From sex and the gods to that ending, Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation of “The Odyssey” takes a number of creative liberties.
By Marlow Stern
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©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection When the first footage from Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” dropped, some of the worst people on Al Gore’s internet lost their minds (Elon Musk chief among them). They decried its inaccuracies, even though Homer’s epic poem is not only mythological, but also part of an oral tradition where it was expanded upon and reshaped over centuries. To disallow artistic license when it comes to “The Odyssey” is to deny its very essence.
It stands to reason that Nolan, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind “Oppenheimer” and “Inception,” would take creative liberties with Homer’s tale in order to trim a 600-page story into a 3-hour film and put his own stamp on it. His Odysseus (Matt Damon) is a broken man haunted by visions of the Trojan War who, aided by the guidance of Athena (Zendaya), clashes with gods, sirens, giants, scylla and a cyclops on his 10-year journey home to Ithaca, where his loyal wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and callow son Telemachus (Tom Holland) are fending off dozens of suitors, led by the cruel Antinous (Robert Pattinson), vying for her hand — and Odysseus’s throne.
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