Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been the largest event film of the year (2026). Everything about it is promoted as big. Shot on IMAX with big cameras, big scenes (though not that comparable with De Mille casts of thousands), big egos and big appetites (with Odysseus’ absence, his wife Penelope has to entertain a warehouse size group of suitors every night with free meals). And then of course the source material – often regarded as one of the foundations of Western narrative – is big, sprawling, in the way that a Grand Tour of Europe would have been in the 19th Century (with its age of Neo-Classicism, that comparison may not be that far-fetched).
One of the most startling scenes in the film (there are not that many) is the representation of the Trojan Horse. Nolan’s striking staging of the scene dispenses with the fairy tale, almost sanitized, version which is established credo. We do not get a huge wooden horse upright on four legs rolled along easily on four wheels. Instead we are treated to the horse, half sunken in sand on the beach, vertically erect, its head advertising its presence. It is hauled from the beach to the city by a train of hapless slaves and soldiers. They do not totally ignore the possibility that the Horse hides the enemy. Indeed they poke it with swords and spears, unwittingly killing some of the Athenians in the process.
But this scene is more the startling because it projects itself as a grand, unabashed phallic symbol in full and permanent erection. This is the reason why the Horse when first encountered, is half sunk in the sand in vertical position. There have been some comments that there is no sex in The Odyssey but sexual references are all there, upfront, and in the first act of the film. Oddly enough this Trojan Horse scene is reminiscent of Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, specifically the last scene where Woody Allen is waiting with his other white latex spermatozoa for ejaculation (and the comic surprise of a black guy among them). To some extent they are wondering what they are doing there or more accurately what is going to happen to them. That anxiety can equally be applied to the warriors secreted in the Trojan Horse. What happens to them is not confined to their exit to pillage and capture Troy because their subsequent journey is full of surprises. Maybe we should observe that in Nolan's film, Helen, the object of desire of this phallic horse, is like the out of place spermatozoa in the Woody Allen film - black.
In time we might come to regard The Odyssey as a huge Woody Allen joke.