him: do not look for gods among men.
This brings us to the biggest thing lost in Nolan’s Odyssey:
Odysseus
Homer’s Odysseus, apart from being wise and brave, is noble, an important aspect of which is how pious he is. He never misses an opportunity to pray to the appropriate god. Apart from prayers to Zeus, to Athene and so on, when he reaches the shore of the kingdom of Alcinous, he even prays to the river god. He is always aware and accepting of the fact that events, people’s decisions, and people’s attributes are in the hands of the gods. He is so innately pious that even when lying—when telling his entirely made-up stories, pretending to be some nonexistent character—he still acknowledges the power of the gods: for example, during the “Cretan lie”, he describes his Cretan persona as (translation by A. S. Kline, emphasis mine):
I was a fighting man. A life of labour on the land would never have suited me, nor would a house, even if it was full of handsome children. I loved war, and the oared ships, shining spears and arrows, fateful things that make others shudder. But I suppose a god set the love of all that in my heart, since different men take delight in different occupations.
(This echoes what he says about people’s gifts, when not lying.) For that matter (and I must say I found this funny), a bit later when he pretends to have fought in the Trojan war alongside Odysseus, he even attributes to a god his character venturing into the cold without a jacket:
I am not long for this life: I’ve no cloak, and the cold is killing me. Some god persuaded me to wear a tunic only, and there’s no escaping this frost.
Homer’s Odysseus is a better man than most, and more moral, because he is more pious. Homer opens the Odyssey by mentioning the episode with the cattle of Helios: Odysseus’s men did not sufficiently revere the sun god to abstain despite their hunger, unlike him.
In contrast, Nolan is operating within a modern worldview (his and that of much of his audience) where intelligent men do not believe in gods (and definitely not a multitude of “pagan” gods), nor do they accept their fate. Nolan’s Odysseus has private visions of Athena, who could well be a mental projection of his, but that’s about it. The film’s Odysseus is wiser than his men because they are superstitious and he is not: he says something to the effect that “they became convinced that it was Poseidon’s curse {and I could not convince them otherwise}". He tries to stay aloof and superior, in not sharing their belief. As he did with Insomnia, Nolan has changed the source character into one more understandable and palatable to the audience. The movie is built around a “defy the gods” narrative (the phrase was on posters) which completely inverts the character of Odysseus — Nolan’s Odysseus is driven by such defiance and by his own guilt.
Normally this need not be a problem; a film could well have its own spin on characters’ personalities. But in the case of the Odyssey something important is lost, because, despite the many interesting events that occur in the book, the Odyssey is at heart simply about Odysseus: the ancient Greeks and Romans considered the Iliad the “book of war/weapons” and the Odyssey “the book of the man” (which is why, as I learned from Sumanth’s talk again, Virgil begins his Aeneid with a declaration that he will do both in the same work: “Arma virumque cano”, I shall sing of arms and the man—in his case Aeneas—doing both what Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey do). Having the same events happen, but to a very different man, changes the essence of the work in this case.
Indian culture too, in parallel with the Greek view, holds that life runs like a chariot on the two wheels of daiva (chance / fate / divine will) and puruṣa-prayatna (human effort). Homer’s Odysseus fully accepts that some things will be out of his control, but never ceases striving, never slacks in his strenuous effort. This balance is a central challenge of life and probably the most valuable thing we learn from Homer’s Odysseus, and that is unfortunately absent in the film.