To offer yet another commentary on Christopher Nolan’s latest film as a work of art may seem almost futile: every possible observation appears already to have been made, debated and exhausted in the arena of contemporary communication. Yet, as a global cinematic event, Odyssey—shot in the IMAX 70mm format to maximise perceptual immersion and the somatosensory impact of its most spectacular sequences—has restored the cinema to a central position, as much as, if not more than, Oppenheimer (2023). At a time when the experience of watching films has increasingly shifted to other spaces and devices, it has restored a sense of wonder and significance to the theatrical experience.
Paradoxically, however, the experience of the film has itself become entangled in so dense a web of public discourse—from newspapers to social media—that it risks being overwhelmed by it. During the promotional campaign, this took the form of a highly polarised debate over the very legitimacy of a Hollywood director’s engagement with one of the foundational texts of Western culture, as well as more specific controversies, including the crossfire of accusations of “wokism” and counter-accusations of racism surrounding the casting of certain actors, most notably the choice of Lupita Nyong’o as a Black Helen. Since the film’s release, this has given way to a tsunami of reviews, reactions and critical reflections, characterised simultaneously by the highest levels of disintermediation and mediation.
On the one hand, social media have revealed a compulsive urge to bear witness, drawing in ordinary viewers, cinephiles and opinion-makers of every kind. On the other, the film—with its reconfiguration of the plot and characters of Homer’s Odyssey, its evident blending of other narrative sources and its display of cultural references—invites classicists and specialists of the ancient world to engage in an exegetical game, leaving film criticism itself in a comparatively marginal position.
Luciano Canfora (Corriere della Sera, 16 July) rejects the very idea of engaging with the film, sceptical that it could offer a genuinely meaningful perspective. Instead, he turns to his own memories as a viewer, recalling the Penelope portrayed by the great Irene Papas in Franco Rossi’s 1968 RAI television adaptation.
Gherardo Ugolini (Christopher Nolan’s “Tragic” Odysseus, Visioni del tragico) identifies the structural principle of Nolan’s work in “the adoption of a perspective that replaces the logic of epic with that of tragedy”. The nostos (homecoming) becomes the slow journey of an Odysseus who is also an Oedipus, whose tragic greatness “coincides with the gradual discovery of his own responsibility”. The fall of Troy is transformed into “the memory of a destruction that continues to haunt him”, while Athena, bearing Cassandra’s face, becomes the human projection of his sense of guilt.
According to Lucio Di Gaetano (Athena Is Dead but Nolan Feels Fine, Substack), Nolan, drawing on Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, superimposes mythology and historiography, advancing the thesis that ” the Sea Peoples—the raiders described in Egyptian sources as devastating the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC—may have been, at least in part, the very Greeks who defeated the Hittites at Troy”. In this reading, the sacrilegious violation of xenia, the sacred code of hospitality, embodied in the deceptive gift of the Trojan Horse and thus in the betrayal of one of the founding principles governing alliances and exchanges in the Late Bronze Age, becomes the catalyst for the collapse of that civilisation.
Both interpretations, like many others, point to the transformation of the myth of homecoming into the trauma of the returning warrior and invite a contemporary geopolitical reading of the historical and cultural context in which the events unfold. It is here, arguably, that the English director’s true “act of appropriation” of Homer’s text lies, sweeping aside the reservations expressed by the writer Riccardo Molteni in Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt (Il disprezzo, 1954). Called to Cinecittà to write the screenplay for a film adaptation of the Odyssey, Molteni believed that the myth should be restored to the culture that had generated it, rejecting both the psychoanalytic interpretation favoured by the director and the spectacular historical-mythological blockbuster envisaged by the producer.
Nolan’s characters, by contrast, appear strikingly self-aware, as though they had read Cline and knew they were living on the brink of an epoch-defining catastrophe. The film’s challenge, perhaps, lies precisely in its attempt to hold together a web of self-reflexive connections, a narrative in which the interplay of memories acquires the weight of a painful act of remembrance while at the same time preserving the pleasure of spectacular cinematic attraction.
Ultimately, when considering both the production as a whole and the whirlwind of paratextual discourse that has surrounded it, there is a risk that cinema as a medium may come to overshadow cinema as an expressive form, and that the obsession with providing the “definitive explanation” may sterilise the viewing experience and obscure our awareness of the irreducible polysemy inherent in every work of art. It would be an ironic fate for the undisputed master of the “puzzle film.”
Maurizio Ambrosini, “Professor of Film History and Criticism and Film Aesthetics”, Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge
