Taming Odysseus

There’s too little sex and violence in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. And it matters. There’s too little religion and supernaturalism, too. That the anodyne Epicureanism of Nolan’s Odyssey is widely construed as Nolan “Christianizing” Homer’s story is testimony to the insipidity of much of what passes today for Christianity.

We’ll start with sex and violence, and then get to religion.

First, though, a preliminary comment on film adaptations of books: Screen adaptations of books must necessarily alter the story. Even a three-hour movie cannot reproduce an epic poem the length of Homer’s Odyssey. But the necessity of change does not grant a director or screenwriter carte blanche. Viewers (and readers) can ask about the film’s selection of scenes from a book and whether the changes made by a director faithfully reflect a book’s story.

It’s also fine for directors to be inspired by a story to adapt it to other situations or thematic ends. That said, these directors often signal the significance of the changes they made by renaming the film. Apocalypse Now (based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), O Brother Where Art Thou (also based on The Odyssey), or even Clueless (based on Jane Austen’s novel Emma) are examples.

There is a middle area, however, in which directors are inspired by a book’s story, and maintain formalistic elements of the plot, but want to tell a different story than the original. All adaptations do this to some degree. But there is a risk that a movie adaptation can be something of a bait and switch in which the director uses the cachet of the original story to increase ticket sales from viewers interested in a cinema version of the original story but not necessarily interested in the director’s insights unconnected with the original story.