In his video review of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” the Canadian artist and philosopher of myth Jonathan Pageau expressed what a lot of us who are committed to the old books have been feeling for over a year: a trepidation that our favorite director might fail to capture the magic of our favorite book (well, second-favorite for me). After disasters like “Troy,” I had sworn off all Hollywood adaptations of ancient classics. If you spend hours every day, every week, for years just trying to get to the point where you can hear a little bit of the magic of the literature of the deep past, then you worry about those who might try to turn your beloved stories into old-fashioned summer action flicks and thus “taint” them, to use Pageau’s term. 

Christopher Nolan is the one director I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, and I had been encouraged by Pageau’s review: He said that not only did the multicultural casting not detract from the film, but Nolan managed to preserve the mythic core of the story. With all due respect to my colleague and collaborator, I have to (slightly) disagree. Pageau is generally right that Nolan’s multicultural cast does not interfere with the story. And the film does indeed possess a deep core—the film itself is a Trojan Horse, as Pageau put it. The core of the film is political, psychological, and it advances, in its final minutes, a striking philosophy of history. It is not, however, “mythic.” 

For me, the multicultural casting was not a problem whatsoever, and I think the sooner we get beyond this superficial battle within the longer culture war, the better. Of course, one might at first be surprised to find that a Black African woman (Lupita Nyong’o) plays Helen of Troy (given that she was from Sparta) or that Eurylochus, a native Ithacan, looks Indian (played by Himesh Patel), but the reality is that the ancient Mediterranean was so extraordinarily cosmopolitan that a “Bridgerton”-style casting is an effective modern tool for recreating it. Nolan also seems to want to represent a world of cooperation that was lost and is being lost all over again. 

The more difficult barrier to cross is not the cross-cultural one but a “vertical” translation of time. Homer dwelled in an “enchanted cosmos” full of spirits and gods and magic and amulets. And within such a cosmos of terrifying depths and stupefying heights, the human soul was perceived as possessing regions both lower and higher than we typically envision in our flattened, utilitarian, secularized world. There is a much greater difference between a human being from the archaic age of Homer and a resident of an affluent suburb than there is between contemporary affluent suburbanites in, say, Oslo, Tokyo and Chicago. Thus, it is not too surprising that Nolan’s translations are of mixed success. 

Antinous (Robert Pattinson), the chief suitor, becomes a slick-tongued, California pretty boy, becomes a slick-tongued, California pretty boy, afraid to touch weapons himself. (He is much more warlike in Homer.) The scene in which Telemachus (Tom Holland) meets Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) feels too close to a stock scene from a generic boxing movie, in which a young man meets a gruff but caring older mentor. Sinon, who convinces the Greeks to accept the Trojan horse (and is not mentioned at all in either the Iliad or the Odyssey), undergoes a metamorphosis from the lying traitor of antiquity (hated by Virgil and put in hell by Dante) to a warrior (played by Elliot Page) who is deeply empathetic, self-sacrificing and even unaware that the horse is full of Greek marauders. (Nolan’s Odysseus calls him “the bravest and best soldier he ever knew.”) And Calypso (Charlize Theron) is a psychotherapist who accidentally falls in love with her patient, as opposed to the god-defying immortal who wants to possess a man, body and soul. 

Calypso convinces Odysseus to stop trying to control every aspect of his life and just “let go.” When he learns this very modern lesson, he ends up, somehow, in Ithaca (although in Homer, Odysseus has to be conveyed in a boat by the generous and godlike Phaiakians). Perhaps we like Nolan’s honest, emotionally in-tune Sinon better than Homer’s chauvinist warriors, and admittedly every wife would rather her husband be on Nolan’s Calypso island than Homer’s. But the danger of translating ancient characters is that they can come so very close to our contemporary interests that they are flattened, and thus lose some of the difference and otherness they possessed in Homer, thus ironically defeating one of the major goals of the filmmakers.

Some of the magic of the ancient epic is protected by the soundtrack of the Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, who uses all kinds of unusual instrumentation (bells, clashing metal, synthesizers) while also creating a music that sounds Middle Eastern to our ears (because it employs semitones). In reality this is a homage to what we know of ancient Mediterranean music, including “Greek” music. 

The cinematography is also glorious: Again and again, tiny human figures walking across vast beaches are portrayed in wide-angle shots or from an aerial view. Or they are portrayed in close-up as they ride an ancient ship that is battered by waves. You could go through the film, freezing it frame by frame, and feel compelled to print out almost every still for a poster for your bedroom. In this way, the warriors are recontextualized among any one of the seven deliciously exotic landscapes where the filming took place, and we have human life reconnected with a world of primitive elements: sun, water, wind, sky, earth, animals, plants. Nolan’s ecological awareness and his desire to create an international team of filmmakers does great service to the “epic” quality of an ancient poem. 

And some of the cultural translations are successful, thought-provoking and even brilliant enrichments of the Homeric original. The trap-music artist Travis Scott plays the Ithacan bard, Phemius. Scott’s “songs” function very much like what you might expect from a trap musician if he had lived in that age. Nolan’s Phemius pounds out a strong rhythm and doesn’t so much sing a tale as much as he performs a series of looping, associative fragments. Rap (and trap) have for us the cultural prestige that bards had in the Homeric world; Scott’s imagistic, symbolist proto-rap poems might do more for us than a traditional storyteller could. This was thought-provoking. .

And then there’s Athena (Zendaya), who—unlike the warlike goddess of Homer who loves to hold a spear in her hand—is almost a goddess of peace and conscience: She fades in and out of Odysseus’s field of vision, in accordance with his own consciousness of his inner life. Tellingly, Nolan’s goddess does not aid Odysseus in slaughtering the suitors, as she does for Homer’s Odysseus. And yet, I like her. When Nolan’s Odysseus laments that the gods do not openly reveal themselves, she gives him an almost Stoical answer about reading the “book of nature”: Isn’t thunder a clear enough sign? Doesn’t everyone see and feel the meaning of “fire”? Bread? Pain? 

In the meantime, Nolan’s Circe (Samantha Moron) is a man-hating feminist who is disgusted by the unlimited appetites of men. She tells Odysseus that she hasn’t transformed them into pigs: She simply revealed on the outside exactly what they are in their nature. This not only captures Homer’s witch but also remains faithful to literary and philosophical tradition. Boethius makes this very point in Book IV of his On the Consolation of Philosophy when he is meditating on the philosophical meaning of “Ulysses.” 

But we now come to that most complex character of all: Odysseus, whom Homer, in the first line of the Odyssey, calls “polytropos.” This could mean a lot of things: The “poly” means much or many; the “tropos” is related to turning or wheeling. Thus, Odysseus could be the man of twists and turns; the man who’s been around the world; the man who’s gone out, turned around and come back again; or the man who is “complicated,” as Emily Wilson’s casual translation puts it. In the Platonic tradition, Odysseus is a man who experienced a “turn-about,” what we could even call a conversion. For student of Plato, Odysseus is man who won and consumed and gained and conquered and got rich at a feverish pace; who bulldozed “nobodies,” destroyed his enemies and lost crew members; but who was then made to realize an inner emptiness that infinite wealth and success could not fill. In this reading—which I have written about elsewhere—Homer is a theologian, but one writing not only before the birth of theology but before philosophy (400 years before Plato!). Thus, Homer longs to talk about “eternity” and the “infinite depths” of the human soul, but he does not yet have access to a technical vocabulary.

Nolan’s Odysseus (Matt Damon, of course) is not moved by spiritual hunger as deep as this. He is a kind of cynical, Homeric-age agnostic. He thinks Agamemnon’s real motivation is to destroy the trading power in the East; he regularly tells his crew to fend for themselves (“the gods help those who help themselves”); he refers derisively to “your gods” when addressing the crew; he promises to defy the gods, thinking their plans unjust; and he gets past Circe without supernatural intervention. 

Although Homer’s Odysseus needs the intervention of Hermes and a sacred charm, Matt Damon just needs his innate honesty and empathy. At the same time, Nolan’s Odysseus is much less arrogant and violent than Homer’s Odysseus. In Homer, after his encounter with Polyphemos in the cave, Odysseus yells and taunts Cyclops, revealing the sacred power of his real name. In Nolan, he shoots one more arrow at Cyclops, runs away and is simply relieved and happy to be away from danger. 

Still, Nolan’s film has real depth. Just as Nolan in “Oppenheimer” used the story of the development of atomic weapons to worry about artificial intelligence and other human-made technologies that get out of control, he clearly has us in mind when thinking through the Odyssey. It’s hard to miss the modern relevance of Agamemnon, the self-proclaimed “king of kings,” who demands obeisance and wants to destroy the power of the East to take control of trade routes. Nolan’s Odysseus is broken by the guilt of having participated in the president of the United (Greek) States’ destruction of the East. He feels that he has been complicit in the destruction not just of a civilization, but civilization itself. I wonder if any living generals worry about such things after leaving the office?

But Nolan also weaves into the film—and this is where he’s at his best—a striking vision of history. Archaeologists in the 20th century became fascinated with the historical Homer, who was writing some 400 years after the powerful Mycenaean kings of the “Homeric World.” But that world was destroyed by some mysterious invaders who shattered this great age of wealth, bringing on what scholars call the Greek Dark Ages. By the time Homer was writing (or singing), the world was just beginning to recover.

Nolan seizes on this theme, and allusions to these “people from the sea” repeatedly come up within the film: Their coming is imminent, and Penelope and Menelaus worry aloud that they have insufficient resources for fending them off. In a powerful scene, when Penelope is speaking with the man she does not yet recognize as her husband, she turns to him and says, horrified: “You [meaning the Greek allies] are the people from the sea!” The “good guys” turn out to be the barbarians. The good guys have destroyed civilization in their greed for power and wealth.

In the final haunting sequences—alone worth the ticket price!—Odysseus and Penelope decide to set sail, heading West into a dying sunset (a telling symbol). As they do, we hear Penelope’s voiceover say: “civilization will rise again.” To which Odysseus adds: “a new dawn will break over the darkened world…and our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” 

In light of the closing glorious sequence, maybe we should also reread a modern tale of the rise and collapse of civilizations, like Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, in addition to Homer’s Odyssey. Nolan gives us a sobering vision of civilizations that rise, collapse, but rise again. And yet, when we come into power again, we forget the old lessons. This is the devastating and very personal price of forgetting. And that’s why we need bards, like Phemius. 

And Christopher Nolan.

Correction, July 18: Antinous (played by Robert Pattinson) is the chief suitor of Penelope, not Eumaeus (played by John Leguizamo).