The Odyssey may be the greatest story ever told in epic verse. Yet how many screen versions of Homer’s homecoming tale have there been? Answer: not many. If well clad in years, you might remember Kirk Douglas and the Cyclops going eyeball (glittering) to eyeball (incinerated) in 1954’s Italo-Hollywood peplum Ulysses. And we could include that celebrated 1968 space odyssey, 2001.
But now that Christopher Nolan is poised to unveil his Homer extravaganza — literal, literate (we hope) and starrily cast — let’s ask a different question for a richer answer: how often has Homer’s Odyssey appeared in movies in disguise? Not unlike the hero’s own beggarly masquerade when he returns to Ithaca, his kingdom, after 10 years in Troy and 10 bedevilled years at sea to reclaim his wife Penelope and slay the suitors crowding up his palace.
See how I got the whole story in there? But not really. Because there isn’t really a “story”. As Nolan himself has said, Homer’s Odyssey is “the original non-linear narrative”. Unlike The Iliad — where a whole war begins and ends, albeit across a decade and 24 “books” — TheOdyssey doesn’t go from A to Z. A humongous homecoming yarn, it circles from A to A, beginning with a flashback-style evocation of life in Ithaca, then surviving an alphabet of challenges, ordeals and adventures on the return route (the one-eyed ogre Polyphemus, the Sirens, the enchantress Circe — a name that actually means circle). Ergo: The Odyssey, departing from its base and then picaresquely and incident-richly coming back, is really the first road movie. Except at sea. And in near-3,000-year-old Greek dactylic hexameters.