Odysseus stands on the beach, unsure of who he is. He knows his name, he knows the story: the things everyone knows, thanks to songs and bards. A face, a fleet, a war. But he has forgotten much, because he has chosen to forget. There is something inside of him he cannot bear to face. He speaks to Athena – or is it just himself? – about the gods, and why they don't speak in a way that he can understand.
"Who doesn't understand thunder, or fire, or a good harvest?" Athena responds. She's speaking to Odysseus' hubris. Odysseus, who, in Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey, does not believe in the gods the way others do. Does he not find meaning in all this brilliant light and sound? Do you?
These primal images are important to keep in mind when discussing Nolan. Thunder and fire are apt comparisons for the British and American filmmaker's approach to the medium. He makes films meant to light up the biggest screens, with scores that make full use of premium sound systems. The modern Christopher Nolan film is a wildfire and a storm, one that is always felt but not always understood — but it always brings a good harvest.
Like a figure from the Homeric myths he adapted in The Odyssey, Nolan is a titan. Widely considered the most powerful director in Hollywood, he is one of the few filmmakers who can, essentially, get a major studio to sign off on whatever he wants. Bankability gets you that kind of power: When your grim biographical drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer grosses nearly a billion dollars and wins seven Academy Awards, executives are happy to write you checks as long as they think you can keep pulling that off. Nolan wields this power with a sense of noblesse oblige, speaking with a remarkable awareness of the rarity of his position and his intent to make the most of it.
“I’m drawn to working at a large scale because I know how fragile the opportunity to marshal those resources is,” he told Time in 2024. “I know that there are so many filmmakers out there in the world who would give their eye teeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way.”
That sense of responsibility is palpable in the subject matter of his films of late. So burdened, Nolan forges The Odyssey into a modern exhortation to those who would deny others their dignity, deluding themselves into thinking their plunder abroad will never come to haunt them at home. The creation of the atomic bomb is rendered as a dirge for the grandest destructive act done by people in Oppenheimer. Tenet depicts characters caught in a conflict between humanity's destructive past (a carelessness indifferent to the eventual destruction of climate change) and vindictive future (where those struggling to survive send their fury back through time).
There is an urgency to Christopher Nolan's latter-day oeuvre, made the more desperate and despairing by his turning to larger and larger canvases to tell these stories. Nolan brings a manic street preacher's messageof fire and brimstone to a megachurch platform, standing behind the largest pulpit in the secular world, imploring us to listen.
In an interview with political philosophy lecturer and doctoral student Zhong Shu, Nolan is asked outright: "Are you a bard for a civilization at dusk?" Typically, Nolan evades the question's personal dimension and moves the conversation to the text: He's interested in the 400 year gap between the historical Trojan war and Homer's telling of it. The poet and he are not doing dissimilar work, Nolan argues, wrestling with a time where civilization as the storytellers know it seemed to be on the rise while situated in a present that can't live up to history's imagined greatness. Myth arises from that dissonance: there are times where it is easier to believe that giants built monuments than it is that humans were able to cooperate to do what seems impossible.
Reluctant as Nolan is to engage directly with the question, when one considers the films Nolan has made in the current decade – Tenet, Oppenheimer, and finally, The Odyssey – it's hard not to find the diagnosis accurate. With every film, each more thunderous and technically impressive than the last, Nolan constructs stories that call attention to their own architecture. Oppenheimer's twin timelines converging on the moment that its protagonist admits to Albert Einstein that he has doomed the world; Tenet's war between Earth's past and future reaching its climax on a barren landmark of Cold War nuclear proliferation; The Odyssey's rueful positioning of the sack of Troy as original sin for the civilization it depicts. These are invitations to gaze more deeply, the silver screen polished to a mirror, a palpable effort to wield the emotional power of cinema to try to find where we went wrong.
While the scale, urgency, and directness with which the filmmaker prods at this disquiet in his latter day films is new, his fascination with it is not. Nolan has, with his penchant for nonlinear storytelling, always been asking: Is the end coming, or is it here? And at what point does it become inevitable?
Memento isn't quite a skeleton key for the rest of Nolan's filmography, but it is a fisheye lens to peer at it through. The story of a man with an inability to form new memories trying to investigate his wife's murder, Memento features many of the director's preoccupations in raw form. There is a non-chronological split between color vignettes that begin at the story's end and move backwards through the narrative, and black and white scenes that move forward from another point. Across both we learn how protagonist Leonard Shelby navigates the world. Unable to remember anything once his attention moves elsewhere, he relies on polaroids and notes and tattoos, lessons he's learned but can't remember why or how.
Shelby builds his history every day with images he regards as truth, only for us to learn at the end of the film, when both timelines meet somewhere in the middle of the narrative, that he is manipulating that truth, lying to himself and therefore the viewer. Giving himself a story to chase, knowing he will forget that he is its author. "The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?" Shelby (Guy Pearce) muses in the neo-noir's narration, although for him, it very much does. Shelby, like the viewer, places incredible, powerful trust in the images that have been assembled for him, believing them to hold truth.
In Memento (and to a lesser but still palpable extent, Nolan's debut, Following) the director takes an immediate and enduring interest in a cinema of responsibility, contemplating film's power to mold perception, give abstractions material shape, prod at reality — and ruminate on what it means to be someone wielding that power. "Are you watching closely?" the engineer John Cutter (Michael Caine) asks the audience at the start of The Prestige, articulating the source of that power: an audience that wants to be fooled. In its tale of dueling magicians is a war over how to use that power – for one's own achievement and mastery, like Christian Bale's Alfred Borden? Or for the delight of those audiences, like the dapper showman, Hugh Jackman's Robert Angier?
And what of Inception's protagonist, the dream thief Dominic Cobb, whose original sin is planting an idea in his wife Mal's mind that unmoors her, leading to her death by suicide? The guilt Cobb feels over violating Mal's trust with her subconscious ultimately compromises his own subconscious mind, leaving him unable to discern what is real or not. Eventually, like Odysseus on the beach, or Leonard Shelby with his photographs, Dom Cobb is not sure of who he is anymore, or if his world is real.
2014's Interstellar is the inflection point on which Nolan's body of work pivots from inward-facing psychological thrillers to outward-facing genre exercises, searching for human connection in the exploration of grand themes. It's also his first film about humanity staring down a clock ticking down on its survival, as climate change has left the planet barren and hungry. The film follows pilot Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey) as he becomes a member of a final desperate attempt to find a new home for humanity among the stars, but its focus is far from cosmic. It's a film about love and faith in future generations, about believing in children's ability to surpass their parents, the debt owed to them and the failures they inherit.
It is also thoroughly optimistic, a deeply-felt expression of faith (in the mechanics of the universe, as one of his characters in Tenet would say) that Nolan runs at in a different way in his next film, 2017's Dunkirk. A World War II film about a moment of utter despair, when the British and French armies were pinned between the Axis and the ocean, it's a story with few characters and little hope. But in Nolan's telling, the Dunkirk evacuation, in which 300,000 soldiers escaped across the English Channel thanks to the efforts of a largely civilian volunteer fleet, becomes one of the most moving moments in a horrible conflict, where people do what's right because they can and because they must.
Noblesse oblige defines the latter half of Nolan's filmography. Those resources that only he can marshal deployed to tell stories that speak to the moment in which they arrive, because to use them for anything less than that would be irresponsible. This is a burden that Nolan seems to have placed on himself, one that he's been working towards for some time, accepting the mantle of the bard at dusk.
This is why The Odyssey arrived with potency and immediacy, weeks after release in a world where few things in pop culture can sustain even a few days of discussion. It's not solely due to the timelessness of the source material, or the ongoing culture war that finds it convenient fodder for outrage. It's because this filmmaker has been setting up shop at every multiplex around the world time and time again, contemplating film's role in the modern world, and the messages those with power ought to heed.
This is the gospel of Christopher Nolan, delivered to a cacophonous world he knows is unlikely to hear him. But some might, if he can speak a language that enough people can understand. Thunder and fire. A good harvest, if we're lucky.
