Is Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Odyssey disenchanted? Well, I would say yes, but not entirely. And that's what we're going to be getting into in this episode of the Speak Life podcast. My name's Thomas Thoroughgood. It's great to have you with us. And I would normally be joined by either Glenn Scrivener and/or Naomi Brahm. Both are away, but I've had the past few days to think quite a lot about the Odyssey, this brand new movie that everyone's talking about. It's written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and it is, of course, an adaptation of Homer's ancient Greek poem from around the 8th century BC. It's an all-star cast, including Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Neongo, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Charlize Thuron, and Elliot Page, among many others. I don't know if you as a Speak Life listener have had an opportunity to see the film yet. I don't know if you want to see the film, but in this short podcast episode, I just want to distill some of the key issues that the film raises from a Christian perspective. And hopefully that might be of some use to you as you're processing it personally or having conversations about the film with people you encounter, be they Christians or otherwise. The first half of the episode will be spoiler-free. I'll consider why everyone's talking about this film, its cultural impact, that sort of thing. And then I'll drop a spoiler warning and get into the meatier theological themes that certain key details in the film raise. Okay, so first up, the spoiler-free chat. Why is everyone talking about Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Odyssey? Well, first of all, whenever Christopher Nolan releases a film, it's a big event. He's regularly considered one of the greatest living directors. His previous film was Oppenheimer, and because that came out on the same day as Barbie, there was that whole event, Barbenheimer, and that made a massive splash. I think the Odyssey has made even more of a splash. Perhaps for two reasons. One is that it's a profound technical accomplishment, and two, perhaps more negatively, it has stoked the culture war. So on the technical accomplishment side of things, Christopher Nolan is a traditionalist when it comes to cinema, and where many directors are now shooting on digital, he loves the film format. Now, traditionally, cinema cameras shot on 35mm film, so that's the width of the celluloid passing through the camera. But Christopher Nolan is a fan of shooting on IMAX 70mm, so double the width. And that's the film stock that's considered to give the crispest cinematic image. It costs an absolute fortune to shoot on, as you can imagine. And what's unique about The Odyssey is it's the first movie to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm. So before now, directors tended to only use IMAX 70mm for the action scenes, the big spectacle stuff, because IMAX cameras are incredibly noisy. And so that means when you're filming a dialogue scene with an IMAX camera whirring away, all the dialogue you record on set is unusable. But Christopher Nolan and his team for the Odyssey pioneered a new camera system essentially where each IMAX camera is inside a massive box and that muffles the sound so that we can still hear what the actors are saying, and therefore the dialogue on set is usable. And this sort of technical innovation combined with a pursuit of great artistry, that has come to define Christopher Nolan's filmmaking approach. All that to say, this has led to some debate online about whether the Odyssey is a pretentious and even elitist film. You know, only the people who are willing to shell out more money to see it on a big IMAX screen are getting the full experience as Nolan intended, whereas the rest of us peasants are seeing it on our standard cinema screens cropped top and bottom. But I don't know, I saw the film on a standard cinema screen in the Brighton Odeon, and yes, it was cropped top and bottom, but I still found it to be an incredibly cinematic experience. So that's the technical side of the film, but the real controversy, what has made this movie more controversial than any of Christopher Nolan's previous films, I think, is how it has poured gasoline on the culture war, perhaps unintentionally. So when the first trailers came out on YouTube, swarms of people were slamming the dislike button. People were saying the costumes, the settings, the actors, they don't look authentically ancient Greek. They don't look at home in an adaptation of Homer's poem. And people were saying, look, why does the cast look about as diverse as downtown LA? Why didn't they get any Greek actors in this film? Why are they all speaking with American accents? Why is Helen of Troy, who's described explicitly as a white character in the original, why is she depicted by Lapita Neongo, who's black? And then there's Elliot Page, a trans actor, formerly Ellen Page. And from the trailer, people thought, oh no, why has Christopher Nolan cast Elliot Page in the role of Achilles, you know, this mighty, strong, ancient Greek warrior? How is that in any way believable? It turns out that actually Elliot Page doesn't play Achilles in the film. But all this controversy was swirling around online, and people were tying it to the fact that Nolan's script was primarily based on Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. Now Emily Wilson is a classicist and she did a full translation of Homer's Odyssey and tried to be faithful to the original text, but her translation has been the source of some controversy because she presses more into the gender and power dynamics of the story. And people are saying, you know, is she importing some of her current concerns into her reading of the Odyssey? And that can be a whole conversation. But people online, especially conservatives online, were thinking, oh no, Nolan's basing his movie off her adaptation, the casting isn't authentic. Is this movie going to be propaganda for current identity politics? Well, that was the conversation swirling around when the trailers came out. As for when the film actually came out, if anything, the conversation got even more heated. But what's really interesting about it is that the opinions aren't splitting neatly between left and right. Some conservatives are loving the movie, others are hating it, some liberals are loving the movie, others are hating it. So just to give you a taste of the various opinions, here's Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator from the Daily Wire. He said on Twitter about the film, Nolan strips the gods out of the Odyssey entirely. Only goddesses show up, and then only as PTSD hallucinations. Nolan's apologists will say that he did this because he was going for a more grounded film. Oh okay. So then why does ancient Greece have the demographic makeup of Los Angeles circa 2026? That's one conservative opinion on the film. But then there's Jonathan Peugeot, and he is an Eastern Orthodox icon carver, a symbologist. He's a big fan of the movie. He said this on Twitter. In the spirit of Odysseus, deep trickery is at work in this film. Don't let the apparent compromises fool you. The Odyssey is an absolute triumph. It is made with a profound love for the source material, filled with deep pathos, the return of the father, the elevation of the son, and the restoration of proper order despite all the sins perpetrated by the guardians of that order. It is a film about the end of one world and the beginning of another, about remembrance, return, and the perpetuation of an order after a long wandering through chaos. And in his video essays about the film, Jonathan Peugeot has gone on to argue that the film itself is a Trojan horse. He argues that whilst the film has a veneer of postmodernism in terms of the casting, etc., beneath that it's actually smuggling in a much more traditional message about a father coming home to return order. You know, the film literally opens with an image of the Trojan horse and standing next to the Trojan horse is a trans actor. And it does make you wonder, is Christopher Nolan consciously or subconsciously trying to say something with that? But here's where the opinions get really interesting. Emily Wilson herself, so the supposedly very progressive translator of the Odyssey on which Christopher Nolan based his film, she has said in interviews that actually she's not a massive fan of what Nolan has done with the Odyssey. She said to Sarah Roll, There's a tolerance for ambiguity in the world of Homer's Odyssey, which I don't think there exactly is in the world of Hollywood blockbuster action films. I think that's one of the big challenges for Nolan, is that he has to make the protagonist a likable all American hero, which is a real challenge if you're basing this on a poem where the hero is not necessarily motivated by romantic love or being a nice suburban parent, but actually he wants glory and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city. And Emily Wilson goes on to say this. She says, I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. I think it's a film that has some interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory. So that's fascinating. The film was largely inspired by her translation, and people thought, oh no, that's why it's going to be really progressive. But actually, the author of that translation has distanced herself from the film in some ways. And then there's the historian Tom Holland, who we do need to distinguish from the actor Tom Holland in this case, because the actor Tom Holland is in the movie. But the historian Tom Holland, who we've talked about a lot on this channel, he wrote the book Dominion about how centuries of Christianization have profoundly shaped the West and our values and our outlook on the world. He says, lots of people are telling me the Odyssey is a terrible film on the basis of not having seen it. For what it's worth, I've now watched it twice, and it is by some way the best cinematic adaptation of a Greek myth I have ever seen. It honors Homer while simultaneously making something new of him. And that's fascinating because Tom Holland, of all people, would know the differences between the Bronze Age mindset and the Christian mindset, but he likes the film and he thinks it handles the source material with respect whilst doing something fresh and new with it. So what can we as Christians make of all this? Well, I'm gonna drop the spoiler warning now and let's get into some of those theological details. Okay, you're still here. So I said right at the start of this episode, I think Nolan's Odyssey is disenchanted, but not entirely. What do I mean by that? Well, before the film begins, the text on screen says, in a time of apparent magic, dot dot dot. So right from the outset, we're being asked to question what we're seeing in this movie. This is an idea that Christopher Nolan keeps revisiting in his movies, from memento to the prestige to inception, this constant questioning of what is reality and what is illusion within the story. And in the film, towards the end of his voyage, Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, gets washed up on Calypso's Island, and there he is given these lotus flowers that make him forget the trauma he's been through. So he lives in that state of artificial bliss for some time, but then he wants to remember, however painful that might be. So he stops taking the lotus flowers, and the memories begin to flood back. His memories of the Trojan War and the monsters he encountered on his voyage, and the fact that he has a wife and son back home in Ithaca. And this raises the question, are the fantastical elements in the movie, the Cyclops, the gods, etc., are they merely artifacts of Odysseus' imagination? Is it one big lotus flower fueled drug trip? And he's essentially hallucinating those more fantastical elements. I think that is a valid interpretation of the film, and Christopher Nolan certainly opens the door for that interpretation far more than Homer did in the original. Homer's Odyssey is incredibly theological, and in the movie it seems that Nolan might be telling that story through a materialist lens, a disenchanted lens. And you see this with the gods in the film as well. So the god who is explicitly depicted throughout the movie is Athena, played by Zendaya, and towards the end of the film there's a suggestion that she too is kind of a hallucination. She has the face of a temple priestess who was killed by the Greeks in the Trojan War, and there's a sense that maybe she just represents the regret that Odysseus has about the war. Now, to be fair, there is some ambiguity here because Athena gives Odysseus a grey cloak and he wears that as a disguise in the final act. And so if that cloak is real, then maybe Athena is real within the movie. But as I say, overall, the fantastical elements of the story, the gods, the monsters, their existence is questioned a lot more in the movie than in the original. So I think you can say that Nolan's film is disenchanted, but not entirely. And why do I say not entirely? Well, in the film, as Emily Wilson pointed out, Odysseus is depicted as this tortured figure who has regret for the Trojan War. So the Trojan horse, that ingenious military strategy of smuggling the Greek soldiers into Troy inside a wooden horse. In the film, Odysseus is depicted as having Oppenheimer levels of regret over that. You know, here is this unprecedented agent of destruction that is brought into the world, and now the genie is out of the bottle, it can't be put back. You get that sense of shame and guilt in Odysseus in the movie. And that certainly isn't there in Homer's original. In Homer's original, Odysseus is a Bronze Age warrior seeking glory. He would not have mourned for the deaths of the enemy Trojans, and therefore Christopher Nolan has given Odysseus a kind of Christian or post-Christian conscience. The fact that he wrestles so much with war and the horrors of war, and that he wants to recognise an inviolable worth and dignity to even his enemies, the Trojans, that's much more in keeping with a Christian or post-Christian mindset than an ancient Greek one. And that's why I say it's a disenchanted film, but not entirely. It certainly strips away a lot of the ancient Greek pagan theology, but in its place I think it's consciously or not appealing to some rather Christian theological foundations. So if we're Christians who have seen the film or we're coming into contact with lots of people who have seen the film and are talking about the film, what can we bring to this conversation? Well, as with any piece of pop culture, I think there are ideas within it that we can receive and affirm as Christians. There are ideas we'd want to reject as Christians, and there are ideas that we can redeem. Receive, reject, and redeem. That's a mantra I get from the Popcorn Theology podcast. But I think a great question you could ask people off the back of watching this film is do you believe that our world is enchanted? You know, we can talk about the pagan theology depicted to some degree in the film, but far more so in Homer's original, and what we make of that, it's a pretty scary vision of how the gods interact with humanity. But we as Christians, you know, we have such a rich cosmology. We believe that the universe is profoundly enchanted, teeming with life, that the heavens and the earth are thrumming with meaning because Christ is before all things and in him all things hold together. And so if part of us is longing for some ultimate story to be true in which the great hero comes home to restore the proper order, well as Christians we can say, yeah, those longings are not in vain. There is an ultimate hero, and his name is Jesus. But then another topic that the film opens up is the question of war, because Odysseus has regret for the Trojan horse. He believes that that was an inappropriate act of warfare, but he's clearly not entirely anti-war because when he comes home, he brutally kills many of the suitors who have been occupying his palace, and that's very much framed as an act of righteous judgment in the film. So that might lead to some interesting conversations. You know, I'm not suggesting that we as Christians need to weigh in on all the political controversies and the various wars that are happening around the world at the moment. People will take different opinions on that and we want to tread carefully. But if we're talking to someone who is horrified by war, well, we can ask them, well, why is war so horrific? And we as Christians can say, well, yeah, it's not ultimately the way things are meant to be. God created a peaceful cosmos, and his ultimate plan for the new creation is a peaceful cosmos. But then if people have a problem with the justice of God and the fact that the God of the Bible judges evil, I suppose we can say, well, if God doesn't get angry about certain things in the world, is he truly loving? And so as Christians, we can actually talk about the judgment of God as being a good thing, as something that we're longing for. The uncomfortable dimension in Christianity is that all of us are sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God. All of us deserve judgment, but we believe there is grace, that there is a refuge, that Christ will shield us through the judgment and bring us out the other side. So let's come to him. That's good news. It is good that God judges wrongdoing, like Odysseus returning to punish the suitors. It is good that God does that. And in his great love, he has provided a way through that judgment, and his name is Christ. So what do you think of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey? Has it led to any interesting conversations about faith, either in church or your workplace or home? Why not get in touch with us? Podcast at speaklife.org.uk. Drop us an email, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much for listening to this rather unusual episode of the Speak Life Podcast. And if you're interested, I've done a couple of video essays looking at these ideas in more detail on my YouTube channel. So if you just go to YouTube and type in Thomas Thoroughgood, I cover films there from a theological perspective. Keep speaking life, and we will be back soon!