“This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
– Robert Bolt, “A Man for All Seasons”
…A Face…
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in tales of time and guilt. Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man whose plots spin in twists and turns. Tell me of a complicated man. Muse, tell me of his tales with heroes caught adrift, lost in whirlpools of memory and distance. Tell me the tale of the man, Muse, who brings us now to the holy gates of Troy, sacked and vanquished, a slaughter that will haunt its hero, Odysseus (Matt Damon), from the wine-dark sea into his changed home of Ithaca, now besieged by suitors awaiting their death.
It started with a noble lie, Christopher Nolan’s favorite trick—not to save a dying earth or to foil an evil clown’s plans, but to use a game of death to sack a city. A soldier had to die. Don’t worry, Sinon (Elliot Page), Odysseus could smell your blood. He was there with you as the arrows pierced your chest, locked inside his Trojan horse, and used you as a blood sacrifice just as Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) threw his child to the sea. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the power given by the gods. And what power. They had to get in; they had to trick. How else would they have convinced the Trojans to have the city gates opened? How else could they have left that beach? The blood and screams of the Trojans proved the power of that offering.
As the bard (Travis Scott) performs the Song of Odysseus that opens the film, there is another noble lie: Sinon is not from Homer, but Virgil; Nolan has begun his epic adaptation of The Odyssey with The Aeneid. This playful sleight of intertextuality is key, an immediate announcement of his filmmaker’s scheme, as Homer will be this adaptation’s frame but not always its center. Indeed, Nolan’s characterization of Odysseus—war criminal, deceiver, ender of worlds—owes as much to Virgil and Dante as it does to the Greeks. Yet not even Virgil’s text goes unaltered, as Sinon is no longer a deceiver convincing the Trojans to bring the wooden horse into the city center, but an ignorant hecatomb left behind to convince the Trojans their trick was a gift to a god.
To adapt something is to change it, and Nolan places his film in a lineage of constant reinterpretation, a point made even clearer seconds later, when a beggar (introduced with a thunderclap, teasing whether he’s a god in disguise or a lucky mortal) is asked what he knows of the missing Odysseus, who has not returned in the seven years since the war’s end. “The song of how he won the war,” he says, to which Telemachus (Tom Holland), Odysseus’ wistful son, desperate for his father’s return, replies, “we’ve all heard that. Anything else?”
The Odyssey is Nolan’s answer to that else. It’s a text that pulls freely from the annals of history and narrative, from Homer to Dante to Tennyson, from Harryhausen to Lucas to Tolkien, and Nolan honors each while risking defiance in much the same way Odysseus defies the gods.
…A Fleet…
Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey is a cautionary tale, a warning for breaking the laws of common morality. If we can’t treat each person as though they were a god in disguise, or at least with the sufficient and necessary conditions of basic decency, we will perish. It’s a concept known as xenia, simplified by Nolan as Zeus’ Law, and it’s what spoke to him most when adapting Homer: civilization not only depends on those social laws to function, they may be a definition of civilization itself. With xenia under threat, The Odyssey completes Nolan’s run of films about the end of the world, with each reflecting the way that each generation—perhaps his own most of all—has doomed our future.
From climate change to nuclear annihilation to breaking the laws of hospitality, it’s Nolan’s trilogy of apocalypse, only inverted: Tenet (2020) follows a team of temporal spies who stop the assembly of a device that could invert the entropy of time; Oppenheimer (2023) chronicled the creation of the atom bomb, ending in a flash-forwarding nightmare of the world’s end; The Odyssey, taking place thousands of years before, manifests that inevitable ruin.
Nolan’s earlier work merely showed the potential of a world-ending event, while The Odyssey brings it all. The further Nolan goes back in time, the more his doomsday becomes real, as if his whole filmography is a post-apocalyptic event constantly at risk of another implosion. When Odysseus finally gets home to Ithaca and admits the crimes of Troy to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), it’s a reversal of the final shot of Oppenheimer, which revealed a hurricane of flame engulfing the Earth. Oppenheimer imagines all that could go wrong, but Odysseus remembers what already has, setting forth a chain reaction as devastating as the splitting of the atom. Odysseus spends the rest of the film haunted, knowing this sin may have severed the invisible ropes that bind society whole.
Look back at Nolan’s earliest films and the concept of xenia was always at their center: his debut, Following (1998), follows two thugs as they break and enter a London flat, stealing petty goods and drinking the owner’s wine. In Memento (2000), Leonard’s condition forces him to rely on the goodwill of others, and the femme fatale Natalie uses his disability against him. Oppenheimer is closest in spirit to The Odyssey, but it’s The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-2012) that already dramatized the unseen mechanisms that push society together and apart; each villain’s plan involves weaponizing civilians against one another, using fear toxins, bomb threats, and demagoguery to spur them on—or, in essence, to violate Zeus’ Law.
Nolan’s films have always dismantled the illusions of safety society takes for granted, revealing how civilization relies more on thinly held social contracts than enforceable laws. While hearing her husband’s testimony, Penelope asks the disguised Odysseus “you are the people from the sea?” She refers to the group of violent interlopers who, in speculative history, contributed to the end of the Bronze Age. Odysseus sullenly responds “yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus’ Law is spreading like plague.” As their first stop on the voyage home, they needlessly plundered and burned a village, taking whatever they wanted. A frightened villager is asked why they abandoned their homes instead of welcoming them. “I thought you were the people from the sea,” the man says—Odysseus’ men deny it, but the man was right to fear them.
Rather than a superficially Christianized hero, Nolan’s Odysseus is a man caught between his time and ours. He carries the alien morality of a warrior culture, but with the ethical hindsight of a leader counting its cost. Odysseus may claim he’s had a great moral awakening, but he readily uses the pillaging (and most likely the rape) of innocents as long as they feed his stock. By the film’s end, Odysseus may accept his failures and try to restore his home, but Nolan has cautioned any interpretations of atonement as the hopeful projections of the audience; in this world, that would be an internal and self-oriented act, and would do nothing to redeem the falling moral tides in his wake. That consequentialist perspective is the central thesis in Nolan’s trilogy of apocalypse, and by the film’s end, we know Odysseus has failed.
…A War…
The Odyssey is Nolan’s bleakest, most punishing film, dreamily elusive, abrasive, crowd-pleasing, and confrontational: not just the kind of film only Christopher Nolan could make, but also the kind only he could get millions of people to see. In the welcoming guise of a sword and sandal epic, he finally made his horror movie. As though turning soldiers into swine, Nolan reshapes the saga of Odysseus from tales to charm the Phaeacians into guilt-stricken reveries of despair and death. He clouds his narrative in an Ithacan fog of mystery and disorienting ellipses, and forces the audience to parse how and why they have been led so astray. The non-linear structure is organized around talks with Calypso (Charlize Theron), each recalled flashback playing off horror tropes: monsters, body horror, and witchery.Their exploits are no longer wily adventures to outmaneuver, but trials of visceral, nightmarish survival.
Just listen to the screams. Hear the cry of Polyphemus when he’s pierced by a wooden spear, giving an antediluvian bellow of pain. Or the innocent laughs turned into shrieks by a large young girl, summoning her kin, lumbering giants clad in iron, the Laestrygonians, harbingers of their ended age of bronze. There, the trees move, trapping many to their death, as if their moral violation has begun to shift the reality beneath their feet. When they meet the sea-witch Circe (Samantha Morton), she yelps in despair, fearful of being assaulted, later snapping that they’re rapists and pillagers of insatiable appetites. She may keep her sister as a raven pet, but there’s no lie in her words. It’s an old Nolan tactic to surround a protagonist with characters voicing all he’s done wrong, and while it’s a major disappointment that he doesn’t give Calypso or Circe the tangled psychosexual agencies of Homer (and with the apparent absence of the gods, both storylines resolve unconvincingly), they still work as part of a distressing whole. Everywhere Odysseus and his men sail, they encounter the specters of war, as though the deathknell of Troy chases them in the wind.
Showing his hand further, Nolan discards Odysseus’ most famous lines of dialogue—he no longer tricks the Cyclops into believing his name is “no one”—and replaces it with an act of cruel and impulsive violence. When Polyphemus spits out the helmet of a soldier in a whim of rage and grief, Odysseus fires an arrow into his eye. The reckless act costs Odysseus two of his men, turning his type of hubris from vainglory to viciousness. Odysseus’ second in command, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), immediately urges him to stop, and later asks him why he couldn’t show mercy. Like Circe, Eurylochus is a voice of reason trying to hold Odysseus accountable. He understands that they trespassed into the creature’s home, that they were poor guests, that they abused the spirit of xenia. Odysseus can’t see how his speed to violence violates those laws, or that their unwelcome intrusion makes them nearly as guilty as the suitors on Ithaca.
In other words, Nolan has predictably turned The Odyssey into a film noir. This Odysseus is a guilt-stricken war veteran lost in an opium dream of lotus flower, unable to face what he’s done as he recovers his strength for vengeance. In that way, he’s a classic Christopher Nolan protagonist, a noirish hero who repeatedly violates his own moral ethic for self-contradicting gratification. He may pluck his bow before a hunt, but that doesn’t mean he will hunt honorably—especially when his prey are human. Like Batman’s rationalized murder of Ra’s Al Ghul in Batman Begins (2005) or Oppenheimer’s sphinx-like stance on the use of the atomic bomb, Nolan’s Odysseus is in constant negotiation with moral laws he believes do not entirely apply to him. After all, classic noir shares its fatalism with Greek Tragedy, another form of drama with twisting narratives unraveling what people will compromise for their goals.
…A Man…
Nolan traps the audience inside Odysseus’ guilty mind, and that commitment to subjectivity informs nearly every formal choice. Like most of Nolan’s films, The Odyssey plays as an expressionistic, feature-length montage, with as many threads of interconnection as the burial shroud Penelope weaves each night. The great film scholar David Bordwell once critiqued the filmmaker for struggling to execute Hollywood continuity editing, but his approach has always been more odd and experimental; Nolan’s style is a rhapsodic blend of Eisensteinian montage, Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful studies in point of view, Nicholas Roeg’s experiments with associative cuts, and the barreling momentum of the Hollywood blockbuster. The Odyssey employs them all.
Look at the massive action sequences, where Odysseus’ mood can be felt through camera movement. When he flees Polyphemus’ cave, the camera is panicked and tumbling; when he evades the Laestrygonians, it is woozy and dazed, and when he charges through the fiery massacre inside Troy, it is shallow-focused and tight, forcing the audience into his shoes. And while Nolan’s use of composition and color recalls Mycenaean and Minoan art, it is always in service to a more intimate epic, lingering on the cliffs and crags of the actors’ faces more than the lush vistas of the Mediterranean.
Likewise, Nolan finds the cinematic equivalent to Homer’s language—instead of repeating phrases to help orient the audience (the swift-footed Achilles, the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn), Jennifer Lame, the film’s editor, cuts to the embers of Troy, to the judgmental face of Athena (Zendaya), or to Penelope’s religious pin. With each return they gain new resonance, context, and weight, until they build to revelations of sublime power. Ludwig Göransson’s score of synth and lyre does just the same, not only with conventional musical motifs, but by blending the boundaries of diegetic sound and musical score, making the film’s world feel porous and diffuse.
It only follows that Nolan’s The Odyssey would use the rumble of thunder to signify Homer’s gods. Nolan lures us into the theological point of view of Homer’s audience, a phenomenology of belief where all aspects of nature—wind, land, sea, and fortune—become representations of the unseen divine. Don’t try to understand the gods, just feel them. The absence of Mt. Olympus and Hermes has been incorrectly dismissed as an overly literal approach; instead, it’s an expression of a Borgesian kind of subjectivity, where the labyrinths of personal perspective collide with an unknowable, interpretable reality. “I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there,” Leonard says at the end of Memento, a line that could apply just as easily to Nolan’s gods. When Nolan’s Odysseus questions why the gods don’t speak in ways that he can understand, why they don’t come down from above, Athena answers: “Who doesn’t understand thunder? fire? a child’s smile? a good harvest?”
Revisit the text of Homer and it’s not such a leap. The gods are almost always beyond the horizons of the poem’s heroes, and when they do appear, it is often in secret. Athena frequently only reveals herself to Odysseus, a kind of pre-Christian personal god that chooses when and where to be seen. In The Odyssey’s Book 16, the narrator explains “The gods don’t show themselves to every man alive,” a reminder that Homer’s Greeks were a people who saw the gods everywhere while never actually seeing them anywhere, and took at face value that wicked winds or pleasant waters were the work of Poseidon.
Do the same with Nolan’s The Odyssey and you can see a coherent chain of divine causality at work. It is a proudly pagan film, with blood magic and cauldrons of bewitched food, and every prophecy comes true. The men hear Polyphemus scream for Poseidon, and though Odysseus doubts them, soon their sailing ship hits stormy seas, setting their course towards the giants, Circe, and eventually, the sea-monster Scylla. In his final words, Eurylochus begged Odysseus to ask Poseidon for forgiveness, a plea Calypso repeated only minutes later, confirming the men were right all along: “You must give yourself to the storm, and take your punishment. Give up the fight, give up control, and live. It is a leap of faith you haven’t yet made, Odysseus.” It’s a great humbling, a surrender of hubris, to accept responsibility for what you’ve done but not others. Most telling of all, it works: Odysseus is cast into the depths of the sea, only to impossibly wake up on Ithaca unharmed, with a cloak seemingly gifted by Athena to use as disguise.
…A Thought…
None of The Odyssey’s unseen gods are seen as much as Athena, and by the film’s end, we know why. Her visitations begin as judgmental reprieves, but escalate into a harrowing reveal designed with a dreamlike logic—the city of Troy is burning, and as a soldier climbs the steps to Athena’s temple, he yells “destroy their idols!” as Odysseus sees a pair of Athenas: one is a priestess in the guise of how Athena appeared the rest of the film, and the other is a statue. Both are about to be beheaded. As the swords are about to strike their necks, Nolan match-cuts the cleaving gestures into abstraction, using film language to link the two figures. In one moment, she is a murdered innocent, a personification of guilt, a metaphorical attack on a god, and, even, a potential apparition of the goddess herself. It isn’t necessary to choose which, or to “solve” the ambiguity, because for Odysseus, seeing her everywhere, she is all of them. This death, real and imagined, shapes this entire story in retrospect.
These may be changes from Homer, but his gods always embodied the passions of the human heart. The violation of xenia that began the Trojan War wasn’t the result of Paris running off with Helen out of dangerous desire, but because Aphrodite gifted Helen as a bribe to win a contest held by Zeus. Therein lies the rub: in Homer, it’s possible to interpret this story as a screen for human lust and desire, and the way we turn in knots when hot; yet it is also true that these gods diegetically exist and make mischief in the world. They are therefore both real and metaphorical, and it is in that exact sense that Nolan has retained the meaning of Homer’s deities.
So too goes the guilt of Odysseus—it is both a judgment from above and a condemnation from within, with each an expression of the other. His perilous journey home doubles as a personification of all that happened at Troy and what will happen at Ithaca, a metaphor made real by the gods. Layers of reality are typical play for Nolan, as are ambiguities around cinematic artifice; if the gods aren’t punishing Odysseus for all he’s done, then he’s experiencing a series of preposterous coincidences designed by the storyteller, which is just swapping one kind of god for another. Though much of the film follows characters who are not Odysseus—with a parallel arc of palace intrigue involving Telemachus—Penelope and the beggar-hating villain Antinous (Robert Pattinson), it’s as though the world itself has been animated to realize his moral failure.
…A Trick…
In one of the greatest, most emotional third acts of Christopher Nolan’s career, the nostos of Odysseus—his homecoming—unfolds as a series of deeply felt reunions that celebrate and valorize our hero. As Odysseus travels Ithaca, we feel the paternal joy of seeing a son after too many years gone by, the bliss of greeting a long-missed pup, and the catharsis of speaking with a wife who hasn’t forgotten you. It’s a middle-aged love story, and their reunion, beautiful and tragic, shows two adults whose love transcends the boundaries of time and space. It’s through the loyal swineherd Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) that Odysseus is told what every husband and father longs to hear—that he was needed as much as he needed them, empowering him with a clarity of purpose that only comes from protecting your family.
And yet, no Nolan film has ever been so angry, disillusioned and bitter—it is a finale of dense, irresolvable contradiction. When Odysseus speaks to Penelope of all he’s done, he speaks in the language of genocide: “one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore. What if when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?”
In a film full of tricks, Nolan’s greatest comes next. Odysseus mourns how he broke xenia to Penelope, only to then butcher the suitors by violating the same law. To finally solve the issue of her unwanted guests, Penelope stages a trial to string Odysseus’ bow. The suitors are locked in and all weapons are stowed. Odysseus plucks his bow, and reveals his identity. He fires. As the arrow enters the throat of the suitor Polybus (Corey Hawkins), it is deliriously awesome, a moment of communal sadism where we celebrate the death of an unarmed man. With every cut of a sword or pierce by arrow-tip, we celebrate many more deaths, almost all defenseless. It is a restaging of Troy in the dining room of Odysseus’ castle, a genocidal victory where the only recourse is to kneel to the old king. It is one of the most gleefully vicious endings to a Hollywood production I have ever seen.
You can say they had it coming; Antinous and his cabal of suitors schemed to assassinate Telemachus, and they may not allow Odysseus to return peacefully—but they did not all deserve to die. Trapped and weaponless, they were not honorable deaths. Penelope and King Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) urged Telemachus that killing them would be dishonorable, and Odysseus demanded his son not to participate in his mass killing. It recalls a line from The Dark Knight Rises (2012), when Gordon cries out: “I hope you have a friend like I did. To plunge their hands into the filth so you can keep yours clean.” If that has the sound of an anachronistic morality imposed on the world of Homer, Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey, noted in her introduction there’s evidence the ancient Greeks disapproved of Odysseus’ actions, imagining an ending where “this criminally aggressive hero was sent into exile for killing the suitors.”
Held in Penelope’s loving arms, Odysseus declares “not death, exile,” the final step to restore his kingdom. He and his queen may finally sail west towards an escaping sun, knowing his transgressions would never allow him to rule. He has installed Telemachus to govern, with his hands spared of (too much) blood. The boy may have made a better Ithaca, but he could still not stop the tide—a darkness will follow. The ending narration tells us that this has been a myth in the making, and that the civilizations of tomorrow will suffer the same fate. The Odyssey’s final image is of the Trojan horse burning amidst the collapse of Troy, and Odysseus shares one last lament: “and our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” The futility of nostalgia crashes over The Odyssey like an Aegean tempest, giving way to the lapping cycles of eternal return. Civilization will be in a constant flux of dusk and dawn, and with each rise and fall we will never learn.
With the ending of The Odyssey, we already haven’t. Nolan brings us from the incomprehensible horror of Troy and into the hot bloodlust in the king’s court. By having us cheer for an ending of slaughter, we’ve been made complicit in that cycle of infinite devastation. Odysseus’ parting words have been proven tragically correct; just as Odysseus has doomed us, we have learned nothing, and we will greet him once more as the newly dead.