Admittedly, we're no experts on Homer's written adaptation of The Odyssey. Our first experience with the epic was in college—not high school, as was the case for many of our peers. Either way, this was years ago now. More recently (and embarrassingly), we've engaged extensively with Jorge Rivera-Herran's Epic, a feature-length album musical adapting the events of Odysseus's journey. We're perfectly aware of the liberties Rivera-Herran takes, and have familiarized ourselves with the actual events of the source—the plot, but not the nuances of its themes and characters.
All of this said, our first impression of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey was that it was a fairly straightforward interpretation. The movie's opening crawl declaring its period to be "a time of apparent magic" struck us as odd, surely, but the rest? Here is boyish Telemachus and his Mentor (who has the eyes of Athena, by the by), Telemachus's mother the distantly faithful Penelope, and her suitors, 108 horrid house guests, spearheaded by the antagonistic Antinous. Here, too, is war-weary Odysseus, kept captive by Calypso. The framing device of Odysseus recounting his travels to her is new, but the outset of those travels is not. Again, here is the Trojan Horse, the subsequent sacking of Troy, and the subsequent subsequent sacking of a seaside city. Wily Odysseus, always with the city-sacking*. It smells like The Odyssey to us.
It is when the veterans reach the cave of Polyphemus that Nolan's adaptational license begins to show. Trekking past the fluffy sheep that tease the presence of the cyclops, they find his home, furnished with oversized cheese cloths. Odysseus comments "It's pretty good cheese," demonstrating his signature wit. And then Polyphemus is revealed—a tall, Gollum-esque humanoid returning home with his flock. Despite his bipedal shape, though, the cyclops's behavior is seemingly animalistic. Unlike in Homer's version, Polyphemus does not communicate with his intruders. Yet he shows awareness of them in some capacity: he eats two of Odysseus's men. So, seemingly, this is an interpretation of Polyphemus that behaves not like an overgrown shepherd, but an apex predator... who herds sheep.
Finishing his man-shaped meal, Polyphemus immediately falls asleep, acting like neither a man with intruders in his home nor a predator with prey in its den. The stakes of this scene are incredibly confusing. Is there urgency here? Does Polyphemus pose a threat to the soldiers? Did he mistake two of them for sheep? The crew later blinds the monster, but it's unclear what this achieves, since, again, it is ambiguous whether he was cognizant of them in the first place. In the end, Odysseus does not so much outsmart the son of Poseidon as lead his men in scrambling out of the cave with the flock of sheep. The subject of the "Nobody" incident being left on the cutting room floor has surely been beaten to death by other critics, but it is a shame, isn't it? So much for that legendary wit.
If we linger on the Polyphemus incident too long, it's only because it illustrates our major issue with the work: it has no clear vision. The portrayal of Polyphemus as mindlessly monstrous could be functional (if a bit boring), but there is an outright failure to commit to that interpretation. Instead, he seems to be neither man nor beast, a thoughtless, illogical obstacle for Odysseus to struggle past. In one scene, the men realize that Polyphemus can talk after all, and Eurylochus questions why the cyclops didn't communicate with them. Odysseus quips, "Do you reason with ants?" This is a line that might be clever if the gargantuan monstrosity of the cyclops were more tangible. In reality, though, the men are not ants to Polyphemus—he is maybe three times the size of one.
Other elements of fantasy are watered down or dialed back as well: the Laestrygonians are not man-eating giants, but silent, armored executioners; Charybdis is no sea-swallowing monster, but an enormous whirlpool. Likewise, the gods are never seen directly influencing the events of the story. When the ocean veers the men off-course, it's rationalized by Odysseus being cursed by Poseidon. When a storm takes the lives of his crewmen, it's because they angered Helios, who sent Zeus to seek vengeance. Even Athena, who speaks directly to Odysseus, seems only to take the form of his conscience. When Mentor is killed near the end of the movie, Odysseus chides Telemachus: there are no gods disguised as men.
Is Odysseus right? One recalls the intertitle of the movie: "In a time of apparent magic." Does the word "apparent" mean that magic seems to be such, but is not in reality? Telemachus must be a fool, then, for believing his Mentor is Pallas Athena. Still, it isn't as if there aren't supernatural oddities in the story. How else can the stony tendrils of Scylla reach down to pluck six of Odysseus's men? How else can Circe turn Odysseus's crew into pigs? And how else can Odysseus speak to the dead (minus, strikingly, his mother Anticlea)?
Perhaps magic is "apparent" here in the sense that it is readily viewed, self-evident. In which case, the word seems extraneous. Or, more charitably, perhaps Nolan fully intends for us to meditate on the ambiguity at play. Is the magic apparent or apparent? We're no Derrida scholars, so maybe Nolan has us beat.
It hardly makes a différance. The result is a confused Odyssey that plays at a grounded, realist take on the source material, but can't quite stick the landing. It's a bit brutal, yes, and it's gray, gray, gray, because those are things that mature stories are. Nolan doesn't seem to know how to write around the elements of fantasy, so instead he muddles them, as if this makes them any less present. The gods can't be too hands-on; the monsters can't be too big, or too monstrous. The movie is better off being a realistic historical fiction, or a fantasy. Instead, it chooses to be both, resulting in a visual text that lacks a coherent identity.
Don't get us wrong. We wouldn't like the movie in either instance. But we would respect it a little more.
* What a clumsy, utilitarian verb, "to sack."