‘I’m not afraid to do it the old-fashioned way’: Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ ready to bid farewell to YouTube newbies | film

With a plot worthy of the ancient poets themselves, the hottest movie of the summer isn’t a superhero movie, an alien invasion story, or a crinoline-and-hat period drama. Instead, it is an adaptation of the nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, which director Christopher Nolan released as a follow-up to Oppenheimer’s dark, Oscar-winning study of the origins of nuclear war. Nolan, previously the director of the Memento, Dark Knight, and Dunkirk trilogies, has now turned his attention to The Odyssey, the classic Greek epic that, along with its companion epic The Iliad, is one of the foundational works of Western civilization.

Nolan’s adaptation is a big-budget production, the biggest of his career at an estimated $250 million, and the director has stocked it with a cast of established Hollywood stars like Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, newer teen-friendly faces including Spider-Man’s duo of Zendaya and Tom Holland, and standout choices like Lupita Nyong’o, Mia Goth, Samantha Morton and fellow director Benny Safdie.

The 24 books of the Odyssey were written around the eighth century BCE and are attributed to the classical Greek poet Homer; As a sequel to The Iliad, it tells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year struggle to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after the end of the siege of Troy. Nolan, 55, explained why he chose to make the film, telling the New York Times: “As a filmmaker, you have to move in impulsive ways. I was looking to challenge myself with a completely different kind of storytelling, and I was looking for a gap in the culture.”

The contemporary relevance of The Odyssey is a major issue in the film’s potential influence. Mary Beard, emeritus professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, says she hopes for a “Wuthering Heights effect” and suggests there are deeper questions behind the superficial narrative. “Films always draw people’s attention to the ancient world and to the modern resonance of the classics. What big questions does The Odyssey raise, and do we still have questions? What does it mean to come home? What does war do to those left behind? Where do the boundaries lie between civilization and barbarism?”

Befitting its epic scale, The Odyssey was filmed entirely in the very large IMAX format (for which Nolan has stated that he used 2 million feet of film), and in accordance with his usual practice, Nolan avoided green screen visual effects in favor of building original props and sets, including the Trojan horse and Odysseus’ ship. In November, he explained his rationale: “By embracing the physicality of the real world in your filmmaking, you’re telling the story in interesting ways. Because you’re confronted every day by a world that opposes you.”

Nolan has earned the right to control such expensive and labor-intensive resources, says Wendy Mitchell, contributing editor at Screen International. “Nolan gets these huge green lights for movies because he has a huge audience. I really think audiences are smart enough to see what’s been done in reality, or in camera, which is what Nolan sticks to, and I know we’ll feel that on screen as an audience.”

Mitchell adds: “The whole industry really respects his style of cinema and cinematography in the digital age where we’re going to start seeing more shortcuts with AI or tech tools. Nolan is a guy who’s not afraid to do it the old-fashioned way and I think there’s a lot of respect for him when he does it that way.”

Nolan isn’t the first major filmmaker to look to the classic era for inspiration in recent years. Ridley Scott directed Gladiator II in 2024 and it was a huge success – following on from the 2000 hit starring Russell Crowe. Zack Snyder’s 300, about the Battle of Thermopylae, was a hit when it was released in 2007, as was its 2014 sequel 300: Rise of an Empire. With box office forecasts indicating that The Odyssey could gross between $80 million and $100 million in its first weekend in North America alone, the feeling is that Nolan could, like classic heroes of the past, save the entire film industry.

The Odyssey arrives at an interesting moment in Hollywood, where big-budget superhero movies seem to be running out of steam, and smaller films originating online, from Backrooms to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, are gaining acclaim and box office success. Saying that she believes The Odyssey “will have four-way appeal among all types of moviegoers,” Mitchell is confident Nolan will outperform the uninitiated. “Just because YouTube veterans are having cinematic hits this year, it doesn’t mean Hollywood is all about YouTube now. What will be more interesting is tracking how the Russo brothers’ Doomsday will fare, if their superhero franchises can continue at the level they have in the past.”

Perhaps inevitably, The Odyssey has also become a victim of the culture war, with Elon Musk and his cronies accusing Nolan of “wanting.”[ing] “To destroy Western civilization and everything that helped create it” by casting Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, to critics bemoaning the lack of Greek actors in the film, with Chris Cotonou asking in The Guardian: “Are we unworthy of our mythology?”

Nolan has also been criticized for including modern dialogue, mainly through the use of modern translations by Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn. But Bird says there’s no harm in that. “Translations are never neutral copies of the original. We have to remember that there is no one-to-one correspondence between Greek and English: the Greek languages ​​encode the world differently. New translations show us new things, for us, about the texts.” Beard points out Wilson’s translation of the traditional phrase “serving girls” into the more accurate “slaves.” “That’s what they probably were. Confronting the fact that they depicted a slave-owning society does not undermine Homer’s epics.”

Meanwhile, Mitchell says the film will weather any such storms. “I think it will reach everyone. People will want to participate in the cultural conversation. It’s as if you care about movies at all, and even if you only see one movie a year, ‘The Odyssey’ will be that movie.”

Hit or Legend: Classic Mythology on Screen

Hercules (1997)
There have been dozens of movies about the legendary tough guy, mostly as a way to capture the ripped hunk of the moment. Steve Reeves starred in the 1958 Italian film that launched the sword-and-sandal genre. While still a bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger went to the Big Apple in Hercules, New York in 1970; And Dwayne Johnson played it safe in the 2014 version. But arguably the most memorable is the 1997 Disney animated film, which didn’t take itself too seriously either.

Troy (2004)
A kind of Odyssey, a starry-eyed version of Homer’s Iliad by German director Wolfgang Petersen. Brad Pitt plays the handsome, scowling Achilles, Orlando Bloom is no less preposterously handsome than Paris, and Sean Bean plays the brave Odysseus. But even though the filmmakers do their best, the whole movie is rather lifeless.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010)
Greek mythology went to the young with the Percy Jackson book series by Rick Riordan, about the half-human son of the sea god Poseidon, who happens to live in present-day New York. With Hollywood clearly looking for something to fill Harry Potter with, a series of anticipated films are planned with Logan Lerman in the lead role. But that first installment, in which Percy chases down Zeus’s lost lightning bolt, never captured audiences’ imaginations, and the series fizzled out after the sequel, Sea of ​​Monsters, in 2013.

Return (2024)
The last significant adaptation of The Odyssey was a high-profile prequel created by the late playwright Edward Bond, starring Ralph Fiennes as a traumatized version of the Greek hero, opposite Juliette Binoche as the enigmatic Penelope. This is the treatment that has succeeded in getting to the heart of the essential power of the myth.

Brother, where are you?? (2000)
We’re a long way from sword-and-sandal territory here. The Coens’ Deep South prison break comedy is loosely inspired by Homer, with George Clooney in very dapper form as Ulysses Everett McGill, Holly Hunter as jilted wife Penny, and John Goodman as the KKK’s obnoxious “Big Dan” Tig.

Oedipus Rex (1967) And Medea (1969)
A double header from Greek myth as filtered through Sophocles, Euripides and the Italian Marxist poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. The former features an extraordinary variety of ancient cultural costumes, from the Sumerian to the Renaissance, while the latter features a thunderous performance by opera star Maria Callas.

My Fair Lady (1964)
The Myth of Pygmalion and Galatea has become, among other things, a George Bernard Shaw play, a hit Lerner and Lowe Broadway musical, and an indelible film classic, where it doesn’t really matter that fairy star Audrey Hepburn has traded her singing voice for Marnie Nixon.

Orphee (1950)
French artist and poet Jean Cocteau takes us through the looking glass to see sex and death unlike anything else in cinema. The bouffant-haired Jean Marais is the famous poet Orphée, who enters a stripped-down version of hell after the death of his wife. The Wachowskis must have seen Cocteau’s amazing special effects work in the mirror before doing The Matrix.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981)
Stop-motion effects expert Ray Harryhausen has become a sine qua non of classic mythology films with this pair of monster-filled tales. The first, starring Todd Armstrong as the woolly troublemaker Jason and Nancy Kovak as Medea, was a real step forward in fantasy cinema with its skeletal combat and animated statues. In the second, with Olympus clearly influenced by the recently released Superman, things feel a little awkward, but still great.