Nolan’s Odyssey is Nolan’s Odyssey. That might seem like an obvious statement, but it is one that many seem to ignore. Nolan has made his own interpretation of Homer’s epic poem—in the same way that Homer, if he ever existed, was making his own interpretation of the historical events that might have occurred.
In the following text I have tried to avoid any spoilers, but it might contain some.
And Nolan has chosen not to be faithful to the classical telling of the Odyssey. Many see this as an unforgivable crime, but Homer—or the many storytellers that came to be him—was not faithful to historical fact either, unless we are ready to accept the existence of the many mythical creatures and gods that appear in the story. Homer wanted to speak to the people of his time; Nolan wants to speak to his own.
The greatness of the original Odyssey is that it allows for many readings. It can be read as a proto-Greek tragedy in which the genius of the hero causes his own downfall. It can be read as the mythical hero’s journey that, according to Joseph Campbell, appears again and again in every tradition. It can be read as a spiritual parable depicting the stages of the self and its temptations. Or it can be read as recounting the end of an epoch after it has collapsed.
It is this last reading that Nolan has chosen to focus on, and he is quite explicit about it. Toward the end of the movie, he has Odysseus say something like, “It’s the end of the Bronze Age,” making the character conscious of something he could have never known. Of course, Odysseus does not need to know that; Nolan wants the audience to know it.
It is this strange self-awareness that Odysseus possesses that is perhaps the most disturbing element. He is a modern man in a different age. He more closely resembles a Vietnam veteran with PTSD than a Greek hero. Many have criticized Nolan for that, but I don’t think it’s a mistake; it’s a deliberate choice. The same applies to the diverse—some call it “woke”—casting, or stripping the narrative of its mythical epic nature to render it believable. We might argue with those choices, but they are Nolan’s way of making the Odyssey relatable and understandable to a modern audience. It’s a movie about today, not yesteryear.
“It’s a movie about love, yearning, adventure, wonder, mysticism, and epic mythology woven together by a man who either can’t or won’t understand any of those things,” says the Critical Drinker in his harsh review. Perhaps he is right. But what Nolan has done, consciously or unconsciously, is a movie about something else. He has made a movie about the end of an epoch. I think this was a deliberate choice, and every other character and plot choice was subjected to that, perhaps to their own detriment.
There are movies about people and there are movies about things. In the movies about people, the human takes center stage. In the movies about things, the idea, the subject, or the object takes it. Nolan’s Odyssey is a movie about things, despite being a movie about Odysseus. Oppenheimer was a movie about people, despite being about the building of the atomic bomb. And the “thing” this movie is about is the end of a world as it was known.
That is the impending catastrophe that looms over Odysseus and every other character. That is the idea that guides the story. That is the climax and resolution of the story. In one of the many narrative licenses that Nolan takes, Odysseus does not stay in Ithaca when he finally arrives; he sails to the west with his wife in order to honor his fallen men. But this ending is uncannily similar to the end of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, where the elves have to sail away because their time has come to an end. Odysseus’s time—the time of gods and heroes in a dialectical narrative—has come to an end.
What has precipitated the end of their world is that the Greeks broke the Law of Zeus to conquer Troy with the fake offering of a wooden horse. This breach has reverberated throughout the entire Greek world. The laws and morals that once held their civilization together began to be ignored, disregarded, and consciously broken. The “Sea Peoples” are coming, and there is nothing left binding the Greeks together to stop them.
A world order, even one confined to their known world, is ending because its leaders have betrayed the principles that sustained it. They have done so knowingly in order to secure their commercial interests. Those principles were the manifestation of a worldview. Once they are broken, the worldview loses its normative power. In Nolan’s Odyssey, when the hero realizes this, Athena leaves the stage, never to return.
In this sense, Nolan’s Odysseus is a contemporary character—someone who is aware today that the world is changing. The laws and principles that held our world together, no matter how imperfect they were, have been broken. The “rules-based order,” which was the last expression of the normative power of the Western world order, was violated by the same people who proclaimed it in the first place. We are witnessing the end of an epoch.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza is the symbolic burning of Troy. Others might follow, but it was here that international human rights and laws were definitively put to rest. Israel might take Gaza; they will kill and squeeze its population until they leave or confine them to (concentration) camps. They might win, as the Greeks won the war against the Trojans, but it will also bring forth the demise of the Western order. After Gaza, how can the West, which has stood by and supported the genocide, claim any moral superiority?
It is not just that the Western-led world order is ending—which is evident from the many ongoing geopolitical conflicts—but the West itself is changing. The democratic process, if it was ever truly democratic, is being discarded even in principle. The coarseness with which elections were rigged all over Latin America or Eastern Europe over the last year is just one example. The nature of the financial system is changing toward fully programmable money, which, together with the surveillance capabilities enhanced by AI, will create a new social paradigm.
All of this is justified in the name of security, which, in turn, is needed because the elites broke all the rules that they set up. Perhaps it’s true, as Nolan has Odysseus say, that “we are the Sea People.” We are the ones who brought this on ourselves.
Nolan, with this film, resembles the Roman poet Lucan, who wrote Pharsalia, an epic that stands alongside Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. The subject of Lucan’s work is the ruin of Rome and, by extension, its world. The opening of his epic is Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, which essentially meant defying the Roman Senate and thereby breaking the law. It is the breaking of the law that unleashes the end of the Republic.
Lucan was the grandson of Seneca the Elder and the nephew of Seneca the Younger, the Stoic philosopher who oversaw his education. Seneca was the de facto ruler of Rome for some years under the emperor Nero. Lucan became part of the close circle of the emperor, who awarded him great honors. But when his uncle lost power, Lucan saw how Nero degenerated into a mad king. He was pushed out of court and became a poet who spoke about the end of Rome, the end of his time, and the end of their world.
Nolan is a mature artist from the inner circle of Hollywood who has taken a classical work and turned it into a technically impeccable film. But he is an artist speaking about his time, not about the past. If you want the classical Odyssey, you will not find it in Nolan’s work, and that will lead to many disappointments. But if you watch it thinking about today, you might find that he is reflecting our Western world. And the answers he proposes are not particularly hopeful. In a final line, he has Odysseus say that their stories will be sung because those who come after will have forgotten how to write.
