Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey has been an overwhelming success with audiences (if not with Homer translators). Much of the talk about it has centered around the characters, the performances, the differences from the source material, and the overwhelming visuals. But less has been said about a major parallel between how Nolan portrays Odysseus’ 20-year journey and how he portrayed a different epic hero’s journey 20 years ago: that of Bruce Wayne.
Nolan’s vision of Odysseus’ wanderings and of Bruce Wayne’s vigilantism start with the same basic premise: what would these wild tales — one full of gods directly intervening in the action, prophesies, and plenty of not-quite-mortal beings, and the other filled with costumed heroes and villains with their own inexplicable powers — look like if they were set in a more realistic world?
“Realistic,” in fact, is the very word Nolan used over and over again in interviews to describe 2005’s Batman Begins. (Critics, possibly so as not to copy the director, usually went with “grounded.”) He was “taking on a realistic telling of the story.” He was “making a realistic film” and making Batman himself “more realistic.” He was “setting out to try and tell a more realistic version of the story…than had been done.”
In short, Nolan told Forbes, he was coming up with a “more real world and coming up with more real world explanations for what Batman is.”
This wasn’t just promo talk. In Batman Begins, phenomena like how Scarecrow’s “fear gas” works, Batman’s imperviousness to bullets, and the hero’s seemingly unbeatable fighting skills all found explanations that really were more, well, realistic than their comic book counterparts. The main villain, Ra’s al Ghul, changed from a 600-year-old mastermind with magical healing powers to a very mortal mercenary.
This same approach, counterintuitive as it may seem in a film that features a cyclops, giants, and witchcraft that transforms men into pigs, was also the one Nolan took in adapting The Odyssey.
To begin with, he removed all direct intervention by the gods. Zendaya’s Athena is the only one we see directly, and the film is never clear about whether she’s actually there or a figment of Odysseus’ guilty conscience. This is the exact opposite of the source material, where the goddess of war is by our hero’s side — and his son Telemachus’ side, as well — a great deal of the time. She changes both her own and Odysseus’ appearances frequently. Tom Holland’s Telemachus telling Mentor in the film that “You have Athena’s eyes” is a nod to the fact that in the poem, Athena disguises herself as Mentor during Telemachus’ journey to discover information about his father. Here, no such transformation happens. Mentor is just Mentor, as is confirmed when he dies during the (invented for the film) attack at Pylos.
Athena is constantly changing Odysseus’ appearance in the original epic — making him look worse (as an elderly beggar) or better (as a more handsome, cleaned-up version of himself) depending on what’s needed. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus’ transformation into the beggar happens not by godly intervention, but via a well-placed cloak and a long beard — and he gets away with it because of his loyal swineherd Eumaeus’ (also new to the film) poor eyesight.
All sorts of story changes come out of the decision to eliminate direct intervention from the gods. The stories of Circe and Calypso both are drastically altered because the messenger god Hermes isn’t around to either warn Odysseus about Circe’s animal-changing ways, or to deliver the gods’ order to Calypso to let Odysseus leave her island.
In Nolan’s movie, Calypso never explicitly lets on that she’s anything other than a mortal woman, albeit one who’s handy with lotus roots. In the poem, though, she is the immortal, never-aging daughter of the Titan Atlas, and offers Odysseus his own immortality if he remains with her. Odysseus even handles the final battle scene by himself in the film, instead of with Athena by his side making sure the spears miss him.
Adding to the realism of Nolan’s version is the inclusion of political dynamics that have nothing to do with The Odyssey, but everything to do with the real world of Bronze Age Greece, the setting of the tale.
The frequently-mentioned “people from the sea,” unknown potential invaders we never see, but who every major character is aware of and fears, are not mentioned at all in Homer’s poem. However, they are a real historical phenomenon.
The history, as you might imagine when dealing with things that happened circa 1200 BCE, isn’t totally clear. But what we do know is this: in Ancient Egypt, dating from around the time the events of The Odyssey are set, there are inscriptions describing attacks from some unidentified invaders — invaders that, since these inscriptions were first theorized about in the mid-19th century, have come to be referred to as “the sea people.”
Whether the mysterious sea people are propaganda from the Pharaohs, real invaders whose existence has been lost to time, or something else entirely has been debated since the theory first came to be. Nolan’s The Odyssey makes reference to those invaders. The chaos they (or the fear of them) created is connected in the film to a civilizational collapse, which the ending of the movie explicitly references. That collapse did happen in the real world, beginning around 1180 BCE. The “Greek Dark Ages,” as the period is sometimes known, lasted for almost 400 years.
The end of The Odyssey — the movie, as the poem ends quite differently — shows Odysseus and Penelope sailing away from Ithaca, musing about the upcoming Dark Age and explicitly talking about how their story will be sung, and eventually written down. In other words, the realistic adventure we saw will, through several hundred years of oral tradition, transition into Homer’s Odyssey, a magical story full of gods and wonder.
This is what connects Batman Begins to The Odyssey: Nolan takes a tale full of the inexplicable and mysterious, and pictures what it might actually look like if it were to happen in a reality much closer to our own. Gotham is no longer full of comic book villains and sidekicks, and Greece is no longer full of gods. Instead, Bruce Wayne, Odysseus, and by extension the rest of us, have to make it through their — our — journey alone.
