Christopher Nolan turns the 'Odyssey' into a film of revenge, dark and fascinating

In the prologue of the recent translation ofThe Odyssey published by Bernat Metge Universal, Roger Aluja recalls how Ulysses differs from Achilles, the triumphant warrior of the Iliad, in that his glory culminates not in victory in battle but in his subsequent return home. In his appropriation of Homer's classic, Christopher Nolan takes good note of this. A new example of cinema understood as an immense audiovisual spectacle, the grandeur of The Odyssey lies not in the epic of combat but in the overwhelming weight of external circumstances that a human like Ulysses cannot control. In his darkest film (not at all Mediterranean), Nolan empties the journey of its most joyful adventurous dimension and approaches terror in some of the best passages: the capture in Polyphemus's cave, the disturbing transformation of the sailors into pigs by Circe, the unsettling descent into Hades... Ludwig Göransson envelops it all with a tactile soundtrack that immerses us in Poseidon's oceanic wrath.

The subjective experience of time by the protagonists shapes most of the films of the director of Inception. In The Odyssey, it translates into the typical structure of the best revenge cinema: Ulysses' delayed accumulation of setbacks and waits culminates in a final act of unleashed violence, a staging of brutality as we have never seen in the British filmmaker's filmography. Nolan turns a faithful adaptation of a canonical work into a recap of his usual concerns. Interstellar was already, in fact, a loose version of The Odyssey. But here Ulysses is primarily akin to the tormented figure of Oppenheimer as a hero who laments how his most celebrated feat has broken the rules of the game for an entire civilization. And the film ultimately distances itself from the literary original in the protagonist's self-awareness regarding the horror of his actions, a reflection that resonates in our present.