The Odyssey, Baptised

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is visually stunning; travel agents must be booking record numbers of trips to Greece since the movie was released.

  It is also very violent and very loud. The director assumes that his audience is inured to such effects. If you aren’t, you might want to skip this one.

  With some trimming and re-arrangement of events, this movie is faithful to the story line of the original. But given the rapid pace of the movie’s action and the frequency with which its background music makes the dialog hard to understand, viewers who have not already read Homer’s Odyssey may find the action hard to follow.  Read the Odyssey before you see the movie.

  So what has Christopher Nolan made out of this masterpiece of eighth century B.C. Greek literature? He has given us a Christianized Odyssey. Which is to say, something very different in essence from Homer’s hard-edged epic.

  Between the modern reader and the classic works of Greek and Roman  literature, there stands an historical event that adds immensely to the difficulty, for that modern reader, of justly appraising and enjoying that literature. The historical event is the rise of Christianity.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Love your enemies.” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.”  All such phrases from the New Testament have become part of our thinking — so much so that we can hardly be aware of them. They would have sounded bizarre to an Homeric warrior. Nolan’s Odysseus watches Troy burn and collapse into ash and sorrows at the destruction and suffering that he sees — and is appalled to see what his cleverness has brought about.   This is Nolan’s half Christianized Odysseus — a figure who had more in common with Aeneas, the half Christianized hero of Vergil’s great Latin epic poem than with Homer’s Odysseus.

Viewers of Nolan-s movie who go on to read Homer’s Odyssey may be surprised and even repelled by the Odysseus they find there — a tougher character, a  remorseless sacker of cities, whose main attribute is not empathy but cleverness.  And reading Homer’s Odyssey, they will get something that they won’t get from Nolan’s movie: a chance to expand their sensibilities by looking at the world in a different way from our own.