Artforms evolve and mutate from one era to the next, but they rarely disappear entirely. The epic poem may not be a central part of modern culture but its shape and influence can still be felt. Similarly, the Hollywood blockbuster film is widely regarded as a waning cultural force after 50 years of dominance. But a handful of film-makers, led by the director Christopher Nolan, still aspire to the grandeur and sweep of cinema as spectacle.
So it is hardly a surprise that Nolan has chosen to bring one of the foundational archetypes of western culture to his very large screen. For three millenniums The Odyssey has inspired artists from Virgil to Dante.
It would be disappointing if such an ambitious project did not attract argument and controversy, and this one obliged well before anyone had seen a frame of it. Casting decisions drew predictable complaints from the usual self-appointed defenders of western civilisation. More interestingly, classical scholars have argued that Nolan has smoothed away the moral ambiguity that makes Homer’s hero compelling, replacing him with a more conventionally decent man, a sensitive survivor of trauma carrying guilt. Some Homerists regard this as a watering-down of the poem’s sophisticated ethics in favour of spectacle.
But every age has remade the poem in its own image, from Virgil onwards. Joyce moved it to Dublin and handed Odysseus to an advertising canvasser. Reinterpretation is not a threat to the epic tradition. It is how the tradition has survived.
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The public verdict, meanwhile, has been emphatic. The film passed ¤255 million worldwide in its first week, outstripping Nolan’s last film, Oppenheimer, at the same stage. All 172 minutes of it, with no franchise behind it.
One director cannot sustain an industry and the economics of theatrical exhibition in the 21st century remain punishing. But the appetite for scale, difficulty and shared experience has plainly been underestimated. The oldest story about the journey home has filled cinemas with strangers sitting together in the dark.
