The Orchestrator

I get the desire for a story about war and what comes from it, to look at PTSD and trauma and how senseless such conflicts ultimately are. But in a very profound way, so did Homer. It's just that he explored those themes in the Iliad, not the Odyssey. That's why it focuses on both sides of the war, why Hector and Achilles are so often contrasted in their desires and actions — because it begs the question of what a hero, a general, a warrior, really is.

You want a story about the kind of atrocities men at war can commit? You want to cast Agamemnon as the villain? You want a protagonist who's big and strong and does awful things he must learn to regret? That's Achilles' story! Not Odysseus'!

Odysseus is wily. He's a trickster. He's a liar and schemer and talker and thinker. He's also a phenomenal fighter, sure, but that's nobody's first impression of him! His primary epithet is polutropos: literally a man of many turns, many tricks, many tongues.

And that's nowhere to be found in Nolan's Odyssey, which means...it's really not a story about Odysseus. He's not winning the day with wits and tricks and disguises — he's certainly not Athena's chosen champion. Nolan wrote a story about a completely different man than the titular protagonist of the original myth. That doesn't change just because he borrows a small handful events from the Apologoi and a few more from the Telemachy and Mnesterophonia with a completely protagonist and focus and moral.

But we all know Nolan loves his tortured, tragic, angsty powerful male heroes. And one of Homer's epics did contain that — it just wasn't the Odyssey! The Iliad would've worked so much better, because Achilles at his core is the kind of character Nolan likes to write. He's angry and scared of his own mortality and constantly worried about his own legacy and driven to do terrible things at war due to grief and love!

Nolan presents Odysseus' trick with the Trojan Horse as though it was some kind of Ancient War Crime, but the Greeks would not have given a shit and certainly wouldn't have considered it a violation of xenia (which the film incorrectly called "Zeus' Law" — more on that here).

But you know which Homeric protagonist did do something that the Greeks considered horrifying and a violation of honorable combat? Achilles! When he desecrated Hector's corpse because the guy had killed his lover and best friend.

There’s discourse (not just among modern academics, Plato’s Hippias Minor is too) about whether wits and tricks should be held as more respectable or valued than pure martial strength in Homer’s eyes — whether Odysseus or Achilles is the greater Homeric hero. Nolan's Odyssey claims to be about Odysseus, but its values clearly state that Achilles is the better hero and protagonist. This movie gave almost zero credit to tricks and wits and disguises and lies, instead focusing on his sense of duty towards his men, his martial strength, and his leadership.

The latter is notably distinctly missing from Odysseus' canonical journey; his relationships with his comrades (summachoi) are almost completely absent, because the Odyssey is instead a story about marriage, about partnerships between men and women. (Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa are all notably love interests for Odysseus whom he rejects in favor of Penelope; the former two are too dominant and powerful, the latter too young and impressionable. The woman he loves is his equal partner — by Greek standards — Penelope.) But Nolan's misogyny means he was never going to correctly rate the significance of the female characters in the Odyssey correctly, which further hampers the film. He'd likely have done better with the Iliad, where Chryseis and Briseis simply have to cry beautifully and he can paint Helen as a bitch or whore and Andromache as the tragic wife, like he prefers.

And if Nolan really wanted to get into the horrors of war, the things men can do when convinced of their righteousness and their strength is unchallenged...Neoptolemus in the Aeneid would be a fantastic lens to view that through. The Iliad is the war itself, and I think Nolan would prefer the battles to their aftermath, but you can look at the trauma and abuse that occur at war through both the spear-wives of the Iliad and the entirety of the Aeneid.

He kidnapped his wife’s host. He violated the sanctity of marriage. Menelaus and Helen welcomed Paris as they would any Greek guest, and in return this foreigner bedded (raped) and stole the warlord King of Sparta’s wife.

This isn’t to say what the Greeks did to the Trojans was justified — on the contrary, both sides of the war, in life and in death, in the Iliad and Odyssey and extended body of spin-off works, lament that there was so much death and destruction on behalf of one woman.

But the war very much wasn’t just about Helen — it was about her kidnapping, and what it represented.

How could the Greeks let such a violation of xenia, such a barbaric act that spurned their most valued customs, go unpunished? They couldn’t. That was why the Trojan War happened. And you can’t ignore that, especially not in a retelling of the Odyssey, which is all about xenia and hubris and what happens when men do things they should not.

Haruka Kawakami