The Current Cinema - Helen Madden is most unimpressed by THE ODYSSEY (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2026)

Oh what a dull, hollowed-out hero is Nolan’s Odysseus. What a dead-eyed gloomy Matt Damon...

This Odysseus is certainly a Christian pilgrim, burdened by sin, plagued with guilt and obsessed with redemption .

Where is that quicksilvered hero of high emotion, unquenchable curiosity, the subversive up-ender of things and agog at the wonders of the world ?

Homer’s Odysseus is the world’s first described demobilised soldier, freed from the bloody walls of windy Troy, amazed now, just to be alive and to sail the seas, not quite so desperate to get home , but home is the destination. He is astonished at the beauty and marvel of the world, its goddesses and its horrors, happily waylaid by the possibility of another one, ever another opening of his eyes.

And the wit and humour of the man? All gone.

Gone too are the precious scenes with the wild and beautiful women who have been disappeared. Where is Nausicaa, the teenage princess whom Odysseus discovers when he is shipwrecked on the shores of Ogygia, playing ball with her friends? Where Odysseus plays out one of the most entrancing scenes in literature, clutching a branch to hide his nakedness he wins over the alarmed young woman with sparkling words, soothing and smooching with wit, irony and tenderness.

Nolan’s Calypso, the dangerous nymph with glossy braids, is barely conscious. While seductive Circe, the goddess of fabulous beauty, is now a grubby witch. Her physically reshaping of Odysseus’ men into pigs is a sickly vomit-inducing image and accompanied with the man-hating rant it’s the most egregious example of the crude token wokeness of the film.

So many 'fucks' but no actual fucking in this Christian’s progress. All that fun, Calypso bedding him every night for seven years, Circe every night for one year. This simpering Penelope is only allowed a few minutes in bed on his return. A night Homer describes as the longest night in the history of the universe ..as Athena held back the dawn for them.

Unbelievably, Helen is punished by Nolan as he inscribes guilt on the face that launched a thousand ships with gruesome scarring. In Homer’s Odyssey Helen survives intact, protected and loved by Menelaus. That thousands of soldiers die while Helen lives and loves is Homer’s brilliant insight into the brutality and arbitrariness of war...

And the truth of Homer’s Odyssey? This tale of a man who in the end, bereft of friends and companions, faces Ithaca, the future, alone – is literature’s first intimation of that psychological truth, that we are all, in the end, stranded on the shore and alone.