Christopher Nolan Is Not a God

I go into every Christopher Nolan movie with a similar mindset: that this man is going to pull off some superhuman feat of filmmaking, that he’s going to spring some insane trick or somehow levitate the audience with his masterful directing skills. But he’s never quite gotten there — the closest he’s come may have been Memento or Heath Ledger’s scenes in The Dark Knight — and yet I’ve never left a Nolan movie feeling disappointed (granted, I still haven’t seen Tenet).

Christopher Nolan is not a God. He’s just a man who happens to be incredibly good at his job, maybe the most skilled director working today. He does occasionally offer up a few sacrifices to the Gods — sound editing is not his forte, and his dialogue can occasionally clunk. But my god, man: I can’t imagine any director making a better Odyssey than Nolan. He doesn’t lean on stylistic flourishes or lens flares or callbacks to his earlier work or clever nods to the audience. Dude just makes great f***ing films.

The Odyssey is no exception. Imagine anyone else making a three-hour film based on an ancient Greek epic accessible to general audiences (despite an R-rating), particularly those who care very little for Greek mythology (among whom I include myself). Nolan’s Odyssey is workmanlike without losing its potency. It’s sturdy, but never boring. It is, like Odysseus, magnificent without being showy.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, making his ten-year-long journey home after the ten-year-long Trojan War. Most of you probably already know the story, or never attended an American public school. There are a few mishaps along the way: cannibals, a giant cyclops, sea monsters, a witch who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, a sea nymph, a trip to the misty edges of the underworld. You know? The usual.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, dozens of suitors loll around a neverending feast waiting for Odysseus’s wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), to give up on her old man and remarry. For men so fixated on Ithacan hospitality, they make lousy guests. Odysseus’s son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), helps his mother fend off the suitors until she can hold out no longer.

I’m not going to recount the entire plot here (read the book!), but I will say that Nolan reworks and significantly alters the overriding themes of Homer’s work. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus is a prideful and triumphant king (this is where most middle-schoolers learned the word hubris). Nolan takes a different approach: Odysseus is plagued with guilt, suffering from PTSD, and determined to break the cycle of violence and war. Nolan’s existential horror better suits the times — modern audiences might have had less sympathy for Homer’s Odysseus and viewed his suffering as an appropriate comeuppance. Nolan’s version is more like, “Oh, this poor bastard. I hope he gets home before his wife is forced to marry Edward from Twilight.”

It’s brilliantly cast and the performances are all terrific, although if you’re singling anyone out for awards consideration it’d be Damon, Jon Bernthal, Samantha Morton, and I might even throw a shout-out to Elliot Page. The special effects are likewise fantastic: modern, but still with a touch of that Ray Harryhausen magic. It’s also incredibly well-paced for a three-hour movie, and I was even pleasantly surprised that the story’s action centerpiece — the Trojan horse, which erupts in one of the flashbacks Odysseus recounts to Calypso — doesn’t overwhelm the back half or drain anything from the third act.

It’s just good, solid filmmaking that fuses modern techniques with old-school craft (a feat that Spielberg failed to accomplish in Disclosure Day earlier this summer). It absolutely earns its epic label. Nolan may not be a God, but he’s barely a man, either.