07-28-2026, 04:58 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-28-2026, 04:59 PM by RiverNotch.)
Last week I watched Nolan's Odyssey, and many years ago (let's say ten) I read a prose translation of it.
My general thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey are that it's sufficiently faithful, and that Nolan's obsession with chronological disorder works well to give an impression of the original poem's overall vibe. The chuds were dead wrong, not only by being racist, but also because I think the movie's best performances were delivered by Lupita Nyong'o and Elliott Page, even if one of those actors had only a bit role. Those who had more general misgivings over the trailers were only half-wrong: the trailers definitely highlight the worst aspects of the film, namely its drabness, but when one actually views the film one gets so thoroughly impressed by what Nolan and company do right that one doesn't care if, say, Odysseus' ships are more Viking than Greek, or that Agamemnon's costuming is too angular.
In fact, Agamemnon's aura of menace is emblematic of what the film typically gets bang on, which is that the aura or vibe of what sequences it chooses to adapt match the aura or vibe of Homer's story, certain adaptational differences aside. (Here we get into spoilers, not so much for Homer's story as for how Nolan chose to adapt it.) The encounters with Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, and the dead are terrifying in ways that capture the overall spirit of terror in those episodes as written, even if the scenes were somewhat truncated. The Fall of Troy is a spectacle one cannot help but cry over, much as every veteran in the book cries when they hear people sing of their war, though that episode of the war itself I don't remember being so directly described by Homer. Odysseus' final encounter with his dog and the slaughtering of the suitors are truly cathartic, even if the latter feels more in the spirit of a contemporary action film.
As for the overall spirit of the adaptation, three things stood out for me, two as I watched the film and one more in retrospect. Most obvious is Nolan's historicizing of the Odyssey qua the Bronze Age collapse, to the point that characters outright mention "peoples of the sea" (and Odysseus himself says "Our age of bronze is ending"). I liked what Nolan meant to do here, even in terms of overall message---that old social contracts, being broken, have left our world in ruins, though we'll get to this in a bit more detail later on---but, I mean, those quoted lines made me roll my eyes in the theatre. Nolan messing with time is a 'Nolanism' that really works for a narrative as sprawling as this, but Nolan writing lines like those....
Next is Nolan's sanitizing of the Odyssey, in particular Odysseus' character. The truncation of the encounter with Polyphemus involved cutting Odysseus making the cyclops drunk, telling the cyclops his name is nobody, and later shouting to everyone but the cyclops that his name is actually Odysseus---this is a sanitization of Odysseus' character that I really didn't mind, since in the film his particular actions still get his men killed, which I believe was the final point of his hubris in the book. But where the sanitizations become....interesting....is in the way the film emphasizes the Fall of Troy, especially Odysseus' culpability in it, such that it becomes a sort of 'ancestral sin' for posthomeric society being as broken as Odysseus or Nolan assay it to be; in the way the film emphasizes the virtue of Xenia, in the film called "Zeus's law", being far more based in the essential dignity of individuals---in their being made in the image of God, essentially---than being as rooted in notions of social class as in Homer; in the way the film frames Odysseus' departure from Ogygia as a "leap of faith", faith thus being framed more as the theological virtue than as the more straightforward loyalty or fidelity of the book; in the way the film omits the slaughtering of Odysseus's unfaithful slaves, again making it seem like Odysseus actually thought of his slaves as anything more than property. The combination of all these choices makes Nolan's Odysseus, not just 'modern', but also markedly 'Christian', which I personally liked, but which more generally is a choice neither good nor bad.
Now for a bad choice, or rather set of choices. Nolan completely omits the Phaeacians, including Nausicaa and Arete, conflating their role in the story with Calypso; Calypso herself gets Odysseus hooked on lotus, rather than the two episodes being entirely separate; Odysseus and his men spend much less time with Circe; Odysseus' time in the Underworld is reduced to a meeting with Tiresias, Agamemnon, and the movie-only character of Sinon, completely omitting his conversation with Anticleia; Athena is reduced to Odysseus's post-traumatic hallucination; and Penelope doesn't actively test Odysseus and his identity at the very end of the story. Some of those choices are for the sake of shortening or historicizing the story, sure, making it feel more verisimilitudinous to the modern audience, but added up, Nolan's adaptation is an oddly regressive one, when it comes to its women, even when compared to the millennia-old original.
What this adaptation means to say, overall, is probably a lot sharper than what the Odyssey has meant for its various audiences, and that's to be expected, since it's a three-hour-long film adaptation of a twenty-four-book-long epic poem, and it mainly goes back to Nolan's historicizing of the narrative, to his notion that certain old virtues such as Xenia, once broken by individuals, lead to irrevocable changes in society. I have heard some commentators note how Nolan's Odyssey is overall 'conservative' in its outlook, that it forwards too much a 'great man' theory of history, but I think this criticism is grossly misguided, since overall where Nolan's Odyssey is 'conservative' is where it faithfully adapts the narrative---where it delivers a millennia-old vision of history, one that predates the divide between conservatives and liberals or especially Carlyle's 19th century notions on 'Great Men'. Thematically, Nolan's Odyssey is only as 'conservative' as one wishes it to read it as 'conservative', its anti-Homeric regressiveness on women aside; one can just as well read its emphasis on Xenia as the emphasis on shared humanity from which all liberal and socialist ethics is ideally derived.
So....yeah. It's a great movie. I think my favorite Nolan movie is still Dunkirk, since that's a story where Nolan's biases against women and towards conservative politics are overcome by the subject matter---the systemic biases behind few women being involved in the Dunkirk evacuation is not one that needs to be interrogated by any adaptation of that story, while the adaptation itself ended up being far more collectivist and egalitarian than Nolan's tendencies might suggest---but my love for seeing Greek myths be treated with respect pushes this adaptation to a comfortable number two, or maybe number three next to The Dark Knight (a movie that is conservative to the point of being ur-fascist, sure, but damn if the spectacle don't impress).
Now, why I put this review in "Poetry Discussion" rather than "Movies, Music, and Media" is because I don't want to talk about Nolan's Odyssey alone, I want to talk about epics---rather, epic poetry, just to exclude things we conventionally describe as epic but are much closer to other genres, for instance movies.
An old, now-closed thread by Quix once asked the question, "What makes an epic poem"? To which this not-quite-dedicated scholar is wont to respond with this diagram of Northrop Frye's theory of genres, courtesy of Robert D. Denham: https://imgur.com/a/aYkcncw
In fact, Frye uses the terms 'epos' and 'epic' separately, with epics referring to particular works that are in genre more typically epos but also inclusive of such prose works as Finnegans Wake. 'Epic' he ties to his notion of 'encyclopaedic forms', which he defines as "presenting an anagogic form of symbolism, such as sacred scripture, or its analogue in other modes"---"modes" Frye generally defines as "a conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature", which in short we could say is the difference between, say, Dickens and Kafka, or between Scripture and the Commedia; "anagogic form of symbolism", even Frye struggles to describe in less than religious terms, so let's have it be the visionary sensibility shared by, say, Homer, Milton, Blake, and Joyce.
'Epics', then, he ties to cyclical structures of creation to apocalypse, law to kingdom, or birth to death, and he further classifies epics into epics of return, epics of wrath, analogical epics (as in, analogical to some process within the aforementioned cyclical structures), and contrast epics (as in, contrasting one cyclical structure with another). The examples he furnishes are numerous, and thus instructive. Epics of return include the Eddas, the Muspilli, the last book of the Mahabharata, and the Odyssey. Epics of wrath include the Iliad. Analogical epics include the Hercules legends, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Holy Scripture, the Commedia, the Faerie Queene, legends of the Holy Grail, the Aeneid, Milton, Blake, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Contrast epics include Ovid, Hesiod, Boethius, and Langland's Piers Plowman. Lastly, there is the distinction he adapts from Milton between the brief epic and the diffuse epic, with the brief epic being a less encyclopaedic epic, or perhaps a more thematically concentrated lyric: his examples here are the Book of Job, Beowulf, Spenser's Epithalamion, Lycidas, Michael's prophecy in Paradise Lost, and The Waste Land.
I'd say Frye gets to what we generally think of as epics, which is to say we generally think of epics as two different kinds of work. There's epics per Frye's definition of 'epos', with an emphasis I think on rhythm and radical of presentation, and there's epics per Frye's definition of 'epic', flexibly allowing for a good deal of prose and lyric poetry, but also thoroughly excluding, say, the less universalizing works of Jane Austen or Sappho.
I don't know how useful this all is for the general reader, except maybe that it helps set up expectations. The epic-as-'epos' is usually gonna read more even-handed and monotonous than a dramatic or lyric poem; the epic-as-'epic' is gonna feel more expansive in scope than your average novel or anthology. As such, the general reader is advised to have copious cups of coffee or tea ready when reading epics-as-'epos'; reading epics-as-'epic', and it seems enjoyment of such works is really a matter of taste, just as one could prefer Mozart over Wagner when listening to operas, albeit I agree with Frye that certain epics-as-'epic', especially the Bible and Homer, should be required reading for anyone serious about anything related to (Western) literature.
As for the writer, herein lies my dilemma. I'm setting myself up for failure by desiring to write an epic, but my first dilemma is whether it's gonna be an epic in the second sense alone, or if it's gonna be an epic in both senses. As someone whose main experience writing creatively is by writing lyrics, it's gonna be much easier for me to write an epic in the first sense rather than to write prose, but won't that sound terribly outdated, sinking the project just as I embark on it? Indeed, what use do we still have for a genre that's meant mainly to be recited or read aloud for a long period of time, and with a consistent metrical rhythm---we still have plays or at least films, we still have novels or at least comics, we still have anthologies or at least pop records, but where has gone the epic? And, in this age of nuclear disaster and climate catastrophe, how should one anticipate its return?
(It's been ages since I read Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism, so for this discussion, I've mainly relied on this dissertation: https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/cri...eface.html )
My general thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey are that it's sufficiently faithful, and that Nolan's obsession with chronological disorder works well to give an impression of the original poem's overall vibe. The chuds were dead wrong, not only by being racist, but also because I think the movie's best performances were delivered by Lupita Nyong'o and Elliott Page, even if one of those actors had only a bit role. Those who had more general misgivings over the trailers were only half-wrong: the trailers definitely highlight the worst aspects of the film, namely its drabness, but when one actually views the film one gets so thoroughly impressed by what Nolan and company do right that one doesn't care if, say, Odysseus' ships are more Viking than Greek, or that Agamemnon's costuming is too angular.
In fact, Agamemnon's aura of menace is emblematic of what the film typically gets bang on, which is that the aura or vibe of what sequences it chooses to adapt match the aura or vibe of Homer's story, certain adaptational differences aside. (Here we get into spoilers, not so much for Homer's story as for how Nolan chose to adapt it.) The encounters with Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, and the dead are terrifying in ways that capture the overall spirit of terror in those episodes as written, even if the scenes were somewhat truncated. The Fall of Troy is a spectacle one cannot help but cry over, much as every veteran in the book cries when they hear people sing of their war, though that episode of the war itself I don't remember being so directly described by Homer. Odysseus' final encounter with his dog and the slaughtering of the suitors are truly cathartic, even if the latter feels more in the spirit of a contemporary action film.
As for the overall spirit of the adaptation, three things stood out for me, two as I watched the film and one more in retrospect. Most obvious is Nolan's historicizing of the Odyssey qua the Bronze Age collapse, to the point that characters outright mention "peoples of the sea" (and Odysseus himself says "Our age of bronze is ending"). I liked what Nolan meant to do here, even in terms of overall message---that old social contracts, being broken, have left our world in ruins, though we'll get to this in a bit more detail later on---but, I mean, those quoted lines made me roll my eyes in the theatre. Nolan messing with time is a 'Nolanism' that really works for a narrative as sprawling as this, but Nolan writing lines like those....
Next is Nolan's sanitizing of the Odyssey, in particular Odysseus' character. The truncation of the encounter with Polyphemus involved cutting Odysseus making the cyclops drunk, telling the cyclops his name is nobody, and later shouting to everyone but the cyclops that his name is actually Odysseus---this is a sanitization of Odysseus' character that I really didn't mind, since in the film his particular actions still get his men killed, which I believe was the final point of his hubris in the book. But where the sanitizations become....interesting....is in the way the film emphasizes the Fall of Troy, especially Odysseus' culpability in it, such that it becomes a sort of 'ancestral sin' for posthomeric society being as broken as Odysseus or Nolan assay it to be; in the way the film emphasizes the virtue of Xenia, in the film called "Zeus's law", being far more based in the essential dignity of individuals---in their being made in the image of God, essentially---than being as rooted in notions of social class as in Homer; in the way the film frames Odysseus' departure from Ogygia as a "leap of faith", faith thus being framed more as the theological virtue than as the more straightforward loyalty or fidelity of the book; in the way the film omits the slaughtering of Odysseus's unfaithful slaves, again making it seem like Odysseus actually thought of his slaves as anything more than property. The combination of all these choices makes Nolan's Odysseus, not just 'modern', but also markedly 'Christian', which I personally liked, but which more generally is a choice neither good nor bad.
Now for a bad choice, or rather set of choices. Nolan completely omits the Phaeacians, including Nausicaa and Arete, conflating their role in the story with Calypso; Calypso herself gets Odysseus hooked on lotus, rather than the two episodes being entirely separate; Odysseus and his men spend much less time with Circe; Odysseus' time in the Underworld is reduced to a meeting with Tiresias, Agamemnon, and the movie-only character of Sinon, completely omitting his conversation with Anticleia; Athena is reduced to Odysseus's post-traumatic hallucination; and Penelope doesn't actively test Odysseus and his identity at the very end of the story. Some of those choices are for the sake of shortening or historicizing the story, sure, making it feel more verisimilitudinous to the modern audience, but added up, Nolan's adaptation is an oddly regressive one, when it comes to its women, even when compared to the millennia-old original.
What this adaptation means to say, overall, is probably a lot sharper than what the Odyssey has meant for its various audiences, and that's to be expected, since it's a three-hour-long film adaptation of a twenty-four-book-long epic poem, and it mainly goes back to Nolan's historicizing of the narrative, to his notion that certain old virtues such as Xenia, once broken by individuals, lead to irrevocable changes in society. I have heard some commentators note how Nolan's Odyssey is overall 'conservative' in its outlook, that it forwards too much a 'great man' theory of history, but I think this criticism is grossly misguided, since overall where Nolan's Odyssey is 'conservative' is where it faithfully adapts the narrative---where it delivers a millennia-old vision of history, one that predates the divide between conservatives and liberals or especially Carlyle's 19th century notions on 'Great Men'. Thematically, Nolan's Odyssey is only as 'conservative' as one wishes it to read it as 'conservative', its anti-Homeric regressiveness on women aside; one can just as well read its emphasis on Xenia as the emphasis on shared humanity from which all liberal and socialist ethics is ideally derived.
So....yeah. It's a great movie. I think my favorite Nolan movie is still Dunkirk, since that's a story where Nolan's biases against women and towards conservative politics are overcome by the subject matter---the systemic biases behind few women being involved in the Dunkirk evacuation is not one that needs to be interrogated by any adaptation of that story, while the adaptation itself ended up being far more collectivist and egalitarian than Nolan's tendencies might suggest---but my love for seeing Greek myths be treated with respect pushes this adaptation to a comfortable number two, or maybe number three next to The Dark Knight (a movie that is conservative to the point of being ur-fascist, sure, but damn if the spectacle don't impress).
Now, why I put this review in "Poetry Discussion" rather than "Movies, Music, and Media" is because I don't want to talk about Nolan's Odyssey alone, I want to talk about epics---rather, epic poetry, just to exclude things we conventionally describe as epic but are much closer to other genres, for instance movies.
An old, now-closed thread by Quix once asked the question, "What makes an epic poem"? To which this not-quite-dedicated scholar is wont to respond with this diagram of Northrop Frye's theory of genres, courtesy of Robert D. Denham: https://imgur.com/a/aYkcncw
In fact, Frye uses the terms 'epos' and 'epic' separately, with epics referring to particular works that are in genre more typically epos but also inclusive of such prose works as Finnegans Wake. 'Epic' he ties to his notion of 'encyclopaedic forms', which he defines as "presenting an anagogic form of symbolism, such as sacred scripture, or its analogue in other modes"---"modes" Frye generally defines as "a conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature", which in short we could say is the difference between, say, Dickens and Kafka, or between Scripture and the Commedia; "anagogic form of symbolism", even Frye struggles to describe in less than religious terms, so let's have it be the visionary sensibility shared by, say, Homer, Milton, Blake, and Joyce.
'Epics', then, he ties to cyclical structures of creation to apocalypse, law to kingdom, or birth to death, and he further classifies epics into epics of return, epics of wrath, analogical epics (as in, analogical to some process within the aforementioned cyclical structures), and contrast epics (as in, contrasting one cyclical structure with another). The examples he furnishes are numerous, and thus instructive. Epics of return include the Eddas, the Muspilli, the last book of the Mahabharata, and the Odyssey. Epics of wrath include the Iliad. Analogical epics include the Hercules legends, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Holy Scripture, the Commedia, the Faerie Queene, legends of the Holy Grail, the Aeneid, Milton, Blake, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Contrast epics include Ovid, Hesiod, Boethius, and Langland's Piers Plowman. Lastly, there is the distinction he adapts from Milton between the brief epic and the diffuse epic, with the brief epic being a less encyclopaedic epic, or perhaps a more thematically concentrated lyric: his examples here are the Book of Job, Beowulf, Spenser's Epithalamion, Lycidas, Michael's prophecy in Paradise Lost, and The Waste Land.
I'd say Frye gets to what we generally think of as epics, which is to say we generally think of epics as two different kinds of work. There's epics per Frye's definition of 'epos', with an emphasis I think on rhythm and radical of presentation, and there's epics per Frye's definition of 'epic', flexibly allowing for a good deal of prose and lyric poetry, but also thoroughly excluding, say, the less universalizing works of Jane Austen or Sappho.
I don't know how useful this all is for the general reader, except maybe that it helps set up expectations. The epic-as-'epos' is usually gonna read more even-handed and monotonous than a dramatic or lyric poem; the epic-as-'epic' is gonna feel more expansive in scope than your average novel or anthology. As such, the general reader is advised to have copious cups of coffee or tea ready when reading epics-as-'epos'; reading epics-as-'epic', and it seems enjoyment of such works is really a matter of taste, just as one could prefer Mozart over Wagner when listening to operas, albeit I agree with Frye that certain epics-as-'epic', especially the Bible and Homer, should be required reading for anyone serious about anything related to (Western) literature.
As for the writer, herein lies my dilemma. I'm setting myself up for failure by desiring to write an epic, but my first dilemma is whether it's gonna be an epic in the second sense alone, or if it's gonna be an epic in both senses. As someone whose main experience writing creatively is by writing lyrics, it's gonna be much easier for me to write an epic in the first sense rather than to write prose, but won't that sound terribly outdated, sinking the project just as I embark on it? Indeed, what use do we still have for a genre that's meant mainly to be recited or read aloud for a long period of time, and with a consistent metrical rhythm---we still have plays or at least films, we still have novels or at least comics, we still have anthologies or at least pop records, but where has gone the epic? And, in this age of nuclear disaster and climate catastrophe, how should one anticipate its return?
(It's been ages since I read Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism, so for this discussion, I've mainly relied on this dissertation: https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/cri...eface.html )
