The Odyssey is proof that old things still matter—maybe more than ever

Unless you’ve been living in a cave blocked by a rock (and if so, maybe get out of there), you’ve heard about, and likely have already seen, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

The adaptation of Homer’s three-thousand-year-old poem caused a considerable stir prior to its release due to some Nolan’s casting choices. But those debates have largely been quelled by the release of the film itself, which has been a mega-hit at the box office—to the thunderous applause of both critics and audiences.

The massive success of The Odyssey, and the tidal wave of interest and commentary generated by it, is a telling and even pivotal moment for our culture. It demonstrates that, despite all appearances to the contrary, five things often treated as old and outdated—from movie theaters to the moral law—still matter to us, and for us, and matter deeply.

Movie theaters

Fewer people are going to the movie theaters. This year, AMC has seen attendance drop by 26 million compared to 2019 (more than a 25% decline), and already at that pre-pandemic point, the numbers had been falling for nearly two decades.

There could be numerous causes for the decline, but the most obvious is the proliferation of the internet, smartphones, and smart TVs. Movies can now be streamed anywhere, anytime, at the click of a button. Studios have been forced to get creative, releasing films direct-to-TV instead of, concurrently with, or shortly after a theatrical release.

But The Odyssey is on pace to be one of the biggest releases of the year. It’s also the first major film made entirely with IMAX cameras for IMAX viewing—an as anyone who saw it in that mega-screen, mega-audio format can attest, this was not something that could be replicated on a phone or even a TV. (As David Lynch, a cinematic inspiration for Nolan, once put it, “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film.”)

Going to the movies, to borrow from the opening line of The Odyssey, is “a time of apparent magic”—a magic that’s only heightened by IMAX. But at the heart of that experience is joining a giant crowd of people to react together in real time to a wild journey like The Odyssey. (The same principle applies, of course, to live theater too—which, though it might lack the audio-visual explosiveness of an IMAX movie, is explosive in its own way.)

Human art

Christopher Nolan, though clearly no Luddite, has drawn some sharp lines with technology: He refuses to own a smart phone, and he advocates “a healthy skepticism” with AI (“a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside it”).

But most remarkably for him as a contemporary filmmaker, Nolan is famously resistant to the use of CGI. He used a massive puppet to help construct the cave-dwelling Cyclops; old-school camera and casting tricks to create the illusion of a race of bloodthirsty giants; and, most memorably, makeup and animatronics reminiscent of 90s-era Jim Henson movies to depict Circe’s “handiwork.” When we look at scenery, we’re looking at real places—from Iceland to Greece to Morocco—and when we watch boats sail in water, we’re watching real boats in real water.

This commitment to the human element in filmmaking—avoiding CGI, AI, and all manner of digital shortcuts—cuts against the grain of just about everything churned out in the entertainment world today. It’s more costly, more difficult, and more time-consuming. But the result, when paired with the care and expertise of an artist like Nolan, is far richer and more rewarding.

Not only does The Odyssey not feel hokey—it feels immersive, visceral, and elevating in a way no computer graphics, however good, ever do. The sacrifice has paid off—and audiences know it. As an actor acquaintance put it to me, “The Odyssey proves people still want human movies.”

Classic stories

Sure, The Odyssey is masterful moviemaking—an action-packed audio-visual powerhouse from a mad scientist of cinema. But how does it fare as a story, especially as an adaptation of one of the foundational stories of Western civilization?

Here, the reaction has been more mixed. Emily Wilson, whose progressive translation of The Odyssey Nolan has referenced, wrote a blistering and much-discussed critique of the film. Wilson emphasizes the deviations from Homer’s original and argues that the movie is shallow and “gimmicky”: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

Meanwhile, conservatives, long before the film’s release, have been upset about some of Nolan’s casting choices, arguing that they tarnish the story’s authenticity and promote a liberal agenda.

The critics have raised some fair concerns, but they often fall into a pedantry and politicization that misses the forest for the trees. Nolan’s adaptation is a compelling Hollywood story and, in the main, faithful to the contours of The Odyssey. Yes, he makes some striking changes, but most adaptations do—and this ancient Greek poem is about as far removed from the world of movies as any.

As Jonathan Pageau succinctly put it, “A movie is not a poem. You can’t make The Odyssey into a movie. It’s not possible if you wanted to do it exactly like the poem. And also then, what’s the point?”

And while Nolan could have parted with Homer in more substantial ways, he didn’t. As Tod Worner, a man of the humanities but also of common sense, put it in his on-the-money review, the omissions “do not break the film” and the character debates were ultimately “jots and tittles of little import.” (Pageau even argues, provocatively, that Nolan’s casting is itself a kind of Trojan Horse trickery.) The Odyssey, Worner writes, did “much honor” to Homer, whose works have recently been subjected to attempted bans in schools.

Indeed, the poem is now flying off the shelves thanks to Nolan’s film, introducing countless people, perhaps for the first time, to this classic work.

Moral law

What is the heart of that story in Nolan’s retelling? Another fair critique of Nolan’s Odyssey is that there’s just a lot going on, not only narratively but thematically. For a movie with a runtime of nearly three hours, there’s not much space to process its meaning until the credits roll.

But one could make a strong case that Nolan’s primary aim is what C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man called “the Tao”—that universal moral law that can be detected around the world and across the centuries. There’s an objective moral order, a right and wrong, that we either meet or fall short of, both as individuals and as a society. Cultures may disagree about what, exactly, is good and honorable, but they don’t disagree about the value of goodness and honor.

At the heart of that moral law, for Nolan, is xenia, or “Zeus’s law”—an ancient Greek concept of hospitality. The law, which Nolan compares to the golden rule, emphasizes kindness to strangers—foreigners, travelers, even beggars—who could be gods in disguise. Nolan depicts the Trojan War as essentially a series of violations of xenia, and the inevitable cycles of violence and retribution that unfold as a result. It’s the loss of social harmony through the flouting of moral order—the abolition of what makes us human.

But The Odyssey is not just about compassion toward others; it’s also about the personal excesses that threaten to engulf and rend us. Each vignette on the journey becomes a vivid metaphor for some kind of temptation, whether toward theft (as in the cave of the cyclops) or lust (as with the sirens’ song) or a drug-induced state of oblivion (as with the lotus flowers). Indeed, while gluttony is maybe one of the least discussed moral issues of our time, Nolan’s vivid depiction of this vice (and, by extension, any unrestrained appetite) in the cottage of Circe is one of the most impactful and unforgettable in film history.

Christian civilization

Nolan’s moral vision, though, isn’t that of Homer. As Wilson rightly puts it, “Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour—all perfectly fine in the world of Homer—are, in this version, very bad.” Wilson sardonically lampoons what she takes to be the movie’s “American ideas” about charity and the ideal “American family man.”

But what this all amounts to, at root—whether Nolan intended it or not—is that the ideas are, fundamentally, Christian ideas. The Odyssey assumes a moral framework that the West now takes for granted, but that came to birth through the Catholic Church’s influence. Indeed, in Nolan’s retelling, the invasion of Troy through the deceit of the wooden horse approaches, as Samuel Korb rightly notes, an image of original sin.

A specifically Christian interpretation of the story also becomes, within this adaptation, that much more natural. We can read Odysseus, as Clement of Alexandria does in his second-century Exhortation to the Heathen, as a figure of the human soul journeying through the temptations and dangers of this life toward a higher world: “Sail past the song [of the sirens],” Clement writes; “it works death. . . . Bound to the wood of the cross, you shall be freed from destruction: the word of God will be your pilot, and the Holy Spirit will bring you to anchor in the haven of heaven.”

We can even read the kingly protagonist, especially in the film’s last act, as a Christ figure: God, in the “disguise” of human likeness and the form of a slave (Phil. 2:7), arrives to deal with his enemies, to reestablish justice, and to reclaim his house and his bride and to elevate his child.

But while this double helix of interpretation arguably runs through much of this movie—Odysseus-as-Christian now turning to the fore, now Odysseus-as-Christ—we never quite “get to” Christianity, least of all in the end. This is, after all, still a pagan myth, and the climax of the story, in both the book and the film, is a veritable bloodbath. Indeed, Nolan’s film wrestles with itself morally: Why is the wanton slaughter of the Trojans after hiding in a wooden horse a kind of “original sin,” but the wanton slaughter of the suitors after hiding in a beggar’s cloak a kind of “redemption”? We remain trapped in the same endless cycle of bloodletting—a pre-Christian paganism that pants for the Gospel, a ruthless justice that longs for divine mercy.

Indeed, Nolan’s Odysseus—despite his regular touchpoints with Athena—is consistently skeptical about these pagan gods and their muddled meddling with man. They seem, at best, what Lewis called “good dreams”—the shadowy anticipations of some divine fullness as yet unrevealed.

The film thus seems to strive forward, with remarkable focus and energy, to that which came before us—as if to say, with Chesterton, “Paganism was the largest thing in the world and Christianity was larger; and everything else has been comparatively small.”

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