After Three Thousand Years, Homer Gets the IMAX Treatment
The trailer for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey premiered on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on May 4, and I have watched it three times since, each time noticing something different. The first time, I noticed Matt Damon as Odysseus—a casting that lands well, the kind of face that carries its age as a credential. The second time, I noticed the scale: $250 million, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras across Morocco, Greece, Iceland, Malta, Scotland, and Italy. The third time, I noticed what was absent from those two and a half minutes: almost nothing of Odysseus's inner life.
This is, perhaps, the honest problem of adapting Homer for cinema. The Odyssey is a poem about a man thinking—thinking about home while a nymph offers him immortality, thinking about identity while a giant threatens to eat him, thinking about his wife, his son, his island—and cinema, even at its most interior, tends to externalize. Monsters photograph well. Longing is harder.
The cast is formidable: Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron. The film releases July 17 in the United States. Nolan wrote the script himself—the same director who made Interstellar as a meditation on absence and fatherhood, who made Memento as a film structurally about a broken memory. These are not irrelevant precedents. Homer's poem, after all, is partly about the way memory distorts the journey it is supposed to preserve.
What strikes me, watching the trailer, is how much Nolan clearly loves the source material—and how that love creates its own difficulty. The Odyssey is not a story about a hero returning home; it is a story about the impossibility of the return itself, about how the man who left cannot be the man who arrives. Ithaca is real; the version of Ithaca that Odysseus carried through twenty years of war and wandering is not. That gap—between the place and its image in the mind—is where the poem's grief lives. Whether a $250 million spectacle can hold that grief is the question the trailer does not answer, and probably cannot.
I think of what the Scandinavian writers who shaped my reading knew about the homecoming: Hamsun understood that going back was a kind of invention. The sagas knew that the man returned was not the man remembered. Homer knew this too—which is why Penelope does not recognize her husband immediately even when he stands before her, and why that delay is the poem's most precise emotion.
The Odyssey has been translated into every major language hundreds of times, adapted for stage and screen and graphic novel, turned into Joyce's Ulysses and the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? and countless novels between. Each adaptation reveals what its maker believed essential and what it chose to leave behind. Nolan's version—with its companion epic still waiting in the ancient texts—will be no different. The question is what he chose to carry. July 17 is not far away.
