Nolan’s Odyssey and Sinone’s surprise
Saturday evening, July 18th, I went to the cinema to see Nolan’s Odyssey — not in IMAX, in a regular theatre, which for a film made expressly for the big screen is perhaps already a small venial sin. I’m writing about it now not as a film critic, a trade that isn’t mine, and not too much as a psychotherapist either, except on one specific point: the surprise of finding Sinon in front of me, a character I did not at all expect in an adaptation of the Odyssey. That’s where the reflection that follows began.
The Aeneid within Nolan’s Odyssey
Among the various things one could say about this film, my observation is that this Odyssey of Nolan’s alludes to the Aeneid. It never states it, never quotes it, never puts it in a caption: but it shows it, scene after scene, with an insistence that eventually becomes one of the film’s defining traits. The clearest case is Sinon. The Greek soldier who convinces the Trojans to bring the horse inside the walls does not appear in the Odyssey: his story, his deception, his feigned desertion belong to the second book of the Aeneid, where it is Aeneas who recounts them to Dido. Nolan puts him on screen, gives him a face — Elliot Page’s — and with him also stages the sack of Troy and the building of the horse, which is exactly what the Homeric poem never shows directly. In the Odyssey, the fall of Troy is a memory, something the characters recall at a distance, at a banquet, in a bard’s song: it is never present, never image. Nolan chooses instead to show it, and to do so he goes looking for the story elsewhere, in another poem, by another poet, in another age. Once again, it is a story belonging to Aeneas, not to Odysseus, who in Homer’s poem recounts his adventures on the way home and doesn’t dwell much on Troy. The destruction of the city does not weigh on Homer’s character’s conscience.
On Sinon, Nolan does not simply borrow from Virgil: he goes further. In the Aeneid, Sinon is a lucid and unscrupulous impostor, a subtle traitor who lies knowing he is lying, and who finds his effectiveness precisely in that awareness. For Virgil, Sinon is an even more deceptive and ambiguous figure than Odysseus.
Nolan, instead, turns Sinon into a persecuted figure: a young man manipulated and sacrificed by others, kept in the dark about his own fate, a victim more than an author of the deception. It is a twist that moves away from both Greek and Latin epic alike, and that resembles, if anything, a Christian sensibility — the figure of the scapegoat, the innocent sacrificed to a design larger than himself. And he is, at the same time, a deeply American figure: the individual sacrificed by the system, deceived by those in command, who nonetheless carries his task through to the end alone, on the margins, almost by personal choice rather than obedience — an outsider, a maverick, who turns against the group that used him while still remaining, to the end, inside the mission.
Sinon serves as an introduction to Matt Damon’s Odysseus, who, facing the ruins of Troy, is not merely the man of many wiles that Greek epic hands down to us: cunning, adaptable, capable of lying and changing identity as tools of survival. And yet this Odysseus is not indifferent to the moral cost of his own inventions. Nolan’s Odysseus is a man moved by the fall of the city he helped destroy. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, he is a man weighed down by the violence men have inflicted on one another, and at times he seems to have no desire whatsoever to return to Ithaca — much as Virgil’s Aeneas repeatedly seems less than eager to go found a city in Latium by attacking the local populations. He would settle for a shorter journey, for going just about anywhere, and above all he would like to accept Dido’s offer and stay in Carthage. In the end he leaves, but only to obey the gods’ orders.
Moreover, Nolan’s Odysseus — and this is the decisive point — appears essentially neutral between Trojans and Greeks. He does not root for his own side. He does not rejoice in victory. He watches the destruction the way one watches something that concerns humanity as a whole, not one faction against another. This stance — moved, non-partisan, capable of seeing suffering regardless of the flag under which it is inflicted — is not Homer’s stance. It is Virgil’s.
Why Nolan’s Odysseus Differs from Homer’s?
It’s worth being precise about what we mean here, because the risk of anachronism is high. Odysseus does not go so far as to feel guilty for the harm inflicted on the Trojans: that would be a Christian category, presupposing an inner tribunal and a guilt to atone for. Nolan does not take that step, and rightly so, because it would be an operation out of time and out of place. What the film builds instead is something different and more precise: a profound disquiet in the face of a violence that calls itself into question, that looks at itself and no longer recognizes itself as a heroic gesture but as a wound inflicted on a shared fabric. It is the gaze of someone who has won but cannot cleanly separate his own fate from that of the defeated — and that is, precisely, a Virgilian gaze, not a Homeric one.
The pathos for others’ suffering, the capacity to weep over the fallen enemy, the idea that history produces victims regardless of who wins and who loses: these are all traits we recognize in the Aeneid, in Aeneas carrying his father and the memory of a destroyed city on his shoulders, far more than in the Odyssey, where the destruction of Troy is a settled fact, almost administrative, the necessary premise for another story.
Virgil’s perspective
To understand why this gap is not a detail but the heart of the film, we need to step back and ask who Virgil was, and from what position he wrote. Virgil is not a poet identified with the winners — neither when the winners were Greek, in the mythical material he narrates, nor when they were Roman, in the historical context in which he wrote. He is, if anything, the opposite: a poet who felt himself to be, and was, at a specific moment in his life, a defeated man, dispossessed of his own lands. He tells this himself in the first of the Eclogues, the one dedicated to Tityrus. In the text, two shepherds find themselves in opposite positions: Tityrus lies at ease in the shade of a beech tree, his land and his flocks safe, because a young “god” — behind whom we glimpse the figure of the Emperor Octavian Augustus — has allowed him to stay; Meliboeus, the other shepherd, is instead on his way into exile, driven from his fields by the confiscations of land destined for the veterans of the Roman civil wars, forced to abandon everything he knew. It is a poem written from the side of the one who loses his home, not from the side of the one who keeps it thanks to a favor from power: even when the narrating voice is that of the fortunate shepherd, the poem exists because, beside him, there exists someone who was not so fortunate. Virgil writes the story of Rome — the Aeneid is, on its surface, the tale of an empire’s origins — but he does so with the sensibility of someone who knows what it means to be dispossessed, who has seen land change hands by decree, and that awareness settles over every page of the poem like a shadow accompanying the light of victory.
This is the sensibility Nolan grafts onto Matt Damon’s Odysseus, and this is the gap that makes the film something more complex than a simple faithful adaptation. The director seems to want to talk about Homer — the title is Homer’s, the structure of the journey is Homer’s, Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, Ithaca, the Suitors are all present and respected in their narrative function — but continually, almost systematically, he lets it be understood that he is really interested, above all, in Virgil: not the poet of cunning and homecoming, but the poet aware of the end and the limits of a civilization. It is no accident that the film chooses to show exactly what the Odyssey leaves unsaid and the Aeneid tells — the fall of Troy, Sinon, the deception of the horse as an act that violates the sacred codes of conflict — because it is in that moment, in the destruction of the city, that the question truly driving the film condenses: what does it mean to win when victory itself lets one glimpse, in backlight, the fragility of every established order, Greek, Trojan, Roman, or — one might add, thinking of the contemporary viewer — Western.
An Odyssey more human than divine
One final element confirms this reading. In the Homeric poem, the gods intervene constantly: they guide, hinder, punish, save, and human affairs always unfold under the gaze and hand of a superior will that ultimately shares in the responsibility. In Nolan’s film this presence thins almost to the point of disappearing: the gods are named, invoked, feared, but rarely act on screen, and the tragedy that unfolds — the fall of Troy, the disasters of the voyage, the slaughter of the Suitors — appears as the result of choices and violence that are entirely human, not the execution of a divine design. It is a choice that distances the film further from the theology of the Odyssey and brings it closer to a sensibility more historical than mythical: that of a story questioning the end of civilizations as a phenomenon produced by human beings themselves, for entirely internal reasons — the very perspective, not by chance, that runs through the Aeneid, a poem written in the aftermath of a civil war, by an author who knew how much ruin could be the work of the victors just as much as of the defeated.
In this sense, Nolan’s operation is not a betrayal of the Homeric text, but a reading that passes through it to arrive elsewhere. Homer supplies the plot and the architecture of the journey; Virgil supplies the gaze, the emotional tone, the historical awareness with which that journey is told. Odysseus leaves Troy not as the man who has won and can now afford cunning as a game, but as the man who has watched his own victory turn into an unresolved question about violence and its costs — a question that, before being his, belonged to Aeneas, and before that, to a poet who knew what it meant to be left without land while others, by the grace of power, could go on lying in the shade of their own beech tree.
