Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey Strips Away the Epic’s Complexity

The new adaptation focuses on Nolan’s pet themes of self-deception, “the noble lie,” and superheroes whose moral virtue makes them lonely and sad.

A man floats half-dead for days in the middle of the Mediterranean. Eventually he is rescued by a kind stranger and nursed back to health. His body recovers, but not his mind: He can’t remember who he is or how he ended up stranded in the sea. When his memories return, he’s wracked with guilt over his role in a destructive project orchestrated by distant invisible forces.

Thus begins the story of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) in The Bourne Identity and of Odysseus (Matt Damon) in Christopher Nolan’s new film, The Odyssey. Though one is adapted from a nearly 3,000-year-old Greek epic and the other from a 1980s spy thriller, it’s no coincidence that Damon is Bourne again as an amnesiac veteran fighter. “Matt plays an Everyman very well in a lot of films,” Nolan has said, explaining the casting of his relatable superhero. “But he’s also Jason Bourne.” When we first encounter Odysseus in the narrative’s present day, his well-meaning caregiver Calypso (Charlize Theron) has been keeping him in a lotus-induced stupor for seven years, sensing that he isn’t ready to confront his trauma and check out of her idyllic clinic. Slowly, he begins to remember the endless war in Troy, the ill-fated attempt to bring his men home to Ithaca, and the wife and son who have been waiting for him for nearly 20 years.

In The Odyssey, as in The Bourne Identity and Nolan’s breakout hit Memento, memory loss is a screen for guilt. But Nolan’s Odysseus is too simple a man to have a guilt complex. He straightforwardly regrets the consequences of his well-intentioned choices and wants to forget them. The Homeric characterizations of Odysseus—“wily,” “crafty,” “lying”—don’t easily stick to the open-faced Damon, and in Nolan’s version, they don’t have to. More than the much-discussed racially diverse casting of the film, what makes The Odyssey feel most like a product of the twenty-first century is its simplification of a character famously described as “polytropos”—“of twists and turns” in Robert Fagles’s translation; “complicated” in Emily Wilson’s—into a basically good guy who feels bad. He’s closer to the protagonists of Nolan’s previous films, or to someone you might meet in group therapy, than to the conniving storyteller, arrogant bully, and cheating husband of the ancient epic.

This isn’t to say that Homer’s hero isn’t haunted by war, or that he’s not at all sorry about the men who died under his leadership. Part of what makes........

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