Towards the end of Homer OdysseyOdysseus and Penelope finally see each other after 20 years apart. Odysseus, disguised as an “old man” by the goddess Athena, tells Penelope that her husband will return to kill the suitors who tormented him. “No one will escape death and its destruction,” he says. This is Homer’s protagonist: cunning, god-assisted, and vengeful—a reflection of a culture that valued respect, power, and loyalty to a set of intervening gods.
This is not, however, Christopher Nolan’s main character. At key moments in recent adaptations of the ancient Greek poem, the story of Odysseus appears to be more biblical than Homeric.
In the film, when Odysseus is reunited with Penelope, he has not been turned into an old man. Nolan keeps his identity a secret through the most natural means: the dimly lit room, the cloak over his body, and the latticed sliding doors that separate the two characters. The gates, which do not appear in Homer’s poem, are striking scenes between priests and penitents in a Catholic confessional—an environment that Nolan, who was raised Catholic, would be familiar with. And while in Homer’s poem, Odysseus thirsts for revenge, Nolan emphasizes a different emotion in this scene, one that is essential to confession and the Christian life in general: repentance.
Odysseus expresses great guilt over his central role in the famous episode of the Trojan War: when Greek soldiers hid inside wooden horses to trick the people of Troy into allowing them to enter their city. “We left them a gift,” he tells his wife, “a peace offering, which they took home.” In sacking Troy, Odysseus says, he and his fellow soldiers “violated all that has been held sacred among men”—he recognizes the connection between torturing humans and disrespecting the divine. He admits that he “lost his way,” not only physically or physically but in his soul.
Other aspects of Nolan’s composition feel biblical, even Christian, rather than Homeric—the half-sea baptism scene, for example, and the absence of sexual references that fill the poem. The underlying principle of the film’s moral world seems to echo the Bible. “Treat unto others as you would be treated,” Penelope declares early in the film, demonstrating a moral that various characters refer to as “the law of Zeus.” Many versions of that idea exist, both in secular and religious systems. But in the film, Penelope’s words seem more like Jesus’ Golden Rule than any of Homer’s Laws, where heroes—though obliged to welcome guests as if they might be gods in disguise—seek glory more than compassion.
The film’s fictional treatment of Odysseus, too, seems to agree with the Ten Commandments rather than Homer’s moral outlook. In the poem, Odysseus’s lies are often shown well, as evidence of his intelligence and skill – when he deceives the Cyclops, for example. In the film, however, Odysseus’ lie has dire consequences, a clear reflection of the Bible’s claim that false testimony is a sin. Odysseus works for a young soldier named Sinon—a character who does not appear in the poem–for giving horses to the Trojans. But he doesn’t tell Sinoni that his goal is to attack the city. Sinon dies as a result of Odysseus’ deception. Later, in Hades, he warns his commander: “Did you have to lie to me?”
Likewise Christopher Nolan made a Christian film, which Daily Wire the founder Ben Shapiro and others have suggested since the movie was released? Not at all. Like my colleague Gal Beckerman he wroteNolan minimizes the role of gods, considering them important to society but not necessarily real. It is difficult to confidently call “Christian” a film that considers the divine as a possible dream. The movie is god-haunted, though. Homer may have seen Odysseus’ fraud and theft as noble. Nolan’s revision seems to make a different decision. It is animated in part by biblical, modern wisdom Odyssey I cannot see how the deception of war degrades a person and a culture.
