NOTE: This is the first of two articles. It’s not a review of the extraordinary Christopher Nolan film that I just watched, now opening on screens around the world. I’ve read close to twenty first-rate, deeply pondered, intelligent, literate reviews of the movie written by professionals – and why should anyone read UN-intelligent, IL-literate, UN-professional anything in life? This is a factual piece inspired by the film, written for the high school students I’ll be facing in a classroom a month from now.
A new movie has come to a theater near you, and it happens to tell one of the most ancient and most important stories ever told. Yes, by anyone. Anywhere. The Odyssey has entered our lives with a tale first shared verbally almost 3,000 years ago, filled with men and women, gods and goddesses, monsters, and no small amount of fire and bloodshed. And one very famous fake horse.
There was, millennia ago in ancient Greece, a poet we forever know as Homer. And while we don’t know for sure that he ever really existed, we know someone of that name is credited with one blockbuster of an adventure story. Well, make that two. To the best of our understanding, the stories gathered into The Iliad and The Odyssey were handed down by word of mouth, generation after generation, until somebody bothered to write them down – in ancient Greek, naturally. And perhaps most significantly, every other story told by anyone since Homer’s time – yes, every book, every movie, every video game – has borrowed, sometimes heavily, on the myths and meanings Homer left us.
Christopher Nolan, the movie director who gave us the much-awarded, wildly successful Oppenheimer, also created not one, not two, but three very dark Batman movies, among his many films. It probably took someone that admired (and that well-paid) to take on The Odyssey. No matter what he says now, it must have felt like kind of a dare. Even with his box office clout, it’s the type of towering $250-million challenge that could damage a career. Or even end one. It has happened in Hollywood.
But on July 17, surrounded by excitement and controversy, The Odyssey opened on IMAX screens around the world. Homer tells a really BIG story, Nolan reasoned. Why not film it for the biggest movie screens anyone had built yet? His Odyssey is the first theatrical-release movie filmed entirely in IMAX, and some fans are traveling hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to view it on the very biggest IMAX screens.
One of the most interesting things about this modern cinema masterpiece by a modern cinema master is that it might be THE most ancient story. Whatever parts of it actually happened in human history happened centuries before anyone wrote such things down – before history as we think of it existed. Prehistoric, we like to say. Of course, dinosaurs didn’t write Jurassic Park either, but the absence of written history gives us immense challenges and a certain amount of freedom.
The Odyssey is the second half of two Homeric narratives, a book now known as The Iliad starting things off with a war between ancient Greeks and people known as Trojans. Those people lived in a place called Troy, probably on the west coast of today’s Turkey. They ended up losing the war after those wily Greeks sneaked a wooden horse inside their towering city walls. At night, while the Trojans slept, Greek soldiers hiding inside this “Trojan Horse” crawled out and slaughtered everybody they could find. Victory was theirs in the legendary Trojan War.
Much like a sequel at the movies today, The Odyssey gives us the “after” story of Odysseus, a Greek king who left his family for ten years to fight in the war and then, after winning, spends almost another ten years trying to sail home. In the story, many famous things try to stop him – including a one-eyed monster called a cyclops and gorgeous women called sirens who lure ships onto the deadly rocks with their beautiful singing. As best we can tell, Homer didn’t borrow these things, these ideas – he created them. And storytellers have been borrowing from him ever since.
Today, whenever people go on a long journey filled with stops and starts, especially if it’s by sea to reach someplace meaningful to them, they are likely to call it an “odyssey.” The Odyssey is a timeless part of our culture. It’s part of our shared language.
Christopher Nolan was smart enough to dig into The Iliad (and the later Roman Aeniad) just enough to place Odysseus, played by actor Matt Damon, inside that famous wooden horse. In fact, the trick with the horse is his idea, leading not only to victory but to thousands upon thousands of bloody deaths. Odysseus may be a hero in the ancient Greek sense – after all, he gave us what’s now known as the “hero’s journey,” familiar from Star Wars and every single Disney animated film – but he is a sad and guilt-ridden hero. He cannot shake off the evil things he has done, and his idea of the gods can’t, won’t and don’t forgive him either.
Fascinatingly, Nolan’s previous Oscar-winning film, Oppenheimer, is about the physicist who led the effort creating the atomic bomb that ended World War II. The real Robert Oppenheimer never truly recovered from the deaths and horrors brought about by his brilliant, history-changing creation. This connection between the two films has been much discussed in the most intelligent reviews of The Odyssey, as have many other recurring, usually dark Nolan themes from the films that came before.
Really, isn’t it an intriguing human process – to dig back into history to perhaps the most ancient story and deliver into modern movie theaters a film about today and even tomorrow? The Greeks had a word for the pride that inspires men to break the laws of the gods and do evil things to make themselves look grand. They called it hubris. Take a look around. There’s no shortage of hubris in our world today.
