Flasz On Film

The sanctity of silence of the reading room nested in the far end of the Nolan residence was broken by the buzz of an old Nokia 3310 vibrating against the surface of a mahogany coffee table. It emitted the familiar sound of a monophonic rendition of Grand Vals, four bars of it, as it did so. Christopher, who was sitting in the far end of the room deeply ensconced in Lord Byron’s biography, slowly raised his head as the phone continued to racket. He was not jolted into action; instead, he located a tattered postcard he had used as a bookmark for decades now and gently wedged it in between the yellowed pages of the old tome before closing it with what could only be interpreted as unfettered reverence. He corrected his scarf, eased himself out of his armchair and ambulated casually towards the buzzing brick. He picked it up, looked at the screen at an angle and distance allowing his bifocals to read the caller’s name and pressed the green receiver button. 

“Hello, Dan! Nice of you to ring! How’s the family?” He said.

“I’m great, Chris. How about you?”

“I’m doing splendidly. Any day when I can sit down and read about Byron is a great one.” 

It wasn’t lost on Dan that Chris didn’t like being interrupted almost as much as he didn’t like to use technology. But needs-must.

“I know you’re in the middle of your resting period at the moment,” Dan pressed on, “but I spoke to Donna at Universal and I think I finally convinced her about your idea to do The Odyssey.”

“That’s absolutely fantastic, Dan! Emma is going to be elated!”

“There’s just one thing.”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, so Donna is OK with the project in principle. She’s even fine with the budget. She’s learned that if you can make a billion dollars doing a biopic, you can definitely make a billion doing a sandal epic–”

“What’s the catch?” Nolan interjected.

“Well,” Dan was sheepish. He knew this wouldn’t go down well. “She’s not so hot about telling the story out of order. She thinks it’s confusing, risky and it might alienate the audience.”

“Did she read the book? Maybe I should give her a call myself. Homer’s book is told out of order. He wants me to tell this story out of order! It’s what it’s supposed to be!” Nolan was getting angrier with each word he uttered. 

“That may be but Donna thinks–and I agree with her on that too–that it’s a bit much and that people will think it’s your shtick.”

“Hitchcock said that self-plagiarism is–”

“Style. I know,” Dan cut in. “I’ve heard it before.”

“Look, either I do it my way or I’m not doing it at all.”

“Chris. I love you. But think about it. You’ve wanted to do this movie for decades. You’ve got the budget. You’ll put IMAX cameras on boats. Matt Damon is already getting jacked for this. You have the colourblind cast you asked for to mess with those right-wing loons who’ve adopted your movies as parts of their personalities for some reason. Can you just let this one go?”

“Absolutely not.” Nolan was unrelenting. “The Odyssey is not just a movie. Make it into a regular movie and you’ve got Troy. I’ve seen Troy and it’s not good. This is an epic. It needs to meander, obfuscate and linger. It needs to make the viewer doubt in my ability to deliver until the very end. They need to be in awe of it and tired of it too. By the end, when Odysseus makes it home, they need to feel relieved that it’s over. They need to be like Argos. Ready to die for me. Do you get me?”

“Yes, yes. I get it.” Dan sighed. “I’ll get on the phone with Donna and let her know. Hopefully she’ll see the light.”

“She’d better. I can always set it up at Paramount. I’m sure they’d take it. But don’t tell her that just yet.”

“Sure thing. I’ll be in touch.”

“Best of luck, Dan! Let me know how it goes.” 

Nolan looked at the phone briefly before pressing firmly on the red receiver button to end the call, put the phone back on the table and went back to reading.

This never happened. Christopher Nolan probably never had this conversation with his agent. What I believe could approximate the truth is the vibe Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey emits combined with the veritable onslaught of apocrypha coming from the cast of the film, all implying that participating in this filmmaking project was imbued with the kind of pomp and circumstance you’d find in religious rituals. 

What is definitely true is that Christopher Nolan had always wanted to adapt Homer’s The Odyssey into a movie, at least he has repeatedly made such a claim, and that he wanted to make this movie his way. Otherwise, he would have done it already. He must have instinctively felt that he needed to be ready to take on one of the most foundational texts of the Western civilization, extract its inner meaning and give audiences a spectacle they’d be unlikely to refute. 

The summer of 2026 saw the culmination of this lifelong dream. Christopher Nolan finally put his vision of Homer’s The Odyssey the way he saw fit. He obstinately adhered to his principle of shooting as much as he could in camera. He installed IMAX cameras, gargantuan in size and ludicrously loud, on the closest approximation of period-accurate seaworthy boats. He assembled a cast that flew in the face of convention and was likely going to generate an uproar among the right-leaning substrata of his fan base. He chose to freely cut between timelines and rely on subjective narration to recreate the spirit of Homer’s poem. Finally, he distilled what looked like a revisionist meaning out of the text—which had already been implanted there by Homer to an extent—and recontextualized the story of Odysseus to fit the modern zeitgeist. 

Predictably, the public lapped it all up, all three hours of it. They sat through this meandering spectacle with the patience of a scarf-wearing arthouse cinema-goer willingly subjecting himself to a movie directed by Lav Diaz and propelled The Odyssey to the top of the box office. Christopher Nolan made his lifelong dream become a reality and in doing so he proved that he can move masses with movies long-considered commercially unviable; that he commands almost religious authority among vast swathes of the moviegoing public; that his movies are events that transcend the constraints of the screens they are projected on. He also, perhaps completely, irreversibly and irretrievably, lost contact with reality as we see it. 

Somewhere between the unfiltered anticipatory praise coming from the outer rim and a messiah syndrome brewing unnoticed on the inside of Christopher Nolan’s artistic consciousness, something went terribly wrong. Having directed some of the most exuberant movies in recent years and having spent numerous years engineering stories that thrived at the intersection of high-octane spectacle, heartfelt drama and temporal complexity, he convinced the public that his movies were events that couldn’t be compared with anything relating principally to cinema. They were man-made phenomena designed to rival natural spectacles like the Perseids or solar eclipses, aimed to make people leave their houses en masse and look up to the sky in petrified awe. Therefore, any new movie he’d choose to make next would come with an increasingly unwieldy baggage of expectations. And no mortal man is built to withstand pressure of such magnitude. 

After all, Nolan is but a man; though, it is also not unlikely that over time he would begin to believe that he might be “the one:” a cinematic messiah placed on this mortal coil with a singular mission to save movies from drowning in the swelling deluge of entertainment firmly parametrized as content. After a number of successful attempts to bring to the screen what seemed impossible to others and capturing in camera stuff that multiple other filmmakers would elect to conjure in post-production–if only because it’s easier, cheaper or less frightening–and having spent years wading through crowds of fans convinced his movies were in a league of their own, it’s only fair to assume that he’d become entrapped by his own social stature. Anybody would. He had bent reality, crossed event horizons, and coalesced timelines. He had revised what the seminal icon of American pop culture looked like (The Dark Knight Trilogy). He made heist movies in dreamscapes (Inception). He produced a James Bond-like film backwards (Tenet). He put the fear of God in audiences by dropping a nuke in the middle of a biopic (Oppenheimer).

Hence, it would require superhuman resolve and strength to pivot away from large-scale storytelling. For one, Nolan’s audiences expect cosmic events and Nolan himself has likely grown to believe that not only is he capable of delivering eclipses, but he might be the only one with the skills and wherewithal required to do so. He couldn’t scale down his ambition and bring a movie driven by internalized character-led storytelling in front of audiences whom his previous work had trained to expect maximalist experiences. 

Ironically, the idea of adapting Homer’s The Odyssey, despite the moniker of “epic” attached to this seminal text most of us remember from school, required Nolan to reach within, not without. This meandering poem cannot be simply boiled down to a string of plot points anchored around well-recognized mythological memes like the Trojan Horse, escaping the Cyclops, evading Siren calls, defeating Circe or Odysseus’s final arrival and his dog giving up its ghost upon finally seeing its long-missing master. These iconic events people associate with Homer are frequently referred to in the poem in passing, or sung about. They are legends of cunning and pre-Macchiavellian treachery that the text itself wrestles with. 

And Christopher Nolan knew that because at its core his take on The Odyssey is just that: an internalized quest of one man to find redemption and peace wrapped in a double helix with a young man’s journey–his son Telemachus–to become a man his father, whom he had never met, would be proud of. Boiled down to thematic fundamentals, The Odyssey is a seminal text on manhood where these many memetic stopovers the general public has come to associate the text with are illustrations guiding this journey. The real movie, so to speak, is the story that takes place in Odysseus’s mind, Telemachus’s yearning for meaning and–brief as they are–elements of characterization pertaining to other male characters. Agamemnon’s obsessive pursuit to retrieve Helen whom he viewed as property. Menelaus’s doomed obedience to a man whom the film visually compares to the likes of Darth Vader. Penelope’s numerous suitors, human coyotes and hyenas, brave and brazen only in packs. Unsurprisingly, this is also the facet of the text that Christopher Nolan desired to deploy in a revisionist manner, thus exposing general audiences to uncomfortable truths about the spectrum of masculinity, treacherous waters of lust and desire and the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of redemption and virtue.

This, however, introduced friction between what The Odyssey needed to be in the eyes of the filmmaker who wished to remain respectful to the source material, and what the film had to be in order to satisfy the requirements of a spectacle bearing the subheading “directed by Christopher Nolan.” Arguably, this is where the movie ultimately failed as it struggled immensely to find this fine balance between internalized character-based storytelling and an awe-inspiring string of set pieces the audiences have come to expect from him. The legendary tales of mounting unwieldy IMAX cameras on period-adjacent boats, lavishly spending on lifelike sets and deploying optical trickery and forced perspective to bring to life the images of a giant Cyclops or a process in which Circe magically turned Odysseus’s seamen into pigs only served to obfuscate the real mission of the movie unfolding beneath the spectacle instead of elevating it to the fore. 

Hence, it all registered as chaotic and unfocused. Instead of leading me into the scaled-down universe in which Odysseus and Telemachus are orbiting one another joined by an invisible tether of yearning and duty, the film walloped me about with abandon and utter disregard for the high risk of whiplash associated with this process. It was a three-hour slugfest, a bareknuckle bout that swung mercilessly between moments of genuine internalized elevation, overwrought and overwritten distillations of the numerous themes the filmmaker wanted to inject into the already pressurized screenplay, and those easily-identified bits of memetic red meat the viewers have come to expect. 

Put simply, The Odyssey is just unwieldy, overly calorific and tiring. It is a movie that’s paced to a rhythm you’d find in a ninety-minute action spectacle but prolonged–not stretched–to twice the size this pacing could sustain. In this regard, it is a film equivalent of what would happen if Napalm Death recorded a twelve-minute song at a tempo of their usual two-minute cacophonous firehoses–overwhelming, confusing and intellectually infuriating. The movie is concussive and so tightly stuffed with content that it has to resort to stacking conveniences–ones the viewer will absorb in three seconds or less–into a pyramid of shorthand that should have really been given room to breathe instead. Maybe it just goes to show that The Odyssey should never be compressed into a single film, or maybe that some choices ought to be made: you either sacrifice the spectacle and flesh out these resonant themes challenging our understanding of masculinity, fatherhood and patriarchal state, or hide the themes in the background and bank on the spectacle. 

Sadly, Christopher Nolan surely believed that he could have both the spectacle and the conversation and that no sacrifices should have to be made if he was the one calling the shots. Little did he know, he probably laid it all on the line because this is now the third movie in a row, after Tenet and Oppenheimer, that underscores his shortcomings as a storyteller. In the context of a spectacle that not only works but fires on all cylinders and occupies the viewer with its own structural complexity as it does so, narrative cliché and shortcuts can be often excused or even overlooked. But now, seeing a string of movies of his that refuse to gel as intended, one can develop an eye to retroactively spot these numerous hairline cracks in Nolan’s previous movies. I might now fear the notion of revisiting Inception or Interstellar simply because the magic might be gone as I will be more attuned to conveniently placed dialogue in which a character must tell me in ten seconds exactly why they’re here and why it matters for me to learn what they know. 

The Odyssey had to forgo narrative nuance in order to cram so much into an already large frame of a three-hour running time; that was the price Nolan had to pay to fit Homer into a single movie. But instead of a resplendent awe-inspiring spectacle, he delivered one hundred and eighty minutes of clichés and conveniences strung together around bits of spectacle and cutting in between the two like an undecided maniac suffering from acute short-term memory loss. And that’s exactly the opposite of what The Odyssey deserved. In place of an epic experience that married the internality of its character work with the epic experience Nolan and his acolytes believed the movie should rest on, it played like a feature-length trailer: a composition of one-line beats summarizing the narrative spliced together with snippets of large-scale action that never stayed long enough to register as elevated or grand. 

Perhaps, Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind was right after all in its remark that Christopher Nolan was a dumb person’s idea of an arthouse filmmaker. Starbucks of cinema. Large, popular with the masses, vaguely based on the real thing. And inappropriately expensive. Still, I remain convinced that he sees his mission in life as messianic because he brought Homer to the screens and the masses, whose desires he has clearly understood over the years, just bought it without a shred of doubt. He has made a billion-dollar sandal epic with a colourblind cast which is also a movie that looks from afar as though it was this promised land of epic adventure and feels in the moment as though it had something profound to say, but it has the scope of a pound shop landschaft, the depth of a puddle after a spring drizzle and the ego of a rapper with seven Grammys to his name coming up to the stage to receive his eighth. 

Ultimately, it didn’t matter if the movie reflected Homer’s nonlinearity, something I imagine any filmmaker would have had to fight for with their financiers. And it’s because the movie failed on so many other levels. In any case, I bet that Christopher Nolan went to bed content after he wrapped production on this. He probably looked at his copy of Homer’s The Odyssey and gave it a subtle salute, as though he was convinced his movie was the greatest sandal epic of all time. In fact, he likely anticipated that the hordes of his zealots would proclaim it as such in no time. And then, I imagine, he went back to reading about romantic poets or nuclear physics in his armchair the next day, wondering what other Herculean task he would take on next.