Regardless of how you feel about Star Wars today, it’s undeniable that, ever since George Lucas’s space opera soared onto the silver screen in 1977, it has had a major influence on creatives everywhere. As revealed in an interview with Cine21, master filmmaker Christopher Nolan, best known for his work on The Dark Knight trilogy and Oppenheimer, is no exception.
Nolan’s latest blockbuster is his adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, which Polygon’s Jake Kleinman described as “the Lord of the Rings trilogy, boiled down to 3 epic hours.” However, for all that it does to adapt Odysseus and his journey back home to his wife and child on Ithaca, the film also has a surprising callback to a galaxy far, far away.
In a Cine21 interview with fellow filmmaker Park Chan-wook, Nolan discussed the opening sequence of The Odyssey — namely, where he sets expectations for the audience by introducing the story as “a time of apparent magic.” Each word in that phrase does a lot, but especially “apparent.” Homer’s Odyssey has plenty of what modern-day audiences would see as magic — particularly the involvement of the gods — but how does that translate to the characters whose lives viewers are about to experience?
Nolan reveals that Star Wars inspired him to explore such questions and expectations.
“One of my earliest movie experiences, a very profound one, was seeing George Lucas’s first Star Wars,” Nolan says. “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.”
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away” doesn’t give audiences anything specific to lock onto, but it does give a solid understanding that the story we’re about to watch is already over and so unreachable to us that it’s in another galaxy entirely. There’s almost a melancholic tone to that, especially when you consider how much tragedy and sacrifice occurs within Star Wars. Even so, it perfectly captures the sentiment of each film and TV series the phrase is a part of.
As for The Odyssey, Nolan’s use of the word apparent was to acknowledge the existence of the supernatural in a film where the story he wanted to tell should be as realistic as possible.
“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,” Nolan said. “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.”
Considering there are cyclops, giants, and sea monsters, as well as the very real dangers of illness, murder, and betrayal, we’d say Nolan’s work to blend fantasy and realism was well received. Even with gods around, Nolan’s adaptation was so overtly about grief that the inclusion of the supernatural didn’t take away from the adaptation. It only enhanced it.