The Trojan War is an aberration, the fault of faceless, monstrous Agamemnon (the one in the weird Darth Vader outfit), who has failed as an American family man by killing his daughter. Odysseus is an idealised leader who would never willingly put his people in danger: his foolish men insist on going to check out Circe’s hut for themselves, and he kindly retrieves them (without pausing to have sex with the goddess even for an hour, let alone a whole magical year). Damon’s Odysseus is motivated mostly by anxiety and guilt, though he is also eager to protect his boy (Holland is good at playing a gormless young man of twenty going on twelve).
But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.
Yet we are also invited to despise Penelope’s chief suitor, Antinous (‘opposite mind’), for being a coward, a liar and a schemer. The film asks us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing. The massacre of the suitors is probably the most enjoyable sequence in the film. The exuberantly villainous Antinous – Pattinson is the only person on set who seems to be having any fun – clearly deserves to be stabbed to death with the dagger of Sinon, but he also deserves one of the Oscars that will shower down on this movie like the golden rain of Zeus.
Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.
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