Since its release in cinemas a week ago, The Odyssey has had the biggest cultural impact for a Hollywood film in years. Showered with critical acclaim and a record-breaking box-office opening,IMAX 70mm screenings are sold out in London through mid-September.
Meanwhile, political commentators are having heated debates on social media over not just whether the film is any good, woke or anti-woke, but what it’s truly trying to say across the layers of Nolan’s script. Many have highlighted the Oscar-winner’s favoured themes for exploration across his films; most notably non-linear timelines, trauma, memory and men desperate to get home.
To date, Nolan has made two World War 2 movies, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, but I think it makes a lot of sense to see The Odyssey as a third in disguise that closes a trilogy exploring similar themes at different points during, around and after the actual fighting of modern conflict.
Dunkirk (2017) kicks off Nolan’s World War 2 trilogy by recreating the 1940 retreat of the Allied Forces from the beaches of Dunkirk and back to Great Britain. A sobering time during the conflict, when Hitler had the upper hand as conqueror of Europe. This film is very much about survival and getting the men back home. This is a time not of aggressive counter-attack, but of patiently waiting for rescue from the volunteer boats and maintaining order. Small acts of heroism and sacrifice bleed through, as the tense race against time across land (1 week), sea (1 day) and air (1 hour) ticks its nail-biting countdown. Dunkirk concludes with an ironic victory of lives saved (in defeat), ready to fight the war another day. And so comes Oppenheimer.
Although it jumps around in time, Oppenheimer (2023) has three distinct one hour acts across its dense three hour runtime. Act 1 is the biopic, charting J Robert Oppenheimer’s life in the 1930s as an optimistic modernist physicist. He’s an idealist communist party member, hungry for scientific breakthroughs, including the seemingly impossible splitting of the atom. Act 2 is the heist movie during World War 2, where Oppenheimer gathers his team for the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb before the Nazis. He pulls it off, but at what cost?
The film is split between black and white and colour scenes. Nolan confirmed that the previous displays objective reality. For example, much of the courtroom drama in the third act, where he’s under Senate questioning over his communist connections, is captured like this. Meanwhile, a lot of the flashbacks are in colour, emphasising how Oppenheimer wanted to remember his actions; displaying how trauma can affect memory, and lead to the rewriting of our pasts in an act of self-preservation.
There’s the famous scene where he’s applauded by a young patriotic audience for the atomic bomb ending the war. But beneath his doubting smile, he imagines the horrific deaths of the estimated 200,000 Japanese people his work was responsible for annihilating and what that means for the future of humanity. If anything says, “What have I done? What have I unleashed on mankind?”, it’s the blank stare of Cillian Murphy in his Oscar-winning role during the film’s final scene. Which brings us finally to The Odyssey.
The Odyssey (2026) is obviously not set in World War 2, so how can we call it Nolan’s third World War 2 film when Homer’s epic myth takes place around 3200 years ago? It’s because the themes naturally follow on from what the writer-director explored in Dunkirk and Oppenheimer as films about the beginning and end of World War 2 (or modern Western involvement in conflict), and The Odyssey is about what comes after.
Odysseus has been away at war with Troy for 10 years. He used the Trojan horse to trick his way past the gates and conquer the people there. And unlike Homer’s glory-seeking ancient warrior, Matt Damon’s is like a traumatised American soldier who questions his conduct in warfare. As many have pointed out, it seems on purpose that the Greeks of Ithaca have American accents.
When enticed by Calypso and her drug-fuelled lotus fruits, Odysseus recounts the fantastical tales of his years trying to get home. The movie had opened with “in a time of apparent magic”, which suggests that he, like the traumatised Oppenheimer, is misremembering his exploits in a form of self-preservation.
A major theme throughout Nolan’s Odyssey is Zeus’ law, a take on Xenia (Greek hospitality) in Homer’s original text. On his journeys, Odysseus and his men are treated badly by their ‘hosts’. But only on his return to Ithaca, where suitors are breaking Zeus’ law by invading his palace and pursuing his wife, does he conclude that he did the same to the Trojans. The payoff, of course, is that Zendaya’s Athena was actually the psychological embodiment of a Trojan priestess whom Odysseus’ men had executed.
Of course, such regrets are a far cry from Homer’s Odysseus, but Damon’s all-American version embodies Nolan’s modern Western liberal ethic in what appears to be a commentary not just on how soldiers deal with coming home from something like World War 2, but on American foreign policy in the decades following from Vietnam and Iraq to Israel and Iran. In a world now where isolationism is cool again and Tucker Carlson asks if Churchill was a villain (Nolan is certainly not going that far, The Odyssey isn’t an anti-war film), the great director’s World War 2 trilogy condemns the unnecessary use of violence in conflict, especially against civilians, whilst simultaneously highlighting the heroic and maintenance of order. We see this from the sacrifices at Dunkirk, to Odysseus’ defeating the suitors and repenting of his actions by paying tribute to his lost men, while also restoring his authority as the returning Father and King.
