Imagine, for a second, being in the shoes of Christopher Nolan. For 20 years you’ve been arguably the biggest film-maker in Hollywood, racking up such critically lauded hits as superhero gamechanger The Dark Knight trilogy, the dazzling dream-heist thriller Inception and soulful space epic Interstellar. And then you become even more powerful than ever: Oppenheimer, your tense, weighty, three-hour drama about the race to develop nuclear weapons during the second world war, has been rapturously reviewed and has bagged seven Oscars. It has also made close to a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.
For your next project, you can make anything you please. What do you do? Well, Nolan surprised everyone when he announced that his 13th feature would be an adaptation of Homer’s poem The Odyssey. And has he delivered in spectacular style. He brings to the screen, at a scale and level of artistic ambition never achieved before, the ultimate heroic epic, a literary work regarded as the foundational text of western culture. But really it’s no surprise at all. What else could it be? The Odyssey, created, it’s believed, in the eighth century BC, is a spectacle-heavy, thrill-packed, action epic. It’s the only thing big enough for the writer-director at this point in his career.
