Did Christopher Nolan Hide a Batman Easter Egg in His Epic Film ‘The Odyssey’?

“I revisited the poem over and over, and I saw very strong, positive connections with my previous work,” Christopher Nolan told us earlier this month about his new feature film based on Homer’s eponymous book. “The Odyssey encompasses all narrative patterns at once: it’s an incredible adventure story but also, as you pointed out, a tale of vengeance, love, loss. It’s a coming-of-age story, a tale about returning home that also speaks to the consequences of war. I found many timeless, essential things about human nature in it. And as a storyteller, these are the things that deeply resonate with me.”

What strikes us upon viewing the film, released on July 15th, is how well the narrative aligns with the author’s body of work, often dealing with themes of vengeance, obsession, subjectivity, or a character seeking to return home, much like the protagonists of Inception, Interstellar, or Dunkirk. “The Odyssey” can also be seen as mirroring Oppenheimer in the way it looks at the past to discuss the present, particularly the violence of men and the consequences of war. And perhaps… a bit of his The Dark Knight trilogy?

Last May, on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, while the host noted that the cast of his thirteenth feature film included former Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) and current Batman (Robert Pattinson) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland), the director pointed out that superheroes and Greek heroes are connected: “They are the original superheroes,” he stated then. “And much of comic book culture, whether it’s Marvel or DC, comes from Homer’s epic poems.” “No one really knows if Homer was one person, and he might have been the George Lucas of his time. We’re not sure if it was one person or several, but he was the Marvel of his era. And there’s this strong desire within us to believe that gods live among us, and modern comic books are an expression of that.” Is this why one of the images from The Odyssey, showing a hooded Ulysses whose face is obscured at the moment of his return to Ithaca, reminds us of his approach to Batman? Or is it a conscious reference, to continue his exploration of the notion of a “hero”?

“Reading Homer, you see The Count of Monte Cristo, hence Batman”

“It wasn’t my intention,” Nolan told us at the beginning of July. “But there is a strong connection between them, as Batman draws from The Odyssey, and that is also what makes it interesting to return to this foundational, ancient text: you find many elements from other stories because they draw from it. Looking at Batman, I saw The Count of Monte Cristo. But reading Homer, you see The Count of Monte Cristo, hence Batman (laughs) There is a whole lineage of strong elements stemming from this story.”

“And there’s this idea of returning home in disguise, to be able to assess the situation and see how he can reclaim his kingdom. It’s also a powerful trope, a strong form of storytelling we’ve seen in many ways before. And I didn’t seek to avoid these connections, I let them be as strong as possible, because that’s where the fun lies for me in The Odyssey: discovering this great adventure, which you might know in other forms. But it’s in Homer where you find the purest and most extreme version.”

More than ever, The Odyssey is truly a Christopher Nolan film, right down to the way it fits within his overall oeuvre and links to his other films.