{"id":250367,"date":"2025-12-25T05:43:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T05:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/250367\/"},"modified":"2025-12-25T05:43:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T05:43:14","slug":"dont-judge-christopher-nolans-odyssey-on-historical-accuracy-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/250367\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t judge Christopher Nolan\u2019s Odyssey on historical accuracy alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday marked the release of the official trailer<\/a> for Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey, which comes out next summer. Nolan\u2019s film is the latest chapter in the afterlife of a hero whose very name \u2014 built on a verb that means \u201cto cause pain to oneself and others\u201d \u2014 is Trouble.<\/p>\n

Homer\u2019s epic about \u201cthe man of twists and turns\u201d inspired dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in which Odysseus appears alternately noble and base, shifting and shifty. Dante put Odysseus in the eighth circle of Hell for his fraudulent counsel, whereas Tennyson\u2019s poem \u201cUlysses\u201d<\/a> celebrated his unquenchable desire \u201cto follow knowledge like a sinking star, \/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought\u201d. And the story of Odysseus\u2019s homecoming has generated works in a range of narrative media, from James Joyce\u2019s novel Ulysses to the Coens\u2019 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Shay Charka\u2019s Judessey, a graphic novel of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Nolan has already been criticised for inaccurately<\/a> portraying the Mycenaean helmets, armour, and ships in use at the time of the historical siege of Troy. But given that no feature-length adaptation of the Odyssey can hope to provide more than scraps from the banquet of Homer, what should one look for in the film?<\/p>\n

More important, surely, is fidelity to Homer\u2019s plot, characterisation, and leading themes. The trailer\u2019s voiceover, which begins \u201cAfter years of combat, no one could stand between my men and home \u2014 not even me\u201d, nicely captures the lethal tension between Odysseus\u2019s lust for adventure and his soldiers\u2019 war-weariness. Indeed, Homer\u2019s hero arrives home alone, having lost perhaps 500 men due to his recklessness and incompetence as a leader.<\/p>\n

Nor would viewers forgive erasing the immortals from the story, as Wolfgang Petersen did almost entirely in the 2004 film Troy. It\u2019s not just that Odysseus couldn\u2019t have prevailed over Penelope\u2019s 108 suitors without Athena\u2019s help. During his voyage, he is repeatedly threatened by divine witches and nymphs who wish to keep him in oblivion as a pet or a lover \u2014 or, in the case of various female monsters, to kill or eat him. Toxic femininity plays as big a role<\/a> in the post-war world of the Odyssey as its masculine counterpart does in the Iliad.<\/p>\n

Then, not entirely at odds with the inclusion of non-human figures, there is the question of realism. Audiences won\u2019t quibble about small anachronisms in battle gear so long as the film has the feel of real life. This goes for the immortals as well, where the key is to go light on special effects while capturing their all-too-human failings of lust, rivalry and wrath. The 2006 film 300, about the Battle of Thermopylae, was marred by its video-game aesthetic, including the absurdities of an enormous, rhinoceros-like beast of war and a seven-foot-tall emperor.<\/p>\n

Here, too, The Odyssey\u2019s trailer is promising, with what appears to be plenty of grimy authenticity. Homer spends some time describing Odysseus\u2019s rocky island and simple farmstead. Nolan has an opportunity to show the natural beauty of Ithaca\u2019s coves and hills, as well as the dirt floor of his palace and the stump of an olive tree that anchors his bed.<\/p>\n

Homer\u2019s Odyssey reveals the deepest longings and tensions of the human soul and the fundamental structure of the journey of life: nostalgia for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever. It is this human meaning, absent from so much of what Hollywood produces these days, that moviegoers crave. If Nolan delivers that in a fresh and vital form, questions of historical accuracy will be irrelevant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yesterday marked the release of the official trailer for Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey, which comes out next summer.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[130201,130202,18,117,90306,19,17,130203,30853,130204,16003,5279],"class_list":{"0":"post-250367","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-ancient-greece","9":"tag-chirstopher-nolan","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-homer","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-odysseus","16":"tag-the-odyssey","17":"tag-trojan-war","18":"tag-ulysses","19":"tag-uncategorized"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115778617553431066","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}