3 Hours Were Not Enough: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Today I saw The Odyssey. Yesterday I saw Project Hail Mary. I love those stories where a man has to fight against everything to get back home. Although Ryan Gosling doesn’t seem particularly eager to return in Project Hail Mary. And, at times, Matt Damon doesn’t look entirely convinced either in The Odyssey. A few days ago I watched Masters of the Universe. It also deals with returning home after a long time. Half jokingly I said I’d watched it as a warm up for The Odyssey.

Matt Damon is the guy who always has trouble getting home. We saw him in Saving Private Ryan. We saw him in The Martian. We saw him in Interstellar. How could Christopher Nolan not call this man to play the ultimate lost boy? Odysseus is the eternal wanderer. And if Batman wasn’t enough for Nolan, it was only a matter of time before he made a film about the father of Sherlock Holmes and of Batman himself. Odysseus was the great strategist. He used his intelligence and cunning to solve every challenge, every dilemma, and defeat monsters, something like the supervillains of his era.

This is not a review of The Odyssey. And don’t cry over spoilers. The story is more than three thousand years old and it still moves people. I seriously doubt you don’t know it. I’ve known it since I was little. I remember playing with plastic soldiers as a kid. I’d send an army off to war and, after the victory, make them return while facing every kind of adversity that prevented them all from getting home. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey in secondary school. Don’t tell me you didn’t. Homer was the original great writer of epic adventure novels.

Not long ago I was telling my daughter that I listen to music and watch movies because I’m looking for a reason. I never do it at random. That’s why I want to share some of the reasons I watched The Odyssey.

It is a story about decisions and consequences. In The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer proposed several revolutionary ideas. You can believe in the gods. You can believe in fate. You can believe in luck. But in the end, everything that happens to you springs from your decisions. Every decision brings consequences. It’s like the laws of physics: every action provokes a reaction. Don’t blame God, fate, or luck for the good or the bad that befalls you. Even when you decide not to decide, you have already made a decision. Ego is your worst enemy when it comes to choosing. And above all, perfect decisions do not exist.

Not long ago I was commenting on Nicolas Cage’s decision to enter the world of series with Spider-Noir. Cage said that ninety minutes of film weren’t enough for him to convey the emotions he wanted as an actor. Well, The Odyssey is a great three-hour trailer. I’m left waiting for the series based on The Odyssey that I hope Nolan has in mind someday. Yes, The Odyssey feels like a huge and magnificent preview of something even bigger.

Nolan handles time superbly. He constantly moves back and forth from the present to the past and then to the future. The editing is spectacular. We jump from one character to another at a frenetic pace. We follow Odysseus’s story, his son’s, witness the fall of Troy, and then the hero’s return alongside his queen. Nolan shows the lessons he learned from Orson Welles’s narrative style in Citizen Kane. Even so, three hours are not enough.

Nolan fills the screen with major Hollywood stars: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Samantha Morton, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Elliott Page, John Leguizamo, Mia Goth, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, and Travis Scott. Three hours are not enough for all of them to truly show what they are capable of. That can be frustrating. Some appear for less than five minutes.

I bet Samantha Morton knows this perfectly well. Her performance as Alpha in The Walking Dead was phenomenal. Here she uses her few minutes as the witch Circe to give us the closest thing to a genuine horror scene. If Nolan has said that one of the few genres he still has left to explore is horror, someone should remind him that he already directed a magnificent short horror film with Morton as the lead.

Jon Bernthal is another actor who knows how to shine with very little screen time. He already proved it in The Bear. Benny Safdie also devours the film in barely five minutes as King Agamemnon. His presence is colossal. He completely steals the show. His Agamemnon has nothing supernatural about him, yet he could perfectly well be an ancient Batman. He enters the scene with the authority of Darth Vader in Star Wars. Many of the comments online are about him. Although, to be honest, he is still a novice compared to the unforgettable appearance of Xerxes in 300, by Zack Snyder.

300 is the perfect companion piece to The Odyssey. There is a lot of that film in it, especially in the action scenes. I hope Benny Safdie keeps acting more than he directs, because The Smashing Machine fell far short of the spectacular Marty Supreme, directed by his brother Josh.

We can say that The Odyssey is an adaptation of Homer, but there is not the slightest doubt that Nolan turned it into a deeply personal film. He impregnated every scene with his style and his view of the world. That is the magic he shares with Orson Welles. This Odyssey belongs as much to Homer as it does to Nolan.

When we see Odysseus regain his memory on the beach with Calypso, the amnesiac protagonist of Memento appears. When we watch his men trapped on the beach, unable to advance toward Troy, we remember the Allied soldiers of Dunkirk. The famous wooden horse used to conquer Troy inevitably recalls Inception, where the strategy consists of entering other people’s minds to plant an idea, and the mission is once again guided by Elliott Page. Odysseus’s return to reunite with his son dialogues with Interstellar and its journey to return to his daughter. When Odysseus defends free will above the will of the gods, we find echoes of Tenet, my favorite Nolan film. When he designs the plan to take Troy and unleashes chaos by defying the laws of Zeus, the Oppenheimer who creates the most powerful weapon in the world and then bears the heavy consequences appears. When he returns to Ithaca, it is impossible not to think of Batman returning to Gotham after being defeated and exiled by Bane. Even at the beginning of the film, when the legendary Trojan horse appears half submerged on the beach, Nolan seems to pay homage to the final shot of Planet of the Apes. If we think about that saga and the way it plays with time and space, it is not hard to understand how Nolan’s mind works.

In every scene. In every decision. In every moment. It is clear that Nolan had a reason for filming it. He left nothing to chance.