This is Christopher Nolan’s world, and we’re lucky to live in it

It’s more than liking something, it’s feeling gratitude to exist in the same moment that a new work of beauty arrives in the world – to share in the context and freshness of its being; when a genius is at work at the same time you’re doing the shopping and paying your mortgage.

It’s how the fans who used to hang around Paul McCartney’s house in London must have felt that summer evening when he came home from the recording studio, put the speakers in the window and played them the first pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as a special treat. Imagine how that must have felt!

Suggested Reading

The Odyssey is a masterwork that reinvents the epic

Matthew d’Ancona

Know then: I sing of “a complicated man” (trans. Emily Wilson), “A man of twists and turns” (trans. Robert Fagles); “The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d” (trans. Alexander Pope): Christopher Nolan. Let’s face it: he is a master artificer – like Dedalus, the architect of the labyrinth (successful) as well as his son Icarus’ wings (I have notes). The labyrinth is right there in the logo of his production company, Syncopy. 

I know I have occasionally veered negative in my film criticism for The New World, but I have to confess right away I’m in the bag for Nolan. I’ve followed his career as he’s gone from intriguing art house noirist – Following and Memento – to blockbusters such as Inception and The Dark Knight Trilogy to his historical epics Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

He is one of those consistently brilliant artists who despite the rave reviews, the commercial success and the Academy Awards, feels curiously underrated. 

Watch as even now the praise for his latest film The Odyssey is almost immediately subsumed by a wave of shrugs, a kind of yeah-but-it ’s-easy-for-him feeling and nit-picky criticism. This is the guy whose least well-thought-of films (Insomnia and Tenet) would be anyone else’s best films.*

One of the aspects of Nolan’s genius is that the man thinks in cinema. Quentin Tarantino might stray into airport noveldom and Steven Soderbergh dallies in television, but Nolan sees cinema everywhere. He looks at a 2800-year-old poem that was largely considered unfilmable and goes “Oh, there’s a film there.” 

And he’s right. Homer’s The Odyssey has everything we recognise from modern films: it has flashbacks, love interest, multiple narrative strands, action sequences, monsters, war, pathos and comedy, a race against time and an ending worthy of Sam Peckinpah. It’s even an origin story and you know how much we love those.

But more than even that: it’s a perfect Nolan film. Matt Damon is Jason Bourne, a man who can’t remember his past and must… Odysseus, a man who can’t remember his past, his identity, what happened to his crew. This is due to the lotus flowers he’s been wolfing on Charlize Theron’s beach, the dirty bastard. 

While at home, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) delays her suitors and Telemachus goes on a sidequest to Sparta to find out where his father is and more importantly – having never known him – who he is, Odysseus mentally retraces his steps like an ancient Leonard Shelby from Memento back to Troy and from thence across the seas, and all the delays. 

Suggested Reading

The Odyssey and our summer of myth

Matthew d’Ancona

In fact, there are many parallels to Nolan’s previous work. There are totemic items similar to those used in Inception to help the characters distinguish between reality and dreams. The multi-layered narrative recalls Dunkirk’s timelines. The idea of a fleeing/returning father can be seen reflected in Interstellar, The Prestige and Inception. 

Most of all, the complicated main character – the leader of conflicted motivation whose actions could have brought about the end of the world – is essentially Oppenheimer in greaves (those weird bits of armour that protect your shins).  

Inspired by Emily Wilson’s recent translation, Nolan has translated the film into modern American. Telemachus talks about his mom and dad; Odysseus laments about being on the coast of Troy for “ten fucking years.” 

Some might see the colour-blind/nationality-blind casting policy of having not only Lupita Nyong’o play Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra, but also Himesh Patel as Eurylochus and Andrew Howard playing one of Odysseus’ shipmates despite being (gasp) Welsh as being cultural vandalism/politicalcorretnessgonemad/wokeism/whateveritisthesedaysifyoudon’twanttobeacunt but here I’d quote Corey Hawkins’ Polybus when approached by Odysseus disguised as a beggar: “Fuck off!”  

As well as Elon Musk-inspired arse rumblings, Nolan also attracts finicky responses. Critics who think Robert Altman’s sound design in Nashville is revolutionary suddenly decided they needed ear trumpets to discern absolutely everything that was being said in Tenet. Or fans who are perfectly willing to accept a bat-suited vigilante start parsing the time it takes for a nuclear bomb to detonate. 

Suggested Reading

The awful truth about the revolting film Elon Musk wants you to watch

John Bleasdale

There will be more valid criticisms down the road. In terms of adherence to the original, the film largely avoids the issue of slavery, plays down the savagery, nixes almost all of the animal sacrifices and makes Odysseus a more reflective soul. But the changes Nolan makes are thoughtful and in some cases profoundly revelatory: especially in its understanding of what actually happened in Troy. 

His use of practical effects and his filming in real locations – Morocco, Scotland, Iceland, Italy and Greece – ground his films and give them real weather. He also considers the real problems behind the myths, answering the age-old question: where did the men hiding in the Trojan horse go to the toilet? (You don’t want to know.) Even the idea of the Gods becomes something grounded; partly in psychology, partly in ritual and a proto-Christian ethic “Zeus’ law.” 

The two major accusations that are lobbed against Nolan are that he’s humourless and (this is connected) cold or unemotional. 

I’ve never got this. I find Kubrick deeply moving as well. I’ve always found Nolan’s films deeply moving – The Prestige and Memento, Oppenheimer and Dunkirk in particular. I think what people mean by unemotional is unsentimental, which for me is all the better. 

And all of them are possessed of a wit, as dry as the scirocco, to be sure, but wit nonetheless. Here we have an almost Monty Python humour as the tactic of Odysseus and his men is similar to that of King Arthur and his knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Run away! Run away!”

Odysseus and his men are at the end of their tethers at the beginning of their journey and are raw nerve ends by the time they’re halfway through their wanderings. It’s hard not to feel for them, or for Penelope as she awaits a form of traditional rape if her husband doesn’t show, or for wimpy Telemachus, who wants to live up to his father’s image even as he traces it from secondhand fragments. 

The nail in the coffin for any claim Nolan doesn’t do emotion should be his treatment of Odysseus’ dog Argos. If that scene doesn’t break you, then I really… I just can’t… What kind of Polyphemus are you?

I hesitated to write this piece. The reviews are all so good. Almost universally. Why add one to the pile?  How much on Rotten Tomatoes? 99%?

There’s the contrarian in me. There’s the knowledge that if I still lived in the UK I’d be getting heartily sick of seeing the adverts on the buses and bus stops and the non-stop blargh of it all. It is the frontlash that provokes the backlash. But I have to stop here for a moment, and let’s just settle for a moment, take a moment and say: “Well, if this isn’t great, I don’t know what is.”

*My favourite Nolan film is either whichever Nolan film I happen to be watching or The Prestige.