After winning the Best Director Oscar for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan officially cemented his legacy as one of the greatest cinematic storytellers of the 21st century. Nolan took a well-deserved break after his 2023 biopic, but he’s about to come roaring back into theaters with The Odyssey, the latest adaptation of Homer’s epic work. To bring the ancient Greek story to life on screen, Nolan has assembled an army-sized cast of actors to be part of what looks to be one of the largest productions ever.
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And yet, underneath all that pomp and spectacle, there is a narrative truth that is already clear from the first trailers for The Odyssey: the film will carry on one of the most prominent themes that runs through so many Nolan films.
Absent Fathers Are A Major Theme In Chris Nolan Movies
Have you ever noticed it before? So many of Christopher Nolan’s movies come with the plot point and theme of absent or compromised fathers, and the mix of trauma and/or legacy that is inherited by their children.
You can trace this motif back as far as Nolan’s independent feature film, Following (1998), and his remake of the Norwegian film Insomnia (2002). The former saw a young man fall under the wing of a criminal mentor (a spin on a father-figure), while the latter had Al Pacino’s protagonist cop being a corrupted mentor/father-figure to Hilary Swank’s younger cop. The theme would become far more literal in the next phase of Nolan’s career, with Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and Inception (2010) all having clear signs of middle-aged angst over parents dying, and/or failing to be there to provide guidance and care to their children. That angst only seemed to grow with Man of Steel (2013) and Interstellar (2014), both of which contain entire subplots about the emotional trauma and existential turmoil of children who lose their parents, particularly their fathers.
Now granted, since Instellar (and perhaps since the notoriously private filmmaker exited certain phases of his own parenting experience), Nolan has eased up on this theme: Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), and Oppenheimer (2023) have been more focused on anxieties over an uncertain world and future (which may have to be fought for). However, here we are again, The Odyssey, which definitely brings Nolan’s fatherhood theme back to the forefront for the 6th time.
In The Odyssey, The Son Is Just As Important As The Father
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day star Tom Holland will also be starring in Nolan’s The Odyssey. In the film, Holland will play “Telemachus,” the son of Odysseus (Matt Damon), the king of the Greek island of Ithaca. In the story of The Odyssey (the original and the film), Odysseus gets lost on a ten-year detour on the way home from the Trojan War, due to the intervention of the gods and other mystical creatures. But while Odysseus is living those dark adventures, Telemachus and his mother, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), are playing a political (and spiritual) chess game to protect the throne of Ithaca from would-be takers, in Odysseus’s absence. That includes Telemachus trying to demonstrate the same wit and cunning as his dad, without any of the hard experiences.
Knowing what we know about The Odyssey’s story (centuries-old SPOILERS!), it feels safe saying that Nolan may be in the next phase of exploring his father/son motif. Instead of parental trauma or anxiety, now we may see fatherly pride being expressed, which would be a nice evolution to see.
The Odyssey will be in theaters and IMAX on July 17th.
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Image courtesy of Tor Books/Macmillan -
Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme
