“Let’s go home,” Matt Damon says brusquely, playing an exhausted Odysseus. Damon’s a good actor, and that moment in previews got me pumped for the movie. It’s a punchy, understated framing of the Odyssey: A perilous journey home from a lengthy and disastrous home.
But that’s not a scene from Homer’s Odyssey. I’m not saying “let’s go home,” is a loose translation by some feminist scholar. The whole scene, with Odysseus gathering his men on the beaches after sacking Troy, is absent in the epic poem. It was invented by Director Christopher Nolan.
Nolan’s movie included plenty more scenes that weren’t in the original. It omitted many more. Some classicists and other online critics assailed the movie for these variations.
Nolan made judgment calls I disliked, but no one can blame him for making the calls. He had to. Homer didn’t write a movie, he wrote an epic poem. Christopher Nolan didn’t make an epic poem — he made a movie. The movie is an adaptation of the epic.
Nolan was working in a different genre, with a different language, and at a different time. As such, he adapted more than just the dialogue or a few scenes; he adapted the core themes of the story and the character Odysseus.
Nolan understates Odysseus’s tragic hubris and makes him tortured and pensive. Deep loyalty to his men and his family defined him.
Consistently, Nolan replaced Homer’s pagan ethics with a more modern ethics. For instance, the characters showed revulsion at human sacrifice and vengeance killing.
Throughout the film, pagan morality sits uneasily with the protagonists, likely because Nolan knew it would sit uneasily with viewers. So he sanitized some of the film’s violence.
The movie also sanitized Odysseus’s infidelity by removing his affair with Circe and never directly acknowledging his sleeping with Calypso. Most significantly, Nolan gave Odysseus deep guilt for the Greek massacre in Troy.
These changes didn’t wokify the Odyssey. They de-paganized it.
Nolan made the Odyssey a tragedy with a conservative tragic lesson: The Greeks abused and disregarded the old laws and the old Gods that had made their civilization, and now civilization would crumble.
Hubris in this story was not limited to Odysseus, but to all Greeks.
The Greeks cleverly exploited the Trojans’ piety by declaring the Trojan horse a gift to Athena.
To the suitors, Zeus’s law requiring hospitality for strangers was antiquated and pointless. One traditional rationale, that any stranger could be a god in disguise, became a punchline for the suitors, too enlightened for such hoary myths.
No one understood how much these old rules and practices made civilization possible. The Greeks could sleep peacefully in their own beds for generations because of these old rules they now saw as pointless or worse. They took for granted relative peace and prosperity, while denigrating its foundations.
The Greeks were spending down an invaluable inheritance and saw no value in replenishing it.
This central theme is conservative and even Christian.
The characters’ invocation of Zeus’s law echoes Christ’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, and his warning and promise that as we do the least of mankind so we do to Him.
When Odysseus and Penelope lament the end of their civilization and foretell a new civilization, the viewer almost expects to see a cross appear on screen.
Perhaps the most Christian scene — certainly the most Catholic one — happens when Calypso sends Odysseus home after seven years on her island. She tells this cleverest of men to stop trying to do everything himself and to trust in the gods. More striking, she tells Odysseus to admit his sins and repent.
LEGACY MEDIA IS A LEGEND IN HOLLYWOOD’S MIND
For all the fuss about this being a woke movie, it borrows its moral weight from conservative wisdom and Christian ideas. Hollywood, when it wants to tell a good story rather than peddle its ideology, often leans on conservative sentiments and Christian themes.
Nolan, who was raised Catholic, is in this way like the Greeks of his Odyssey. In fact, all of Hollywood is, and so is much of our culture. Nolan didn’t merely adapt the Odyssey for our age, he made a movie indicting even himself.
We have spent a couple of generations at least spending down the cultural wealth of Western civilization. We have wandered so far, and God only knows if we can ever go back home.