Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey’: The film that launched a thousand tweets

In the 15th century, an Oxford student was strolling through a forest reading Aristotle’s Logic when he was attacked by a wild boar. Legend has it that he shoved the tome down the beast’s throat shouting, “Graecum est” —it’s Greek (hence not readable), a phrase used by medieval scribes when they came across Greek passages in Latin works they were copying. It’s a refreshingly honest attitude, in contrast to the sudden outbreak of social-media Homer expertise following the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The casting of Lupita Nyong’o, a Black woman, as Helen, launched a thousand tweets. And now, Elon Musk has joined in, promising a “historically accurate” adaptation of Homer’s work made by his AI platform Grok Imagine. Whether a historically accurate rendition of a mythic landscape populated by gods and monsters is possible is another question. The Iliad and The Odyssey do not have a clear setting that can be pinpointed historically. The assumption, shared by Nolan, is that they are set at the end of the Bronze Age. However, the epics’ portrayal of society reflects a later time, when the centralised palace states of the Bronze Age had fallen and local “big men” were in charge —like Penelope’s suitors in The Odyssey. Whatever Musk and Grok may come up with will be as much a product of the 2020s and their culture-war preoccupations as Nolan’s interpretation, as much an act of creation. The question is whether it will resonate with audiences. It’s a tall order because, as a classicist might put it, “Grokum est.”