Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’: Let Me Tell You a Story About a Story Adapted into a Story That’s Almost a Masterpiece

Ain’t No Movie like a Christopher Nolan Movie Because a Christopher Nolan Don’t Stop. Like any big reader or lover of storytelling, I had a Greek Mythology phase. Loved the myths as if they were real (some angry folks on the internet are still doing this btw), bought more books, found obscure and disconnected stories to call my favorites. Realized we had been using Zeus as a shorthand for all powerful when he might be the biggest asshole in all of storytelling. And while my obsession with the gods and the lessons and the trickery and the allegory eventually evened out, there’s a reason they are still the backbone for so many stories today. I think there are three main ways to watch The Odyssey (of course, not counting the Right Wing influencer/grifter hellscape, for which those dudes painted themselves in the corner over this): a straight popcorn flick, an ambitious technical attempt in the storytelling medium, or a “faithful” adaptation of perhaps the most popular epic poem ever committed to parchment (or famously not, I guess). The last one being the trickiest and perhaps the hardest aspect of not only judging this film, but I imagine in even conceptualizing it in the first place. There’s a reason people have said that The Odyssey is one of those unadaptable texts, with film productions usually focusing on smaller scale parts of the journey like The Return, or abstracting it all together like O Brother, Where Art Thou? Factor in the technical aspect of the film where repor…