Twenty-five years of Nolan films led to this one moment

Siyabonga Gule watched Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey twice, including once at IMAX Rosebank, and came away convinced it isn't really a film about time at all. It's about consequence: what victory costs a man once the war is won. Matt Damon's Odysseus returns home unable to be the person Ithaca remembers, echoing a question Nolan first asked in Oppenheimer. Gule traces this preoccupation through twenty-five years of Nolan's work, from Memento to Interstellar, arguing this ancient epic finally reveals what his entire filmography has been circling all along. For local cinephiles deciding whether it's worth the ticket: see it on the biggest screen available.

By  Siyabonga Gule

The Odyssey and the world after men change it

A face...

A fleet...

A war... A man...

A thought...

A trick...

The first spoken words in Christopher Nolan’s pièce de résistance. Words which bookend the first two acts of the film: a microcosm of its thematic underpinning – requiring walking the journey of the film’s protagonist to fully appreciate it. A thematic underpinning which flows not just through this film, but much of his filmography.

Nolan’s The Odyssey opened in China a few weeks ago as of this writing, continuing its frenetic box office pace to become not just the most successful film of his career, but the highest-earning R-rated movie in history. Why have audiences resonated so much with this work?

At the beginning of his promotion tour through the Middle Kingdom, a particularly canny interlocutor asked Nolan a rather provocative question:

“Are you a bard for a civilisation at dusk?”

Most of his interviewers tend to interrogate scale. He’s asked questions about the cameras he uses and has helped to innovate on. His adherence to practical effects and in-camera work. The love he has for shooting on IMAX 15-perf/65mm film. The extraordinary work which goes into the logistics of his productions. His seeming obsession with chronology and time. This time, a question addresses his civilisational function.

We’ve become fluent in the familiar vocabulary: fractured chronology, monumental sound design, the sheer audacity of practical spectacle; men and women brooding urgently beside expensive machinery. Perhaps we’re less certain about what all the machinery is for

For the habitual descriptions of his fixation with time, having now seen this movie a couple of times, I’ve begun to suspect that although time has always been his instrument (deployed again here with aplomb), his true subject is consequence.

Each viewing (of course) was on the obligatory IMAX; my last one in Rosebank, which has a fantastic setup, with the latest laser projection doodahs and digital sound so visceral in its deployment, it frankly obviates the need for 4DX to get your seats shaking. I was taken by the vastness of the image which Hoyte van Hoytema captured through his lens, and how it reduces the grandest human intentions of the characters to something almost pitiful: men declaring their purposes, while oceans, cliffs, weather and the gods remain magnificently unimpressed.

I too was buffeted by the raw textures, vocal ensembles and haunting discordant chords which the ever-impressive Ludwig Göransson wove into emotional musical tapestries throughout the score. Then by Nolan’s artful and confident direction to bring to the silver screen a film of true enormity, whose real subject is the terrifying smallness of the person who has set enormous things in motion.

All this for a story that can be summarised in a single phrase – an adventure about a warrior trying to return home. The telling of it however refuses to unstitch, no matter how many times you pick at its threads. A film about a war won before the story properly begins. Where Troy has already fallen. Where the heroic achievement is already behind our protagonist – Odysseus. The tale is really of the much stranger problem of living afterwards.

Troy: the original world-changing act. The voyage is what follows when the architect of a particular type of violence tries to re-enter ordinary human life. We the audience are asked:

What does the victor carry home?
Can those formed by war return to what once was?
Does home even survive as a place, or only as an idea?
Can the warrior return to an identity that his own actions have helped to destroy?
Is return restoration? Reckoning? Or another conquest?

Odysseus knows exactly where Ithaca is. The deeper difficulty is becoming someone capable of returning to it.

Matt Damon as our protagonist carries the exhaustion, the distance and the homeward desire which the film demands of him. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope and Tom Holland’s Telemachus back home embody the fact that history endeavours to march forward in the hero’s absence, despite their concerted efforts to tame time; to arrest uncertainty.

In his previous work, the film whose success allowed him to make this one, Oppenheimer approaches his threshold from before and during the world-changing act. The Odyssey begins only after a threshold has already been crossed (the gravity of which is first unknown to us). Trinity and Troy are rhyming civilisational events, and the films which depict them, inverted companion pieces.

Concentrated human brilliance. Terrible instrumental success. Victory which generates a new moral world. A great man discovering that authorship does not confer control (hard to forget Gary Oldman’s Truman telling a forlorn Oppenheimer “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit who built the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did. Hiroshima isn’t about you.”)

Man creates forces larger than himself. Those forces subsequently begin creating the man.

The bomb made Oppenheimer.
Troy makes Odysseus.
History metabolises the person into a symbol.

Perhaps the symbol is only the first stage, because history does something peculiar to the people who alter it. First, it records them, then it distils and simplifies them, finally returning them to themselves as myth. Oppenheimer becomes the father of the atomic bomb. Odysseus becomes the cunning trickster and survivor, the man whose name travels further than the man himself. That transformation carries both power and violence – compressing a human being into the meaning history requires of them. Man makes history. History makes myth. And eventually myth begins remaking the man. Odysseus’ greatest creation in that sense, may not be the wooden horse. It may just be Odysseus.

Most films about great action culminate in the deed, whereas Nolan increasingly begins where the deed stops belonging to its author

If myth shows how consequence outlives the act, Tenet asks the stranger question of whether consequences can arrive from the future as well as the past. In what most consider Nolan’s most convoluted (and perhaps self-indulgent) movie, matter, information and people are permitted to move against the ordinary direction of time. Its temporal pincer manoeuvre allows an event to be approached from both sides – one force entering without future knowledge, the other returning forearmed with knowledge of what’s already occurred.

And yet… history remains stubbornly singular. The characters don’t stand outside causality and edit it. Their backwards movement becomes part of the event that’s already happened. Tenet doesn’t abolish consequence; it only gives the same consequence a different direction from which to arrive.

Odysseus is driven in the film by the memory of Troy – consumed by it even. He moves towards a foretold or imagined return. Prophecy makes the future causally active in the present (bards sing his song, the film opens with his tale…) Stories about the past change how the present actors behave. Our foreknowledge as the audience shadows every choice.

Past consequence pushes the story onwards. Anticipated futures reach backwards to drag it forward. Nolan’s cinematic temporal structures repeatedly manipulate who knows what, and when. The chronology changes. The events however retain their heft and weight.

I propose Nolan has spent twenty-five years circling Homer, the gyre tightening with each film.

In Memento, a man cut loose from his past becomes manipulable by the stories he constructs to replace it. In Inception, memory acquires enough force to govern the present, until Cobb’s private mythology begins to overwhelm the reality around him. In The Prestige, greatness consumes the self that pursues it; identity becomes subordinate to performance, then to legend. In The Dark Knight, action hardens into symbol, and symbols acquire meanings their creators can no longer fully control. In Dunkirk, a single historical event fractures across radically different experiences of time. In Interstellar, Cooper helps alter humanity’s future yet remains powerless before the intimate consequences of elapsed years.

Across them all, Nolan keeps returning to the same terrain: memory, myth, history, consequence, and the unstable relationship between the person who acts and the world that remembers

The amnesiac becomes the author of his own trap. The magician disappears into his performance. The dreamer is governed by a memory he created. The astronaut becomes his own daughter’s ghost. The physicist becomes the name of an Age

And Odysseus… becomes Odysseus.

This feels less like Nolan choosing unfamiliar source material than his filmography recognising its oldest ancestor.

In the aforementioned interview with Zhong Shu, Nolan acknowledges modern storytellers like himself must negotiate contemporary expectations around heroism, sympathy and greatness. Arguing that modern audiences require greatness to be qualified or morally interrogated rather than presented as an absolute. Perhaps this actually reduces Nolan’s options for depicting a formally and historically heroic figure.

In making Odysseus legible to us in 2026, legible to modern moral imaginations, has Nolan deepened Homer’s complicated man or partially domesticated him? Is guilt used to translate an ancient warrior into a contemporary protagonist? Does Nolan’s moral architecture make the character richer or more familiar?

Are ancient values allowed to remain genuinely alien? Does its monumental form sometimes overwhelm sensuality, intimacy or ambiguity? Can women and domestic life exist fully in themselves or primarily as the moral horizon of the returning man?

I think some of these considerations make great fodder for deeper interrogation regarding where this film chooses to place itself, and what trade-offs it needs to make to land its core messages. One of the film’s greatest strengths – its grand thematic coherence – must also act as a form of compression. Great adaptations disclose some meanings by suppressing others. Every return is also a reduction: the traveller comes home carrying only what survives the journey. I’d say this applies to all adaptation (and don’t get me started on Dune - the editor won’t allow it!).

So why did this film work for me? I think it succeeds as spectacle and becomes even more powerful as aftermath. Its emotional force continues to accumulate well after viewing it rather than its cathartic third act binding and resolving it. My subsequent viewing suggested that its apparent linearity conceals a dense network of memory, anticipation and historical consequence. I posit its few limitations arise from the same monumentalising instinct which gives rise to its ultimate power; the film asks the viewer to surrender, at least temporarily, to the coherence of Nolan’s vision and design.

This is one of Nolan’s most revealing films because the ancient material strips his recurring preoccupations down to their primal form.

So… is Nolan a bard for a civilisation at dusk?

Perhaps the bard at dusk is not merely the singer of decline. Perhaps he is the figure who gathers a civilisation’s oldest stories at the moment it has begun to forget why they mattered.

Christopher Nolan spent twenty-five years following men who alter reality and discover, too late or just in time, that changing the world is easier than becoming equal to the world one has changed. Homer, of course, arrived there first. His hero wins the war before the poem begins and spends the rest of the story confronting what victory has made of him. The Odyssey is more than Nolan’s latest film, and more than his adaptation of an ancient epic. It is the point at which his entire filmography appears to remember where it came from.

Homer wrote the first Nolan film.

Nolan has finally brought it home.