The Odyssey has been a runaway success, breaking box office records and receiving glowing reviews from critics and audiences alike. The film boasted a $250 million dollar budget and one of the most star-studded casts Hollywood has seen in recent years. Bringing a world like The Odyssey to life was a massive undertaking, one that could have easily buckled under its own weight considering how much was being packed into a single movie. To pull off a film like this without alienating audiences, Nolan drew from the same movies that inspired him to pursue filmmaking in the first place, George Lucas’ Star Wars.
Christopher Nolan’s film opens with text that reads “In a time of apparent magic…” The Odyssey is the only film that Nolan opens with text, making it an outlier in his filmography. Speaking in an interview with Park Chan-Wook, director of Parasite, Christopher Nolan reflected on the movie and why he made the choice to begin the film this way.
“One of my earliest movie experiences, a very profound one, was seeing George Lucas’s first Star Wars. He began that film with a title that said, ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…’ That immediately told me how to watch the film. It put me in the right frame of mind to receive the imagery.”
The Odyssey is a multilayered epic about politics, magic, war, and human triumph. In rapid succession, the movie has to set up Penelope, her greedy suitors, her son Telemachus, and his quest for answers all before diving into Odysseus and his war. Those elements alone would be a lot for the audience to take in before the film reveals giants, cannibals, witches, and worse that pursue the hero Odysseus. The biggest challenge Nolan faced in his adaptation was overwhelming the audience with all these elements. In order to avoid this, the director needed to ease the audience into his world.
“I felt with [The Odyssey] I was chasing that kind of experience where you want to create a world that the audience loses themselves in and takes on its own terms. So I was looking for that as an example, as a way of giving a phrase that would help the audience understand the terms of the story, and the word ‘apparent’ in particular to me was very much about acknowledging the idea that yes, we tell the story realistically, to some extent we have to explain why there is magic.”
Nolan’s choice to open The Odyssey with “In a time of apparent magic…” was a brilliant move. Just like how the opening crawl in Star Wars eases you into accepting all the aliens, spaceships, and magic right from the jump, the opening text to The Odyssey tells audiences exactly what to expect, allowing them more time and energy to absorb what they see rather than question it.
Christopher Nolan has long been considered a master filmmaker, and never has it been more apparent than with the release of The Odyssey. Clearly drawing from George Lucas and Star Wars was the right call for Nolan. In much the same way as Star Wars, the world of The Odyssey feels real, fully fleshed out as if it had existed before the film started and would continue to long after the credits roll. While much of that could be chalked up to the fact that The Odyssey is only a small chapter in an ancient mythological record, the movie would not have been able to sell that world to audiences had it not been for Nolan’s choice to draw from Star Wars.
