A new film from Hollywood’s most bankable auteur, Christopher Nolan, can only mean one thing: controversy. His latest work, “The Odyssey,” based on the almost 3,000-year-old Greek epic, has been flooded with agitated responses about the film’s lack of textual “accuracy.” This agitation has reached the point where even trillionaire Elon Musk has claimed he will create his own adaptation — using only his artificial intelligence imaging software, Grok Imagine — “before this year ends.” His version will allegedly be “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” All of this begs the question: What does textual accuracy actually mean?
It should be noted that the majority of the controversy surrounding “The Odyssey” centers on historical accuracy rather than just textual fidelity, with thousands having posted online about armor, accents and diversity casting allegedly being entirely out of the era. “The Odyssey” is not a true story nor a strict encyclopedia of what Ancient Greece would have looked like 3,000 years ago, and holding it to that standard would deprive the movie of its flair and more than likely make it incredibly boring.
What makes textual accuracy the much more interesting debate is its fluidity, especially with something as old as “The Odyssey,” which was originally adapted from spoken poetry and has more than a hundred different translations. There are different interpretations within each of those translations, and each reader will have their own interpretation of the text as well. On top of all of this, translating a book into film has to fit a specific cinematic blueprint, and some books, like “The Odyssey,” are too long and complex for it to ever be perfectly translated into such a format. So, when a book is adapted to film, it is impossible for every viewer to be entirely satisfied.
Personally, I remember reading Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” at about 11 years old, and it simply blew my mind. It felt like someone had tailor-made a book for my interests and awoke something inside of me at a very specific moment in my childhood. A few months after this, while hosting a sleepover, I convinced my parents to rent the movie — something they would only do if company was over — and I was immediately disappointed. I uttered the famous words, the ones everyone has said at least once in their lives: “That was not nearly as good as the book.” I began nitpicking every way the movie differed from the book, without offering any real criticism of the film itself; I just didn’t like it because it didn’t adequately recreate the book. Now, whether or not Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is a good film on its own is up for debate, but in hindsight, it showed me that a book and its film adaptation are completely independent and should be treated as such.
A good adaptation of a book is like a good cover of a song; it carries the artist’s own flair while still containing the cadence of the original track. Like the once viral Geese cover of Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” the two songs could not sound more different sonically, yet they carry the same emotional weight.
Literature and cinema are two very different art forms with two very different ways of writing. The more you stick to the text in a one-dimensional page-to-screen way, the more diluted the personality of the director becomes. A recent example: Noah Baumbach’s now forgotten “White Noise.” This film logistically feels off because it sticks very close to the novel while fading out the Baumbach humor and bitterness that make him shine as a writer and director. For this reason, I firmly believe the best way to adapt a novel is to write a screenplay about what you took away from the book, what elements popped out to you and what aspects you want to explore that the original work didn’t. Paul Thomas Anderson just won an Oscar using this exact method. “One Battle After Another” is an incredibly loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” where Anderson says he only stole the parts that he found interesting, making the movie he wanted to make while still maintaining the wacky spirit of the novel. It is the screenwriter and director’s right to do this, and is in no way artistic malpractice.
Which brings us back to “The Odyssey.” Is it a good adaptation? Does it carry the same cadence of the poem while exploring new things among Christopher Nolan’s interests? I would say yes; its grandiose nature of unrelenting cuts and shifting of character perspectives while maintaining strong emotions and undeniable action captures that feeling of sitting in a crowded mead hall hearing someone tell a story. Not all of it works; this nonstop pace can create a few moments of disorienting clunkiness, but I would argue that fast pace integrates well into the film’s structure. Nolan talks about how writing the film was to “translate your experience of reading the poem and absorbing the poem into the cinematic medium,” and anyone who has seen any of his other movies can tell “The Odyssey” is full of Nolan’s signature themes. The crux of Nolan’s changes to the textual themes is a focus on how war and time fundamentally change a man and the world. There is a loud anti-war sentiment in the film that is harder to find in the text, but this interpretation pushes it well into modern context and creates an interestingly relevant adaptation.
Its thematic difference from the text will be a turn-off for some; Emily Wilson — whose translation Nolan based his film upon — says that the film “lacks many of the elements that make the poem great” and, perhaps most stingingly, that “there are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.” She went on to call the film a sterile take that prioritizes “Lord of the Rings”-esque spectacle over any of the more sensual elements of the poem, grilling the film for weak writing. Some of these critiques are more than fair, but what Wilson points out as missing or underdeveloped is what I think makes the film work. It’s a display of who Nolan is as a filmmaker and what sticks out to him in the poem. He is more interested in spectacle, the idea of the great man, and most importantly, time. Not only does the world inevitably change over time, but the meaning of these stories change too. “The Odyssey” most definitely means something completely different to humans of today than it did to those 3000 years ago. It’s an interesting and new observation that puts the film in a modernly applicable conversation with the text rather than a plain black-and-white adaptation.
This need for textual accuracy will always be a hindrance to enjoyment for some, but works like “The Odyssey” show that movies are a personal medium. The more personality that shows will almost always result in a more interesting movie — whether it sticks to the text or not.
Daily Arts Writer Sam Brown can be reached at sbrownie@umich.edu.
