Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Opens With a Star Wars Reference

George Lucas’s space opera Star Wars debuted in 1977 and left a lasting mark on filmmakers everywhere. In an interview with Cine21, director Christopher Nolan explained that he was no exception to that influence.

Nolan directed an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Polygon critic Jake Kleinman described the film as “the Lord of the Rings trilogy, boiled down to 3 epic hours.” The movie follows Odysseus on his arduous journey back home to his wife and child on Ithaca, while also featuring a surprising callback to a galaxy far, far away.

During his Cine21 conversation with fellow filmmaker Park Chan-wook, Nolan discussed the opening sequence of The Odyssey. He sets audience expectations by introducing the story as “a time of apparent magic.” Homer’s epic features plenty of divine intervention and elements that modern audiences view as magic, which raises questions about how those phenomena register for the characters experiencing them.

Nolan revealed that Star Wars inspired his approach to framing these expectations.

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. I felt with this film 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 a phrase that would help the audience understand the terms of the story.

The iconic opening crawl line does not provide specific plot points, but it establishes that the narrative takes place in an unreachable, distant setting. That framing carries a melancholic tone that matches the sacrifice and tragedy running through the Star Wars franchise.

In The Odyssey, Nolan used the word apparent to handle the supernatural within a grounded story that aimed for historical realism.

I was interested in the idea that, for a person living in the Bronze Age, there is magic all around you. Things you cannot explain. So there are fanciful, sometimes correct or incorrect explanations for the things you’re seeing and the mysteries of life. I wanted to put that in people’s heads as they started watching.

The film includes mythological creatures such as cyclops, giants, and sea monsters alongside mortal perils like illness, murder, and betrayal. Nolan balanced these fantastical elements with a heavy emphasis on grief, allowing the supernatural aspects to enhance the narrative rather than distract from it.

Source: Polygon