Incredible stories, otherworldly creatures, false identities, a cavalcade of trickery: the original Odyssey is packed with everything you could want from a big-screen blockbuster. And like all great stories, it’s more than just a fantasy adventure. It’s about survival, marriage, truth, what it means to be a man and much more. It’s also roughly 2,700 years old, and by picking it for his latest movie, Sir Christopher Nolan has definitively proved that the old ones are the best. But why, really, has he decided to go Greek?
Screenwriters have always been suckers for a good ‘coming home’ story. It was such a popular genre in ancient times that the Greeks even coined a name for it: ‘nostos’. If you throw in their word for pain (‘algos’) you get ‘nostalgia’, and on that note modern pop culture is littered with many a nostos. Star Trek IV is literally subtitled The Voyage Home, while hit 1980s-1990s TV show Quantum Leap sees physicist Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) forced to inhabit a different person’s body in every episode, ‘hoping each time his next leap will be the leap home’. Film nerds have worked out that if you combine The Odyssey, The Martian, Interstellar and Saving Private Ryan, Hollywood has spent more than $600 million bringing Matt Damon home.
