The Odyssey film theory – Odysseus’ fantastical adventures didn’t really happen | Films | Entertainment

As a Greek myth, Homer’s Odyssey is full of the fantastical, as Odysseus spends a decade encountering gods and monsters. Yet in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation, there are plenty of hints that these fantastical experiences never actually happened.

The Odyssey film opens jarringly with the line, “In a time of apparent magic”. What else could this imply from Nolan, a rumoured secular humanist, than that the ancient people in a pre-‘enlightened’ age were simply imagining the spiritual and the fantastical? The evidence is clear throughout the movie.

As is the case with Homer’s poem, Nolan’s Odyssey is non-linear, with Odysseus recounting his enchanted tales to Calypso, who isn’t a nymph in the film but simply a beautiful woman. Rather than depict the island of the lotus-eaters from the book (where some of Odysseus’ men eat the plant and decide to stay, forgetting their desire to go home), Nolan has Calypso trick feed the lotus plant to Odysseus. As a result, he stays in a drug-fuelled state for seven years as her sex slave. Interestingly, Nolan’s Odysseus doesn’t cheat on Penelope like Homer’s, but is not in his right mind due to the lotus plant.

And then there’s Zendaya’s Athena, the only member of the Greek pantheon to manifest physically in The Odyssey. We learn at the end of the film that Athena wasn’t actually the goddess who aided Odysseus, as in the book, presumably because, for Nolan, God or gods don’t exist. Instead, Athena is the manifestation of the temple priestess who is beheaded alongside a statue of the goddess during the Trojan invasion. She is the haunting memory of Odysseus’ crimes that he repents of at the end of the film.