Christopher Nolan

The Odyssey (2026)

A tree forms itself in answer
to its place and to the light.
–Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths 1999–IV”

People are made by places, I thought.
–Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old story features many of the director’s typical concerns and interests: the passage of time, the frailty of memory, and the centrality of human choice, among others. Homer’s story, on its face, is a story of transience. Odysseus, away from home and at war against Troy for a decade, spends nearly that same amount of time (sometimes) trying to return. In many ways, Nolan adapts this ancient story toward his typical concerns while minimizing its core feature: the deeply human desire to be home, at rest, where we belong.

Throughout Homer’s story, the notion of going home drives Odysseus increasingly at every stage of his journey. At the end of the Trojan War, this man has done his duty to King Agamemnon, giving the king a full decade of his life, suffering through devastating loss in war while his wife sits home alone and his son grows up without his father. Home dominates his thinking. The sailing journey home is nearly as difficult, with obstacles both terrifying and (apparently) fine slowing him down. Home dominates his thinking. He finally arrives in Ithaca and finds his house crowded with suitors courting his wife and eating his stores. Home dominates his thinking.

Nolan’s film certainly contains this theme, but where home dominates the ancient story, Nolan has pushed other concerns to the center and explicitly minimized the home theme. Nolan’s film certainly maximizes anti-war messaging (an ideal to which I am sympathetic), particularly in and around the film’s climax as Odysseus narrates his regrets about the loss of life during the war. On the flip side, Nolan certainly minimizes the home theme by casting the bulk of Odysseus’s decade on the road home as a time of forgetfulness due to Calypso’s lotus flowers. Homer, in contrast, pictures Odysseus, always on the shore of Calypso’s island, weeping for the home he desires.

But Nolan’s film does more than push aside or minimize this core theme of the story. The film undermines it entirely with its exilic conclusion. Homer’s whole story is about this man going and getting home. But Nolan’s film denies Odysseus home in a fundamental sense by sending him into exile to an unknown and far off location. Will he ever actually get there?

For a man who has spent nearly a decade trying to get back to Ithaca, this conclusion is devastating rather than triumphant. Odysseus ends the film leaving without his aged father (who never actually makes it into the movie) and his son, both given rather than chosen. He leaves Ithaca, a birthplace given to him rather than chosen. He leaves with Penelope (his chosen bride) and his exile (chosen to avoid conflict—a conflict resolved by Athena in Homer’s version, by the way).

In all of this, Nolan’s concept of home carries a distinct measure of transience in its disconnection from place and non-chosen family. Further, it fits into a pretty clear sense of self-determination in Odysseus (maybe the most striking contrast with Homer’s story, where the gods exhibit direct control over all elements of his story). Nolan’s concept of home keeps Odysseus on the move, without a sense of being settled, without a network of Ithacan people who have known him his whole life. In this, we Nolan hollows out Odysseus in comparison to Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus is a man we never get to see truly at home, a man always journeying but never settled, a man who has thoughts about war but no place from which to live out his ideals. In this way, Nolan has taken Homer’s triumphant Odyssey and turned it into a tragedy.

Where Homer’s story contains some measure of hope in overcoming the struggle and arriving at home (even if it is dependent upon unreliable gods), Nolan’s film points us to look within toward human choice, to see the mess we’ve made of the world, and to grapple with the deep uncertainty of our future. There is truth in both. But in an exceedingly rare story that has all the elements to give us a positive vision of overcoming the deep suffering of the world and finding home, Nolan has instead given us something more modest and common, a mere negative vision of where we’ve lost our way.

The Dark Knight (2008)

The Dark Knight has raked in obscene amounts of money this summer, becoming the most popular movie released in recent years. Capitalizing on the more modest success of its precursor, Batman Begins, the sequel engages the viewer with a terrifying and senseless villain for Batman to tangle with—the Joker.

With an overly-complex plot involving at least five or six different storylines, the ongoing battle between the Joker and Batman sits as the centerpiece of the film. While Batman attempts to pass the baton of crime-fighting on to Harvey Dent, the Joker wants nothing more than to unmask the caped crusader. And the Joker makes clear early on that he will stop at nothing—not destruction of property, not kidnapping, and not even loss of life—to achieve his goal. The violence and destruction that come as a result take on increasingly senseless proportions, given his desired outcome. Using crude and simple technological elements, he exists solely to create chaos, to push against the rules, and to react against the modern, technologically-advanced world.

Batman on the other hand stands as a symbol of justice. He works hard to avoid killing people, uses the latest technology to aid his crime-fighting, and declares that he lives by a set of rules that govern his behavior. In this sense, Batman is that modern hero of yesteryear; the one who inherently knows what justice is and will stop at nothing to make sure he carries it out to the letter. However, as Joker’s attacks become more and more vicious and unsettling, Batman’s entire position and ethos is called into question. Does he allow this killing to continue in the name of conscience and his own personal rule? Or should he kill the Joker and end the suffering of his victims?

The film has no answer to this question, at least explicitly. We are left with a world of confusion and chaos, one in which the Joker still lives. One could presumably make an argument that due to our implicit knowledge of Batman as the “hero,” we know his way is ultimately the right one. This would all be well and good, except for one significant problem. The Joker has shown that his simple rules do not work. Further, at a formal level, the film leads us to sympathize with the Joker. The plans of the Joker are so cleverly wrought and well-carried out, that we are dazzled by the violence that results.

For instance, in the opening bank robbery sequence, one leaves that scene never really worried about all the criminals that got knocked off one by one. Instead, the thought is—what a great plan. We admire the sharp mind it took to conceive of such a raid. This seems true of most of the violence throughout, where we laugh at the Joker walking away from the hospital in a nurse’s uniform, feel the rush of adrenaline at the close-up fight scenes that offer no sense of perspective and no opportunity for contemplation, or chuckle at his deft ability to use a pencil (or was it a pen?). The excitement brought on by the violence in this film troubles me precisely because the ways in which it excites are more formal than content based.

The film has been popular, I think, because it has pinpointed our times. We live in a confusing world, where people have lost a sense what’s right and what’s wrong. We no longer know who we can trust. Our fathers leave. Our leaders lie. And our nations seem headed for self-destruction. Batman portrays a world that has lost its way. Does anyone know the way back?