The Odyssey

Photo credit: Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures “In a time of apparent magic…” From the Second World War to the Trojan War, filmmaker extraordinaire Christopher Nolan certainly doesn’t shy away from the big stories – be they huge, world-changing discoveries, or his own interpretation of an ancient epic poem. In many ways The Odyssey feels like a natural follow-up to Oppenheimer; both have troubled leaders at their core, but whilst J. Robert Oppenheimer started something with his development of the atomic bomb, Odysseus is the man to break the siege at Troy and then takes the long route to closing that chapter for good. For anyone who is unfamiliar with Odysseus’s story, it starts with him serving in the Trojan War (which began when Menelaus of Sparta’s wife, Helen, is taken to Troy by Paris), where he later masterminds the Greeks’ victory by coming up with the Trojan Horse idea. With the war won, he and his men set sail for their home island of Ithaca; they are consistently…