Staff Writer Shruti Kulkarni on why Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey exposes that modern cinema doesn’t trust its audience to think about the deeper meaning of a film.
The cardinal rule of evolution is adaptation. Species survive by responding to the environments around them; those that fail to adapt eventually disappear. Media has certainly adapted – it’s had to. Technology has transformed the landscape of filmmaking and the movie-watching experience. But there is something unsettling about the direction this new cinematic adaptation is taking.
Rather than trusting audiences to connect the dots for themselves, modern cinema increasingly draws the picture for us: explicitly, repeatedly, and tirelessly. A character explains the plan, then repeats it, and this goes on until the credits roll. Technology may be reaching unprecedented heights, but our storytelling is regressing.
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is, in many ways, a truly impressive cinematic feat. Condensing one of the most intricate works in Western Literature into a coherent, three-hour blockbuster is no small task. However, it has not escaped this regression. Rather, The Odyssey exposes a growing problem in filmmaking.
Hollywood No Longer Trusts Audiences
I didn’t expect The Odyssey to cinematically illustrate why audiences can no longer immerse themselves in cinema. After all, Nolan is the director behind films like Memento and Inception, which demand attention from their audiences, rewarding those willing to piece together their meanings. And expectedly, the cinematography, score, and pacing are simultaneously stellar and remarkably controlled in how they contain the story’s magnificent scale. And yet, somewhere between the breathtaking landscapes and Hans Zimmer’s music, I found myself thinking: “We all know Zeus’ Law by now.”
One of the central ideas of the epic, and in Nolan’s interpretation, is ‘xenia’, simplified as ‘Zeus’ Law’ for the film’s sake. ‘Xenia’ is the ancient Greeks’ sacred obligation of hospitality, and is the core of the poem’s moral weight. It’s a genuinely fascinating concept; hospitality is not simply a social courtesy, but fundamental to human civilisation. Its violation carries profound consequences for individuals and society alike.
The problem isn’t that Nolan makes ‘xenia’ important; the problem is that he seems unwilling to let us forget that it is. The repeated references to ‘Zeus’ Law’ undermine the narrative significance of that concept. Ironically, the strongest representation of xenia’s violation needs no explanation: the suitors occupying Odysseus’ home while he is presumed dead abuse his hospitality in increasingly grotesque ways, encapsulating Ithaca’s moral decay. Even without Matt Damon’s final monologue spelling it out, it is the perfect allegory for the downfall of ancient Greek civilisation.
What happened to show, don’t tell? Something that cinema used to do so well. For decades, good cinema has thrived and relied on implication: a glance, an expression, a subtle motif was often all filmmakers gave to the audience. And it worked. Filmmakers had faith in audiences to absorb the work and draw conclusions for themselves, which now seems to have gone missing.
It’s not hard to understand why. Modern audiences split their attention between the big screen and the smaller one in their hands, as noted by Matt Damon earlier this year. Attention spans are shrinking. If a film lulls for even a second, we look away and miss the crucial line or the telling glance. Filmmakers’ hands are tied; they have little choice but to spell things out. Depth and flair only work if someone’s paying enough attention to notice them.
This is a film adaptation for the modern audience. But adaptation has consequences—where mystery becomes explanation, subtlety becomes repetition, and participation becomes instruction.
And yet, The Odyssey itself has survived nearly three thousand years precisely because it is capable of adaptation. It has evolved from oral recitation to written text, then to theatre, literature, television, and now one of the largest cinematic productions ever attempted. This epic has always adapted to us. The real question is whether modern cinema is adapting to audiences by demanding less from them?
An American in Ancient Greece?
The decision to have the cast speak in contemporary American accents has already attracted criticism, and Nolan’s defence—that it reflects the emotional essence of Homer’s language, rather than an attempt at historical realism—is understandable. But feeling seldom has much to do with logic. For me, this choice made immersion nearly impossible.
Historical adaptations do not necessarily require linguistic authenticity. A blockbuster remake of The Odyssey was never going to be performed in ancient Greek, but there is a difference between historical accuracy and the feeling of authenticity. An adaptation should, at least in part, convince us that we have entered another world. When Tom Holland calls Odysseus ‘Dad’, I had to check that I hadn’t wandered into a Spider-Man screening. The joke aside, modern celebrities make it hard for audiences to forget the world outside the film.
Too much star power?
There is a growing tendency towards what might be called the ‘Marvel-isation’ of cinema: assembling enormous casts of instantly recognisable actors each carrying their own cultural baggage and previous characters with them. The Odyssey is hardly alone in this, though there is nothing inherently wrong with casting talented actors simply because they happen to be famous. Matt Damon, for instance, shines.
But when an audience is presented with Spider-Man, the star of Twilight, Travis Scott, and a succession of other instantly recognisable faces, how can we possibly feel like we are watching a film set in ancient Greece? There is a risk that the mythology becomes secondary to celebrity. Compared to Troy (2004), which deliberately cast a then-unknown Diane Kruger as Helen, was because they believed that an unfamiliar face could better embody a character whose beauty was supposed to be almost mythical.
The modern blockbuster does not merely want us to watch the story. It wants us to recognise the people telling it and to be reminded that we’re watching something important. As streaming is leaving cinemas in the dust, theatrical releases have become riskier financial gambles at the box office and here we’ve stumbled upon another adaptation. Star-studded casts hedge against that risk. Today, recognisability equates to financial security, before artistic quality or integrity does.
Nowhere is the trade-off clearer than in the casting of Telemachus. As a young person who grew up around the Marvel craze, it’s difficult to watch Tom Holland without Spider-Man in the back of your mind. Telemachus, like every character in the Odyssey, requires mythic weight. He is the son of Odysseus, heir to Ithaca, and most importantly a young man growing into his own identity: a son yearning to know a father whose absence is tearing his home apart. Yet this mythic figure is entrusted to the actor best known for playing the most famous teenager in modern pop culture.
Maybe Holland was miscast, or maybe he is simply too famous. This raises an interesting question: is the problem the fame itself, or who the fame is attached to? Take Robert Downey Jr. as a counterexample – who has undoubtedly been synonymous with Iron Man for over a decade. When he appeared in Nolan’s Oppenheimer fresh off the colossal success of Avengers: Endgame, scepticism was inevitable. Could audiences see past the iconic superhero? Yet he vanished into the role of Lewis Strauss, even winning his first Academy Award for it.
So perhaps the problem is not fame itself, but rather the relationship between fame and the world a film is asking us to enter. Oppenheimer is grounded in a historical reality, whereas The Odyssey asks us to believe in gods, monsters, prophecies, and a civilisation that exists thousands of years outside our own cultural experience. Mythology may just require a greater degree of distance between actor and character, to create the necessary allure and mystery that the epic warrants.
Final thoughts
None of this makes The Odyssey a bad film. In contrast, there is much to admire in Nolan’s attempt to bring Homer’s epic to the largest screen possible. But that is precisely why the criticism matters. The epic has survived three thousand years without needing to explain itself. If anything, this story of human endurance and resilience should move us the same way regardless of the era. As technology, spectacle, and scale have not just evolved, but skyrocketed, our expectations of audiences have moved in the opposite direction.
This may simply be the price of adaptation, and alas, a tale as old as time: either eat or be eaten. But if cinema has reached the point where it can’t trust us to watch a film without explaining it twice, a few times, or repeatedly throughout the movie, I wonder what that says about the stories we’ll be given next. The unsettling question is whether we are evolving with the algorithm, or if it is simply lowering the expectations for or of us.
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