Prior to the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I’m not sure many of us would have conceived of the Trojan Horse as a kind of proto-atomic bomb, the sort of norm-obliterating device from which civilisation cannot turn back. If anything, the horse has long existed in our collective imaginations as at best a credulity-stretching plot device – why did those overly trusting Trojans not think to look that particular horse in its wooden mouth? – and at worst a cutely comedic non-threat. The greatest civilisation of its age was taken down by a timber what?
But the true masterstroke of Nolan’s film is its parallels to the last one he dropped on us, Oppenheimer. Like that film, The Odyssey is about a haunted genius who, when presented with a problem, solves it with such speed and significance that he must necessarily cast aside implication. But rather than splitting the atom, Odysseus (Matt Damon), dismembers something considerably more significant – the social fabric.
