Both the sea and Homer—everything is driven by war. What did Christopher Nolan’s *The Odyssey* turn out to be?

And it turned out to be the ultimate “meta” experience. A veritable second Trojan War erupted around the film—even before its premiere. Probably no other Nolan film has sparked so much controversy. Just like in the old days, the opposing factions clashed, and battle-hardened men (and women, too) crossed digital swords over the casting, costumes, and screenplay choices—as if there were no other problems right now besides disputes from three thousand years ago. This is no coincidence, then; it must have struck a nerve.

Nolan and Homer have a long-standing relationship, just like the heroes in an epic. Back in 2002, he was invited to direct *Troy*—the one with Brad Pitt as Achilles. It didn’t work out then; Wolfgang Petersen took on the project instead. But Nolan, it seems, never gave up on the idea of returning to Hellas. And so here he is—a quarter of a century later, having wandered a bit longer than Odysseus.

That said, Nolan isn’t actually the most obvious choice to adapt Homer. The ancient world was full of passion, blood, fury, and lust. In his films, Nolan almost always maintains a British reserve. He shies away from sensuality; you won’t find any sexuality in his work, not even a spark; his battle scenes come across as awkward rather than ferocious. In this regard, he and Homer are worlds apart. The great blind poet, apparently from secondhand accounts—yet willingly and in great detail describes material details: the relief on Achilles’ shield, Nestor’s cup, Odysseus’ cloak—all of it richly and appetizingly Mediterranean to the point of excess. Nolan gravitates toward a Nordic, neutral, and minimalist design, and the armor and costumes sometimes seem a bit sparse for a $250-million epic—as if they were taken from the backwaters of a run-of-the-mill fantasy TV series.

And yet—the rhythm is mesmerizing. *The Odyssey* has a very majestic, archaic feel to it, reminiscent of Pasolini’s *Oedipus Rex* or Werner Herzog’s *Aguirre, the Wrath of God*. The cinematography itself, the pace of the cuts, all the angles, faces, and poses—it’s nothing like today’s Hollywood. A group of young men, a sleeping dog, a peaceful landscape, a close-up of a face. The stunning landscapes also contribute to the atmosphere: Nolan filmed the characters’ journeys in the very locations where the events unfolded—in Italy, Greece, and Morocco. He found the underworld of Hades on the black beaches of Iceland.

Although what matters most is that primal, ancient sense of wanderlust and impulse, which Nolan undoubtedly possesses. His films, starting from the very first scenes, are about loneliness and separation, about the tangled, intricately interwoven world of relationships between people, gods, monsters, stellar anomalies—through which the hero, traumatized, imperfect, yet sincere, strives to return home, to find peace. Not always successfully—sometimes saving the world along the way, sometimes irreversibly changing it. This was true in the Batman trilogy, in *Inception*, in *Interstellar*, and in *Oppenheimer*.

And can’t the same be said about *The Odyssey*? Nolan, who reread all the translations of the poem before filming, takes the rusted armor, extracts the old myth from it, and constructs a brand-new, contemporary epic. In some ways, it’s far darker than the original. The director—who also wrote the screenplay—methodically stripped the plot of nearly all the allies who crossed Odysseus’s path. For example, there are no good-natured Phaeacians or Aeolus, the god of the winds. There are no gods here at all. Only Athena (Zendaya), without her helmet or spear, dressed in a white gown, visits Odysseus, but her appearances—when the hero is left alone with his thoughts—are suspiciously similar to the hero’s own inner monologue. There’s this concept of the bicameral mind—the idea that the voice of the ancient gods was how ancient people perceived their own inner reflections. I wonder if that’s what Nolan had in mind?

The other Olympians make their presence known only through storms, thunder, and the fear in the hearts of those who believe in them. There’s a lot of fear here. All the horror that inhabits the Homeric myth is depicted in abundance. Nolan has always had a penchant for thrillers, but here he truly let himself indulge in horror. The cyclops Polyphemus is straight out of Goya’s terrifying painting of Saturn devouring his son. Scylla is like a tentacled monster from the works of Lovecraft. On Circe’s island, a true body horror unfolds. The cannibalistic Laestrygonians, silently tearing Odysseus’s companions to pieces, resemble something between robots and terrifying knights. Homer captures this archaic, childlike sense of dread toward the unknown world beyond his native Ithaca, and Nolan conveys it fully to the viewer. In the bushes, toy wolves stare with terrifying eyes, just as Homer sang.

But we are living at the end of an era that began with Homer. The great bard’s work reveals a human, compassionate intuition regarding the horrors of war and cruelty—and yet he is more in awe of the warriors’ valor and the grandeur of their exploits. And so Homer is silent; in Nolan’s work, there is no trace of this. War is nothing but shame, misery, misfortune—the most terrifying monster of all. The Greeks holed up inside the Trojan Horse are not cunning heroes, but criminals and victims, suffocating amid the corpses of their friends; here Nolan quotes a scene from his own *Dunkirk*. “What comfort is victory to the dead?” — asks Odysseus bitterly, addressed by the blackened, charred shadow of the young warrior Sinon (Elliot Page), who resembles Fleur from Elem Klimov’s *Come and See*. My Telemachus, the Trojan War is over. “I don’t remember who won,” as Homer sang.

The faces of war here are Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) in his heavy black helmet—reminiscent of either Nolan’s Batman or Darth Vader. A geopolitical figure par excellence, the faceless face of the system, a leviathan who fearlessly unleashed a decade-long bloodbath in violation of any “laws of Zeus.” Or Menelaus (Jon Bernthal)—not a great king, but simply a murderer and rapist, weary of himself.

The cause and pretext of the war—his wife Helen (Lupita Nyong’o)—is no longer beautiful here; she has an ugly scar covering her entire face, a literal representation of trauma and violence. Circe (Samantha Morton), Calypso (Charlize Theron), and even Athena herself—are not so much powerful goddesses, nymphs, and sorceresses as they are women, victims of the violence that has engulfed the entire world. It has easily made its way into the home as well: Penelope (Anne Hathaway) must also cope with its consequences—at the table, the occupying suitors, led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson), feast endlessly. And in our home, there’s a smell of theft, as Homer sang.

And even where Troy isn’t ablaze and monsters don’t roam—monsters of the mind are born. Rumors are endlessly circulated and constantly discussed—about some terrifying “people of the sea” (a real historical term) who do not honor the law of Zeus and attack the coastlines. Until it becomes clear: this is about the Greeks themselves, who brought ruin to Troy through deceit. According to new intelligence reports, we were fighting against ourselves, as Homer sang.

At the heart of this darkness lies the unassuming face of Matt Damon as Odysseus—who seems to bear the least resemblance to an ancient hero, and thank goodness for that. “A veteran of the Trojan War”—that’s how he describes himself—and here, it doesn’t even sound funny. He’s not a brilliant schemer, a rogue, or a trickster at all—he’s a weary man with PTSD who’s searching not so much for a way home as for a way away from himself and his memories. He’ll stop dabbling with the lotus, undergo psychotherapy in Hades, and even arrive in Ithaca, where he’ll chase off his tormentors Rambo-style—but returning to peacetime, of course, is already impossible. We, too, are gradually beginning to sense this. Even if the ruins look quite intact, neither you nor I can find what we’re looking for, as Homer sang.