There’s no question about whether you should see The Odyssey, it’s the cinema’s most irresistible offering this year. The masses are flocking to a big budget fantasy-action film, while the high-brows are dying to know how Christopher Nolan has mangled Homer’s epic. By luck or design, the movie has arrived at a quiet time when there are few must-sees, so its current box office blitz was hardly unexpected.
The Odyssey and The Iliad are the foundational texts of the western cultural tradition - a tradition currently being trashed in universities, as the Classics are being replaced by departments of Popular Culture. Although students allegedly prefer Taylor Swift to Plato, it seems that Homer is more popular than ever. Perhaps there’s some glimmer of recognition that all those characters with capes and leotards in the superhero films, owe their initial inspiration to the Greek myths and legends.
As for Homer himself, we have no reliable historical knowledege, only the stories of the ancient world that tell us he was a blind poet. We don’t know if such a person really existed, or if his two great epics may have been the work of several different authors. What we do know is that the poems were composed between 750 - 650 BCE and transmitted orally. The first film adaptation had to wait until 1911, when three Italian directors squeezed most of the story into a mere 44 minutes. No subsequent version has been so economical, with filmmakers making their own choices about what may be left out. One recent version, Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024), concentrated solely on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, omitting all the fantastic events of the ten-year voyage home – and saving a fortune in special effects.
By scrimping on the monsters, gods and witches, The Return transformed Homer’s story into a psychological drama of a man traumatised by war, wondering if he could ever be reaccepted by his family and his kingdom. It was a far cry from Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (1954), in which a swashbuckling Kirk Douglas worked his way with gusto through a full cast of monsters and vamps.
The greatness of the Odyssey is that it sustains many different interpretations. It’s essentially the story of a soldier returning from a brutal war of ten years, taking another decade to finally arrive home. Odysseus is a king on the island of Ithaca, but he has lost the best part of his life fighting on behalf of his Greek allies. In war he was known as a brilliant strategist, credited with the stratagem of the Trojan Horse which brought about the downfall of Troy. In the aftermath, he is struggling to regain his bearings.