On Screen · Late Bronze Age, c. 12th century BC · Ithaca, Ionian Islands, Greece
Nolan's Odyssey puts Bronze Age heroes in armour five centuries too late, classicist says
Scholars quoted by ARTnews accept the costumes are anachronistic, but two argue that Homer's own poems already mixed objects from different eras in the same way.
News reports
Ithaca, Greece A classicist who studies how antiquity appears on screen says the armour in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey belongs to a period some five centuries after the heroes who wear it. Several scholars also told ARTnews that the online row over the film's accuracy misreads what the epic has always been. The Universal Pictures film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus.
Critics online had picked out faults months before the film opened. One widely shared post said Agamemnon's black helmet looked like something from a Batman film. Others said Odysseus's ship was a Norse longship, and that most costumes came from the classical period, about a thousand years after the poem's Bronze Age world.
Katerina Zacharia, a professor of classics at Loyola Marymount University, did not dispute the point. Her work focuses on classical antiquity in visual and performance culture. In an email to ARTnews, she described the film's armour as "broadly Archaic and Classical silhouettes", such as Corinthian-derived crested helmets and bronze cuirasses. The heroes wearing them, she wrote, belong to a Bronze Age world of boar's-tusk helmets and Dendra-style full-body plate, "some five centuries earlier".
Agamemnon's blackened, faceted helmet belongs to no ancient workshop at all.
Katerina Zacharia, professor of classics, Loyola Marymount University
Homer mixed eras too
Dimitri Nakassis is a professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder and a MacArthur fellow. He specialises in the Greek Late Bronze Age. He said the accuracy debate "kind of misses the point" because myth is meant to feel timeless and the Greeks reshaped their myths all the time.
The Iliad and the Odyssey grew out of a very old oral tradition. Most scholars agree they were written down hundreds of years after they were first composed. That may be nearly a millennium after the era they describe.
Some details match the finds. Homer describes a boar's tusk helmet, a type known from Bronze Age examples and Bronze Age art but no longer used in his own time. Hittite records are the only surviving documents of a political dispute involving Troy in that period. Homer's war bears little resemblance to them.
If there was a Trojan War in the late Bronze Age, it almost certainly didn't look very much like how Homer describes it.
Dimitri Nakassis, professor of classics, University of Colorado Boulder
Zacharia called the poems the result of "anachronistic layering". In her view, Homer fused dimly remembered Bronze Age objects with the Iron Age world of his audience. "When Nolan dresses Odysseus in the armor of the vase painters' era rather than his own, he is doing precisely what the vase painters did," she said.
Nakassis also sees the practical problem. The Dendra panoply is a complete bronze suit of armour from a tomb, dated to around 1400 BC. "If you make a movie and everybody's dressed in armor like that, maybe it looks kind of crazy to a modern audience," he said.
Bronze Age frescoes show women in open bodices with bared breasts. ARTnews notes that copying that dress faithfully would likely distract a modern audience. What matters, Nakassis said, is "whether it's in service to the story Nolan is trying to tell."
A Moroccan town stands in for Troy
Zacharia also criticised where the film places Troy. Its Troy is Aït Benhaddou, a fortified village in Morocco used in films such as Gladiator (2000) and Alexander (2004). Excavations at Hisarlik in Turkey, the established site of Troy, show limestone walls about 15 feet high with towers, on a green coastal plain. They do not show a desert city of earth and clay.
The Greek scenes were shot in Messenia, Greece. "The film orientalizes a city the tradition itself refused to orientalize," Zacharia said. She noted that Homer's Trojans speak, pray, mourn and die like the Achaeans.
Ryan Platte, a professor of classics at Northwestern University, studies how cinema has used Homer. He sees Wolfgang Petersen's Troy (2004) as the film's closest touchpoint. ARTnews notes that Nolan keeps the gods, which Petersen's film cut.
What struck Platte most was how the film ties Odysseus's story to the real end of the Mycenaean Bronze Age. That link, he told ARTnews by email, is, to his knowledge, "new and is really intriguing."
An essay on the website of CANE, the Classical Association of New England, was harsher. It accepts that a faithful copy of the Dendra armour, found in Greece in 1960, would not suit a film. It asks instead for a sense of the period: plenty of bronze, boar's tusk on the helmets, large crescent or figure-eight shields and an imposing silhouette.
By that standard, the essay judges the white costumes and small shields of the Trojan soldiers a failure. It rates Troy (2004) higher on costume. It also gives the film's budget as $250 million.
Nolan has said he used Emily Wilson's 2017 translation as the backbone of the film. After seeing it, Wilson told the Associated Press that Nolan "was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem."
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