One approaches a new Christopher Nolan film these days with the wary resignation of a man entering a cathedral built by a committee that couldn’t decide whether to worship God or the architect. The pews are magnificent, the acoustics impeccable, and yet the sermon keeps reminding you that the architect has read a great many books about sermons and would like you to notice. Mr Nolan’s The Odyssey, that latest monument to his own industriousness, has arrived trailing the usual hosannas from those who mistake length for profundity and budget for vision. Matt Walsh, a gentleman not normally given to queuing for three-hour spectacles, emerged blinking into the daylight with the air of one who has paid good money to watch a sacred cow defecate on its own pedestal. His verdict was merciless and, one suspects, entirely correct.
The casting, to begin at the beginning, is an act of vandalism so thorough it makes one wonder whether Mr Nolan received a grant for it. Homer’s Helen of Troy, she of the 'white-armed' epithet that has survived three millennia of textual transmission, is here rendered as a Kenyan-Mexican actress whose presence is presumably meant to remind us that beauty is a social construct and the Trojan War was, at heart, a diversity seminar that got out of hand. One pictures the ancient bards spinning in their graves with such velocity they could power a small Peloponnesian city-state. The rest of the ensemble appears chosen by the same HR department that once decided Bridgerton needed more Regency rakes of colour. It is not that these performers lack talent; it is that talent has been press-ganged into the service of a contemporary sermon no one asked for. The audience is not transported to the Bronze Age. It is transported to a very expensive modern American university campus where Odysseus has evidently completed a mandatory module on toxic masculinity and is now processing his feelings.
And what feelings they are. Mr Nolan has taken the wiliest, most resourceful bastard in Western literature and turned him into a solemn, guilt-ridden therapy patient who looks as though he might at any moment abandon the journey home to Penelope in favour of a safe space and a weighted blanket. This is not adaptation; it is emasculation with a side order of IMAX. One almost longs for the days when Hollywood heroes were permitted the moral complexity of a cheeseburger. Instead we get trauma. Always trauma. The man who outwitted Cyclops and charmed Circe is here plagued by the sort of introspective melancholy that would have had him cashiered from any self-respecting Mycenaean warband. It is as if Mr Nolan, having exhausted every other way of signalling seriousness, has decided that the surest route to artistic credibility is to give the greatest trickster of antiquity a case of the moderns.
The film itself, aside from these conceptual howlers, is a structural shambles: verbose and rushed, self-serious and yet somehow empty, like a TED Talk delivered inside a cathedral. Dialogue clunks along with all the poetic grace of a committee memo. One waits in vain for a single line that might echo down the centuries; instead we are treated to speeches that sound as though they were focus-grouped by people who have never met an ancient Greek but have strong opinions about representation. The much-vaunted visuals, those sweeping Nolan vistas that supposedly justify the ticket price, fail to conjure any genuine sense of the archaic world. You never feel three thousand years removed from the present. You feel as though you are watching expensive Americans in fancy dress performing a very long Acknowledgement of Country.
This, of course, is the problem with late-period Nolan. Remove the Dark Knight trilogy — those rare occasions when genre conventions forced him to be disciplined — and what remains is a filmmaker who has mistaken complication for complexity. Inception was a clever puzzle box; Interstellar reached for the stars and achieved a certain grandeur despite itself; but the later works have grown ever more bloated, ever more convinced of their own profundity. Mr Nolan builds his films like supertankers: enormous, impressive from a distance, and yet strangely unseaworthy once one boards them. One cannot help wondering what would happen if the man were forced to make a picture on an actual budget, with actual constraints, the sort of low-budget indie affair where ideas must stand or fall on merit rather than spectacle.
The result, I fear, would be chastening. Stripped of his favourite toys — the non-linear timelines, the thunderous Hans Zimmer scores, the endless exposition dumps delivered at seventy miles an hour — Mr Nolan might discover that he has rather less to say than his reputation suggests. A filmmaker who truly understood the ancient mind, as Robert Eggers did in The Northman, can conjure an entire worldview with mud, blood, and a modest running time. Mr Eggers transports you; Mr Nolan lectures you. The difference is the difference between poetry and a PowerPoint presentation with really good graphics.
Audiences, one suspects, are growing weary of these over-long historical epics that mistake scale for stature. Three hours of self-important gloom is a great deal to ask when the story being told has already been told, with infinitely greater economy, by people who did not have access to computer-generated imagery or the services of every available Oscar nominee. Homer did it in verse that still sings. The old Hollywood craftsmen did it in two hours with Max Steiner on the score and a decent script. Mr Nolan does it in three hours with the emotional range of a particularly pompous TED speaker and the historical sense of a man who has Googled 'ancient Greece' and liked what the algorithm showed him.
The pedestal, in short, is cracking. Mr Nolan remains a technician of considerable gifts, capable of moments of genuine cinematic awe. But the awe has become predictable, the gifts ever more in service to a sensibility that confuses contemporary pieties with timeless truth. The Odyssey is not a disaster so much as a cautionary tale: what happens when a talented director is allowed to indulge every whim while simultaneously submitting to the even greater whims of the age. The result is neither ancient nor modern, neither entertaining nor particularly enlightening. It is simply loud — an expensive, self-important pageant that mistakes its own noise for significance.
One leaves the cinema, as Mr Walsh apparently did, with the distinct impression that the emperor’s new toga is rather less impressive than the tailor would have us believe. And somewhere, in whatever Elysium reserved for dead poets, Homer is laughing his bearded head off.