Ancient Trauma: Nolan turned Homer's Poem into a lecture on the Collapse of Civilization

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, an interpretation of Homer's poem with an unthinkable budget of $250 million, has been released worldwide. With the appearance of the first shots from the shooting, the guardians of "historical authenticity" and unsuccessful casting attacked the film. Film critic Timur Aliyev watched the film and told how Nolan's large—scale historical fantasy speaks respectfully about the past and with concern about the present, as befits a multi-layered work of fiction.

Waiting for the Greek therapist

Nolan's Odyssey seems to be returning home, just like Homer's. But the king of Ithaca could definitely use a good therapist. Instead of a cunning and capable warrior who robbed, deceived and killed, on the screen we see a gloomy, bearded Matt Damon, a hero with the eyes of a man who desperately wants to return to his wife and son, but remembers all too well what he did in someone else's house, in Troy. Nolan turns to the poem about the divine punishment of the victors and rewrites it in his own way. Now the Odyssey is, first of all, the story of the post-traumatic disorder of the conqueror king.

Since school, we have come to consider The Odyssey to be one of two iconic works of ancient Greek literature, along with the Iliad. Nolan, at first glance, comes into contact with the plot only superficially: after winning the Trojan War, Odysseus returns to his wife (Anne Hathaway) and son (Tom Holland), cleans the court of suitors and clearly proves that cunning bypasses brute force on all fronts. It sounds like a bourgeois's dream of a well-deserved vacation after a successful scam. Everything is more complicated for Homer — to begin with, the poem opens not with a triumph of will, but with the plea of a storyteller eager to tell the world the story of the king of Ithaca. This is not at all an afterword to the war, but rather its long echo, a chronicle of a civilization that even then had a premonition that the price of a great victory could be the slow destruction of its foundations.

In Homer, it is for victory that one is punished at the moment when the "law of Zeus", sacred hospitality, is violated. Instead of gifts, the inhabitants of Troy were given a horse with a landing party inside — no other than the first big PR project of a military scam. Homer's Odyssey is sure that this is a stroke of genius, not a moral catastrophe. He is not tormented by guilt, but in the end he pays for it by not being able to return home. The Odyssey is not a heroic epic at all, but a poem about the revenge of the gods on the victors for excessive cruelty. Nolan picks up on this idea and gives his characters a completely modern diagnosis — the inevitable trauma of the psyche, PTSD.

In the film, Odysseus is not a trickster, but a murderer who is tormented by painful flashbacks about the war. The monsters encountered by the king of Ithaca and his warriors are presented either as ghostly hallucinations, or as monsters that seem to have escaped from the site of a conditional horror. Along with the flashbacks, Troy and its inhabitants return, while the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) feeds Odysseus with lotus petals, an antidepressant popular in those years. As soon as he stops, he is immediately overwhelmed by waves of memories — of his wife and son, of a city burned to the ground, of soldiers who fell in battle and are no longer able to return home. Hidden in this obsession is Nolan's allusion to modernity, to a generation for whom home has become not a dot on a map, but a semi-mythical, cross-border fantasy.

Unlike Homer, Nolan almost cuts the gods out of the narrative, as well as many other characters. Athena (Zendaya) remains only a beautiful, shimmering phantom with a couple of replicas. There will be no Princess Nausicaa, nor the god of the winds, Aeolus, who helped the lost warriors on the way. The director puts the entire burden of responsibility on the shoulders of one person. Whether Odysseus loses people in a clash with the giants-Laestrygones, Circe, Scylla or Charybdis — he is the only one to blame. There is a minimum of the divine here, and an abundance of the human.

Nolan's meticulousness is evident in playing with time, a favorite technique of the director, which he honed in "Oppenheimer," "The Argument," and "Dunkirk." The personal twilight of the Odyssey and its visual aesthetics are extremely detailed. Switching between different points of Odyssey's journey, the director is enthusiastically fascinated by the form. However, it's a sin not to get carried away when shooting on film IMAX cameras and admiring the space. The torchlight makes it subdued, gloomy and voluminous. Drops of salty sea water on the lips of seafarers seem to be felt on this side of the screen.

Speaking of the atmosphere, the Odyssey is almost a museum of antique trauma on a 1:1 scale and at the same time a monument to national historical guilt. The problems begin where the spirit of a large-scale, but rather boring lesson in ancient literature appears behind the scrupulous scrupulousness. As events unfold, I'm tempted to tick the imaginary checklist "Blockbuster, after which Homer can not be read." Sarik Andreasyan probably did something similar on the set of Onegin.

Penelope is a faithful spouse who has been waiting for her husband for years. Watching the suitors milling around, she dejectedly says, "Our civilization is collapsing," noting the obvious. The Nolan system does not recognize matriarchy, which exists here de facto, but not de jure. The throne room of Ithaca is filled with men who honor the principle of "Only a man can sit on the throne." But they haven't made important decisions for a long time and haven't touched a sword or bow for years—what's patriarchal about them?

Nolan radically modernizes the narrative language itself. The place of aed is occupied by rapper Travis Scott, and a strong foreign word easily breaks into the familiar (from the same school bench) hexameter. The cameo role of Sinon (Elliot Page) elegantly rhymes with the original source: neither Homer nor Nolan's lone warrior gets a place in the glorious song. Special mention should be made of Lupita Nyong'o, who played two roles at once — Helen the Beautiful, who caused the siege of Troy, and her sister Clytemnestra, the wife of King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). In a couple of minutes on the screen, an actress with a scar on her face artfully reminds: beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholder, but also in the mind of the sufferer. We will leave the talk about "quotas" on the conscience of Internet commentators.

Where are Homer and Nolan going?

By the middle, the Odyssey is noticeably sagging and losing its former speed. You can't deny Nolan the courage to admit that trauma overtakes not only the victim, but also the aggressor, as well as the straightforwardness. Take, for example, the stunning scene with Circe: the transformation of warriors into pigs (a technique familiar from Miyazaki's Gone with the Ghosts and dozens of other paintings) reads like payback for war crimes. The grunting animals in the pen are a creepy metaphor for the elite, who have been convinced of their own impunity for years. Homer's poetic discomfort, in which admiration for Odysseus' wit is intertwined with horror at his methods, dissolves in Nolan's moral fog of war. Instead of the murky waters of the Aegean Sea, the director offers a straightforward diagram of responsibility for what he has done.

The final action crescendo (flashed in the early seasons of "Game of Thrones", and where not) continues to exploit the same theme. Odysseus' farewell message to Penelope is not surprising either: "We will go West to honor the memory of the fallen." According to Homer, this is "the way to nations that do not know the sea and the oar." According to Nolan, it is a utopian journey towards that part of civilization that has not yet collapsed, but is beginning to rot. In other words, moving to a New World where the American dream lives and thrives.

Why has humanity been returning to Homer's poem for more than two thousand years? Judging by Nolan's three-hour epic, it was important for the director to highlight the story of a man who deliberately deprived himself of the right to a house. Odysseus is a hero with treacherously little heroism, he won and lost at the same time. It is obvious that similar fates befall entire cultures, those whose representatives are accustomed to consider themselves winners. Instead of being painfully suspended, "Odyssey" makes it clear that the main character is not the nice guy you remember from school. If it seems that only the ancient civilization is being destroyed, while ours is in perfect order, this is a delusion.

So, one of the most expensive film collections in world culture appeared on big screens in 2026. History, as you know, likes to go in circles, in the case of Ancient Greece, there were a dozen such revolutions. We still build wooden horses to deceive the enemy, and we name political doctrines after gods and goddesses, and then we are surprised that the journey home takes more and more time, because cities are growing and the transport system is not keeping up. Looking at the Odyssey, you almost enjoy watching how humanity still fails the history exam and still does not learn from the mistakes of others. The movie is exactly the same — majestic and monumental, but it's hard to watch it without regret.