Price of Greatness

An aspect of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey that I found so very striking was how it reinterprets Homer’s epic poem. The classic is an epic adventure: wily Odysseus outsmarts his foes and wins fame and fortune on his decade-long journey home. It’s the story we know, the story we read in school, the story we argued about in essays (and rants!). The movie by Nolan, et al. takes the familiar and explores it through a different lens and, in doing so, finds a new story that, like any good story, reflects the world and questions around us today.

Nolan’s movies are obsessed with the great man theory, often to a fault. The protagonists of his filmography are portrayed as larger-than-life individuals who singularly affect the world around them. They are men (and they are indeed all men) who carry the world’s burden on their shoulders. Batman is the only one who can save Gotham in The Dark Knight and it is a burden he must carry alone. Caldlow and Burden in The Prestige are the great magicians of their time, vying against each other to be the greatest magician. In Interstellar, it is up to Cooper to save Earth, sacrificing so much on his quest.¹

It is notable then, that The Odyssey instead is more interested in breaking down the very idea of a great man. Odysseus is definitely one of Nolan’s great men: it was he who devised the Trojan Horse that ended a ten-year battle and embarked on a journey that was named for him. He is a king and a strategist, a man others turn to for leadership and guidance. The film itself makes sure we know that Odysseus is special. He’s afforded a degree of interiority that none of his men nor any other characters (save perhaps Telemachus and Penelope[and even then, only barely]) are remotely afforded. And Odysseus’s actions change the course of history — but at what cost?

The Odyssey turns the epic poem into a tragedy. Odysseus is haunted by the victory and subsequent sacking of Troy — a victory he engineered with the deception of the horse. He carries too the weight of the lives lost at Troy and during the voyage home, men who trusted him to lead them to safety. For as great and cunning a warrior as Odysseus is, there is a heavy cost to his actions. What if, the movie asks, the Trojan Horse was not a clever deception but a war crime? What does it mean to be responsible for not just the loss of so many lives but the changing of the very rules of war?

In some ways, The Odyssey is a companion piece to Oppenheimer. Nolan’s prior movie frames the creation of the atomic bomb as the work of a man so devoted in his pursuit of science that he did not wrestle with the implications until it was too late. The Odyssey posits a similar question, but locating it in antiquity lets it look at it from a different angle. Both ask questions about a changing world and how the actions of ‘great men’ can echo through the ages. And so The Odyssey is both the same age-old tale and a framework with which Christopher Nolan wrestles with a familiar theme, somehow a work both familiar and thrillingly new.

1. Compare Cooper to Grace in Project Hail Mary. Though both are risking everything on a last-ditch mission, the latter movie spends less time on what Grace is giving up and more on the process (and romantic adventure) of saving the planet. Cooper, though, gives up his relationship with his children and the rest of humanity and that sacrifice is the movie’s emotional and pathic through line. Furthermore, it is Grace’s everyman nature that leads to his heroism as opposed to an intrinsic greatness displayed by Nolan’s protagonists. ↩︎