Why Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is like Chicken Run

I'm going to let you into a secret. When I'm at the gym – when I'm on the treadmill, diligently throwing myself up virtual staircases – I don't just listen to music. I project myself into the music that I'm listening to. It could be "The Jean Genie", say, or "Get It On" or "What'd I Say". I'm onstage, playing with Johnny Marr; there's a charity concert or else it's a soundcheck and now I've got hold of the piano and I'm doing Ray Charles, I'm testifying, while surrounded by a band, all eager to play along, and three female singers. (Which female singers? I've never established this.) Most satisfying of all, Radiohead have given their second guitarist the night off. It's me and Jonny Greenwood, clanging away – we're like a high tech anvil – and, if I catch it right, it can feel like my body is elsewhere. Don't get me wrong: I can feel it. I may even feel a little sorry for it. But my head is where the party's at.

Have I mentioned before that I'm a Buddhist? I try, at least, to adhere to Buddhist philosophy as much as I possibly can. Strictly speaking, what I've described above runs counter to what I'm refusing to call my "practice". One needs always to be doing the equivalent of lowering oneself, slowly, into a series of baths, each moment – no: each fraction of a fraction of a moment – being the equivalent of a new body of water. What I've described in the previous paragraph is the kind of separation of church and state that would, I think, be considered to be "unwise". Moreover, that separation is an attempt to elicit a certain set of emotions: to manufacture something that, while not quite euphoria, is uplifting enough to allow you to forget those aspects of your experience that are the most germane. Your lungs; your legs; the sound of your breath; the slap of your feet – these all anchor you to lived reality and by ignoring them you encourage a mental state that is both ersatz and untrustworthy. Generic, too. I've been onstage. It was never the way I insist on imagining it. My singing was never anything to write home about and my guitar playing was almost always wilfully primitive. There were songs, especially love songs, that demanded a gentle strum, but I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it. I was more interested in what my hands were doing when I wanted to express myself: a determined hacking and thrashing. So, yes, what I'm doing at the gym feels perfectly understandable, and I'm prepared to admit that, yes, I very much intend to keep doing it. But it's also cheap. It's a lie, or, to be more generous, a fantasy. It's cookie cutter reality: a template that I pour myself into but that, afterwards, leaves me feeling just a little bit soiled.

Which brings me (humour me) to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. I don't have an axe to grind when it comes to which bits Nolan did or didn't include. Neither was it the dialogue that bothered me the most, even though it was so full of twenty-first century idioms that you wondered if Nolan had bothered to try to translate – to bring over – Homer's language at all. I liked the fact that Helen was Black. It was, actually, one of the few moments when I felt a genuine spark of interest. Odysseus' PTSD? I might, with a more intelligent script, have gone for that. Or for the #MeToo Circe, who clearly had beef with the male urge. (We're already pigs, the reasoning goes.) It wasn't any of that that made me hate it nor was it particularly the dullness of the visual compositions nor the strange mixture of real, or pseudo-real, motivation and those sudden irruptions of the hyper-real that were meant to have you gasping on the edge of your seat. No, it was the template; the insistence on cookie cutter reality. There's a moment in Martin Amis' Money when, in order to save a terrible film – to gloss over the aggression and puerility of the hostile actors – the makers insert a scene for every character in which they earnestly explain themselves. Of course, they do this in the most self-regarding and stereotypical of ways and it's something similar to this that's going on in Nolan's film. Nothing significant has been added, not when it comes to the main story. There they all are: Odysseus and Penelope and Telemachus and, yes, Antinous. But, as far as Hollywood blockbusters are concerned, it's just another day at the chicken factory: pluck it; plump it up; then roll it out. Oddly, for a film that deals so very much in fantasy, the otherworldliness of Homer's original has largely been siphoned off. So has Odysseus' wiliness, and his verbal dexterity. What's been added is almost entirely generic: Antinous' egregious nastiness; an Athena Card version of Odysseus' family in which Penelope sobs "Don't die!" and Odysseus talks about his "beautiful son". An arc, in other words, with all of the right inciting incidents. Or, rather, the arc; the one that dictates the plot for pretty much all of the "big" Hollywood films you've ever seen. And don't, don't you dare, say that this is because Homer was the first to create it. He wasn't. What we have here is the reverse of Shakespeare's "sea change"; something rich and strange has been translated into something turgid, lumpen and intellectually inert.

Why is Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey like Chicken Run? Because I think, that, in both films, the imposition of this template is particularly insulting. The Odyssey is like Chicken Run is like Gladiator is like... I don't know. Dunkirk. (I've seen it but I can't remember it.) But Homer deserves much better. As did Aardman, who were put through the sausage machine by Jeffrey Katzenburg at Dreamworks. Previously, every Aardman animation felt like it was organic: each action led, in a rising curve, to a series of actions, each more extreme than the other and each operating within a logic that felt both sidelong and dreamlike. Each scene was character-led, character proving to be one's destiny in the funniest (the most satisfying, in other words) of ways. Chicken Run? Pfft. And two fingers to Nolan's fucking Odyssey. However, I do have a caveat. People love this stuff. Nolan is who he is (essentially, Ridley Scott with an A Level) because of his ability to get bums on seats. Me? Not so much. (I'm sorry but you did know, didn't you, that this would end up as a discussion of my new novel.) I have, I think, just under a hundred readers and it's not just that I'm grateful to them; I feel, in some way, that this is entirely appropriate. Spread your net too wide and you end up with the novelistic equivalent of gruel. A template; a pseudo-arc; The House of Clichés. What I'm doing here is not so much banging a drum as rehearsing an anxiety that I've rehearsed, to myself, on several occasions. I don't know, in other words, if Rough Music actually has a plot. It has a story, sure, and I'm pretty certain that the ending ties it all together, but, of the four novels that I've written, it's easily the most wayward. Character, I would say, is not so much destiny as a weight that my main protagonists have to carry around with them from one extreme to another. As I've written before, one of the aims was to create a kind of road map of England in the second half of the twentieth century; to knock out a sort of Greatest Hits. VE Day; Aneuran Bevan; George Orwell; The Goons; John Lennon – they're all there. And it's interesting that, in opposition to what you might call a certain over-determination, the story sometimes seems to wander where it will. There's a series of lightly linked vignettes. It's all sufficiently organised, I hope; I stick to a handful of main characters. But even I'm hard pressed to tell you what the story is in its entirety. But, see, having watched The Odyssey, I've decided that this is more of a good thing than a bad one. I don't want to be like everybody else and I'm assuming that my readers don't want that either. Lived reality; the rubbing of various rawnesses against each other: personality; socio-economic history; sexual persuasion; the possession, or not, of a sense of humour. This is what, to me, a novel should consist of. Life, God bless it, doesn't adhere to a Hollywood template. Have I succeeded or have I, you know, fucked it up? Does it work? In the words of my favourite poem, does it "sing, and louder sing/for every tatter in its mortal dress"? Or does it lie there, grunting feebly? Please read it. Then you can give me your opinion. I reread it the other day and I think I'm proud of it. I'm hoping, at least, that it's not the equivalent of a party for one, stuck, largely, in my own head.

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. Rough Music, his second novel to be published, is coming out in September.