THE ODYSSEY: A BORING MASTERPIECE
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…
This is probably the first concept people should understand before they attempt to write any essay or article about Nolan’s new movie.
It’s called The Odyssey, the main character is Ulysses, king of Ithaca, father of Telemachus and husband of Queen Penelope. He went to Troy to fight in the war, and came back twenty years later.
Those are the similarities between Homer’s hero and this new Ulysses, but Nolan did something else, he gave his Ulysses the heartbreaking gift of introspection that leads the new character on a different path from what those of us who read The Odyssey in high school and university remember.
Nolan creates a new narration using old characters, familiar and known, to express his view of the modern world and how things didn’t change much in the almost 3000 years since the first embodiment of the oral tradition that we now know as The Odyssey was created.
Agamemnon: the embodiment of corrupted power.
We heard a lot about the costumes. Some have criticized them before the movie was even out because they are nothing like the armors warriors would have worn, but we can’t deny that one of the more detailed one in Nolan’s movie is Agamemnon’s armor.
Black, huge, it hides the body of a man who is not man anymore, but the supreme commander of the Greek expedition. The armor is disproportionate, turning Agamemnon into something barely human, but it is the crest on top of the helmet that represents how disjointed Agamemnon is from every other Greek on the battlefield.
Black, like the armor, the helmet shows one of the few points of color in the back, where a decoration like human vertebrae in gold reminds us of Hades, King of the Underworld and it express without words what Agamemnon turned into.
Fueled by hunger for power and the need to take control over the trade roads through the sea from Troy, Agamemnon becomes a monster among men. He sacrifices his own daughter to please the Gods and have a safe passage towards Troy. He uses his own brother’s humiliation as an excuse to justify a war that lasts ten years, all to be the winner, the conqueror, the destroyer.
But all of this has a price. One that is not paid on the battlefield, but at home when the war and its horror should be forgotten and life should be ready to be lived again.
Agamemnon the leader gives way to Agamemnon the man, who is greeted by his queen, honored, and lured into vulnerability by the promise of her embrace. The armor is gone and put aside. The king is ready for peace, but it’s not peace that is waiting for him, only death. The price of his own daughter.
Ten years of hate and resentment growing inside the heart of a woman who, like many others, have been abandoned for ten years, forgotten because men are not made for civilian life.
Agamemnon becomes the first warning of the consequences of what losing our humanity can bring.
The Odyssey, a cry against war
Nolan does what he knows best. He tells us a story about a broken man who is eaten alive by regret and guilt. It answers the question: what does war do to those who survive? Between survivor’s guilt and PTSD, Ulysses fails to comprehend what is impossible to explain.
As a man he follows Agamemnon to war. As a king, he bends the knee to another king, who should have been at best primus inter pares, but who becomes the leader of the expedition against Troy.
Why? Because he knows Agamemnon wouldn’t let him stay home, his revenge would have destroyed Ithaca and his whole family. These are the last true words Penelope hears from her husband.
Ulysses knows the truth about Agamemnon, because he knows the human nature of his power: violent, stolen, given to him by human laws and not offered to him by the Gods. Agamemnon is the older brother and the owner of the bigger army. Against him, the other Greek commanders couldn’t stand a chance.
It is better to follow a brute than to endure his wrath.
So Agamemnon leads them to war and after ten years, Ulysses is the one who wins the war for the Greek army with deceit. A peace offer that is in truth the dirtiest act of the whole war. Ulysses is the first who breaks the Law of Zeus. Because of him Troy falls, Helena is given back to her rightful husband, and a whole culture is razed in one night.
Agamemnon waits in the dark while Ulysses, hidden inside the horse, destroys the laws of hospitality and stains the temple of Athena herself, the only Goddess Ulysses really respects.
Only when the first blood is already spilled does Agamemnon come out of hiding and enter Troy as the winner. However as the city falls and a whole culture it’s erased from existence, the end begins for the winner too.
Almost everyone who spilled innocent blood in Troy meets a terrible end, or, like Ulysses, is forced to look into the eyes of the abyss.
The past to explain the present.
Nolan trained his audience well. The narration is not linear or chronological. Flashbacks of what had been are intertwined with the present. Twenty years of absence are told by Penelope’s loneliness.
The queen, hidden behind a screen, surrounded by suitors she doesn’t want around, is tragically alone.
Penelope is the moral lighthouse of the whole movie. Innocent, abandoned for a war that horrified her since the beginning, she’s forced by life to harden her heart. She raised her son alone, she leads her people alone in silence, and yet is not enough.
She’s a woman and women are not made to be kings. They can sit by the king’s side, they can even become advisors of kings, but they can’t rule, and when they die by the hands of their own sons, they are not avenged. They are called betrayers and accused of breaking the Gods’ laws.
There is a tight parallel between Penelope and Clytemnestra as much as there is one between Ulysses and Agamemnon.
One queen waits for twenty years, to welcome her husband back, not just because she loves him, even if Penelope herself claims that all she wants is Ulysses back. The other waits for more than ten years for the moment her revenge can be consummated.
One king forgets the blood he spilled to be able to travel to Troy and can’t wait to be back home. The other can’t forget the blood he spilled in Troy and that’s why he can’t go home.
By retelling one of the oldest stories of the Western world, Nolan tells us visually a story of everything that is wrong in our society. While taking out the divine from the narration, he offers us a story that is both personal and universal: soldiers who come back from war carry a burden they can’t share or let go.
There is one scene, subtle and unobtrusive, that alone explains Nolan’s view and summarizes the whole movie. When Ulysses and his men are sailing back, they land in nearby a village that doesn’t recognize them as Greek, and think they are “The People of the Sea”, this unknown menace that is threatening Greece as it was known.
The only problem? The villagers are speaking Greek, and they don’t recognize Ulysses and his men as fellow Greek people.
Because after ten years of war, in a foreign land, the language they speak is not the Greek they left behind, because the lands they are going back to, the houses they crave to see again aren’t the same and above all because they, as men, aren’t the same.
All innocence is lost. All communication is lost. They are foreigners in their own land, unable to talk to civilians, because after ten years, how do you explain to those who weren’t in front of Troy, of the tragedy you saw and caused?
Ulysses: a hero with PTSD
Another clue that Nolan’s movie is against the horror of war and without the divine, which is a fundamental part of Homer’s works, the mythological parts become the embodiment of modern concepts.
Polyphemus becomes the inability to communicate with those who are different. The need to attack before being attacked, even if Ulysses and his men are the first to steal from him. Violence calls violence, but once again to blind the guest, who doesn’t know he’s a guest at all, is a continuation of the destruction that began the night Troy fell.
Ulysses, who, by Athena’s words, is the man who wants to replace the Gods becomes the origin of his own suffering. It is Poseidon who keeps Ulysses from home, or is Poseidon just the personification of Ulysses’ guilt?
Circe becomes the incarnation of revenge. Women who aren’t queens, are the first victims of war. Alone, isolated, they can only be safe if they can defend themselves. The fact that Circe turns men into pigs doesn’t really need an explanation. She just shows what many men turn into when the law of man falls and cities are attacked and destroyed.
Calypso and her island, flooded with so much light to make the scenes with her overexposed, giving them that dreamlike quality that express how detached from reality Ulysses has become, is the escape.
Ulysses runs from his own guilt and his responsibilities, taking refuge in the drugs that help him to forget, which is something we sadly see very often with veterans and people who suffer of severe PTSD. They feel that they can’t face reality and don’t have access to help, so they self medicate in a way that sadly destroys them slowly.
It takes Ulysses seven years to realize that the dead are dead and that there is still something he has to do, not to restore his honor, but to at least try to make things right with those he abandoned. But before he can go back to Ithaca, he must surrender to the Gods and put his life in their hands. This could be a confusing message, as we already said Nolan had taken the Gods from being present in his telling.
However, in a more modern view, it could make sense that a man who had lost everything including himself, will need an outside help in order to be able to take charge of his own life again.
Returning home: the end of the hero and the beginning of the man.
There would be a lot to say about the end of the movie, but it’s the last frame that says it all.
Ulysses comes back home knowing he will once again break the laws of the Gods. Only this time he doesn’t care. He feels justified for once, not guilty about the new blood he knows will stain his hands.
The men eating his food, mistreating his servants, harassing his wife and who, at some point, plotted to kill his son to steal his throne, are guilty in his eyes. Not because they shouldn’t be there, but because they chose dishonor since the beginning. This is the sin Ulysses won’t forgive.
Ulysses reveals himself. He fights not only against the suitors, but also against those servants who betrayed him and allied with them. There is no mercy left in Ulysses, but the spilled blood demands a price, one that Tiresias already predicted. His warning to sail towards the unknown, is exactly about this.
Ulysses is back, he can see Ithaca for one last time, but he can’t stay. Only this time he won’t leave alone. He takes Penelope with him, like she had suggested at the beginning, before the war. They leave everything behind, because Ithaca needs a king, but the king is not Ulysses anymore.
The king is Telemachus, the prince who became a man and a king not at home, under the loving gaze of his mother, but in Sparta, under the watchful guide of King Menelaus. He’s the one who teaches Telemachus the harsh truth.
War wasn’t worth it. It was fought not because of honor, but because of greed. Helena is back by his side, peace came all over again like a new day after a storm, and yet nothing is the same. The world is a harsher place, where a mother, no matter how justified in her hate she was, dies in the hands of her own son to avenge the fallen Agamemnon.
A place where a son must watch his father leave all over again, because spilled blood can’t be repaid in any other way.
A place were place where humanity is a bit more alone and violence is the only spoken language everyone can understand.
There is hope in this message. Hope in Telemachus taking the throne, a new generation or kings and rulers who don’t carry the burden of their fathers, but who must find their own way to make things right.
Conclusion
The real sin of this movie is not how distant Nolan’s narration is from Homer’s tales. The real problem of this modernized version of the Odyssey is that at the end of the day, it’s boring. Slow in places, too rushed in others, there is no balance in the pacing.
7/10.
Not for the purists or those who don’t want to see an adaptation but the true transposition of Homer’s Odyssey on screen.
For everyone else this is a movie made to push people to think about our society and what the past had tried to teach us. It’s up to us to listen or ignore the message passed through generations and millennia.
