Christopher Nolan’s Apocalyptic Odyssey
How can one defy the gods when the gods have abandoned us?
In Homer’s Odyssey, the gods are fickle beings. After Odysseus deceives and blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus, his boastful farewell dooms him to a decade of wandering. Polyphemus, it turns out, was the son of the sea god, Poseidon, who curses Odysseus and his crew, preventing them from returning home to Ithaca.
But when Odysseus’ guardian goddess Athena pleads on his behalf to let him return home, the gods take pity on him and let him finally make his way back to Ithaca, just in time for him to slaughter the rowdy suitors destroying his home and pressuring his long-suffering wife Penelope to remarry. Though Athena has to intervene again to stop Odysseus from starting yet another bloody battle, it’s by-and-large a happy ending — or at least a triumphant one. Our hero returns home after many trials and tribulations, having learned the consequences of human hubris and of testing the patience of the gods.
But Christopher Nolan’s masterful new The Odyssey redefines the epic in a grim and wholly modern way. For Nolan’s Odysseus (Matt Damon), the first sin against the gods that he committed was not his blinding of the Cyclops, but his very famous, frequently-lauded, trick of the Trojan Horse. It turns his entire odyssey into not a punishment, but a redemption quest that, even towards the end, Odysseus is not sure has entirely absolved him of his sacrilegious crime. It’s a crucial change that shifts The Odyssey from a heroic epic into an apocalyptic one; a blistering antiwar screed that is less about “defying the gods,” as the movie’s marketing has enthusiastically claimed, but about grappling with why they have abandoned us.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Odyssey.
The Odyssey Ending Explained
Odysseus returns home — but at what cost?
From the beginning, The Odyssey hammers in the importance of “Zeus’ law,” or the ancient Greek law of hospitality. “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” one character describes. Treat even the lowliest beggar as a welcome guest, because they may be a god in disguise. It’s an ancient rule that every person understands, but that we see already being flouted. Penelope’s suitors, who fill the halls of Odysseus’ home, take advantage of this law by slaughtering all his best pigs, abusing Odysseus’ loyal dog, and mocking Odysseus’ son Telemachus for being unable to kick them out. And out in uncharted waters, rumors spread of the ruthless Sea Peoples, raiders and pirates whose growing attacks signal a breakdown in civilization as they know it.
Even Odysseus, on his travels, sees Zeus’ law turned against him — when they enter Polyphemus’ cave to sample his cheese, only to be trapped and picked off one by one; and again when Circe invites his men in for a meal and turns them into pigs. Perhaps Zeus' law was broken when Odysseus and his men pillaged the first village they arrived at after leaving Troy. Or maybe it was fundamentally broken at a moment of apparent victory.
The final act of The Odyssey unveils it all: After restoring his memory on Calypso’s island and taking the “leap of faith” by letting the waters take him, Odysseus finally washes up on the shores of Ithaca. But he arrives amidst a plot against his son Telemachus, also recently arrived from Sparta. The suitors are planning to assassinate Telemachus at Athena’s temple, which Odysseus foils after learning of the plot from his loyal and blind swineherd Eumaeus, who mistakes Odysseus for a beggar. He escorts Telemachus back to the palace, where Odysseus’ dog recognizes him, causing Telemachus to finally realize that the man before him is his father.
Still posing as a beggar, Odysseus enters the palace to observe the suitors. He later approaches Penelope in disguise, claiming to have fought alongside Odysseus. Hidden by his cloak and Penelope’s screen (which feels like a very intentional use of Catholic imagery on Nolan’s part), he makes his confession: Odysseus’ great trick of the Trojan Horse was the ultimate betrayal of Zeus’ law and was the beginning of the end for their civilization.
The Trojan Horse was not a great trick, but the ultimate breaking of Zeus’ law.
“We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that's ever sacred between people,” Odysseus described. “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home.”
As Odysseus confesses this, Nolan flashes to the sack of Troy, but without the head-thumping triumph that it was depicted with at the beginning of the film. This time, it’s a hellish massacre, with fires burning homes and temples, and women and children being slaughtered. But one woman's face would haunt Odysseus: that of a priestess of Athena, who is brought kneeling before him by his men, and is brutally beheaded as Athena’s statue is similarly desecrated. She has a face that we’ve become familiar with: that of Athena (Zendaya), who has appeared to him in visions throughout his journey.
It’s a shocking revelation that also recontextualizes the entire film before it: Had the goddess Athena actually been appearing before Odysseus, or was it just the ghost of his greatest failure, haunting him? The gods are absent throughout The Odyssey, even though Odysseus and his men run into all manner of fantastical beings and monsters. Apart from a trip to the underworld, where the blind prophet Tiresias (James Remar) warns him how his men will all perish, you could explain away the claims of Poseidon’s curse or Helios’ anger as bad luck or tragic circumstance. Maybe the gods were already starting to abandon us. Or maybe this new godless world was actually an apocalyptic hellscape of humanity’s own making.
Destroyer of Worlds
Odysseus and his men, whom Odysseus suggests accidentally became the “Sea Peoples.”
Nolan’s grimly modern interpretation of the Odyssey is in direct conversation with his last masterpiece, Oppenheimer, which suggests that the invention of the atomic bomb was the beginning of the end of the world. In The Odyssey, Nolan suggests that maybe the rot was always there to begin with — brought on by bloodshed and sacrilege. And it’s this act of sacrilege that Odysseus theorizes to Penelope will bring about the end of the Bronze Age.
Odysseus: “One man's idea. One man's trick to break Zeus's law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.”
Penelope: “You are the people from the sea.”
Odysseus: “Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus's law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't bear to see the ruins of what he'd done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.”
The introduction of the Sea Peoples into this story, which had not been a part of Homer’s Odyssey to begin with, is Nolan’s other major modernizing element. The Sea Peoples were a real part of history — a group of unidentified seafaring tribes that terrorized Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean regions around 1200 BC and were largely thought to be responsible for the Late Bronze Age collapse and the beginning of the Greek Dark Ages. For Nolan to take classic heroic myths — Troy, the Trojan Horse, and the Odyssey — and turn them into the collective dying rattle of a golden era is perhaps the boldest part of The Odyssey, and its bleakest aspect.
Diminish, and Go Into the West
The Sack of Troy takes on new meaning.
But unlike the abject hopelessness of Oppenheimer, The Odyssey ends on a somewhat hopeful note. After Odysseus wins Penelope’s challenge of stringing his bow and slaughters the suitors, he chooses to send himself into exile. His encounter with his undead soldiers taught him that the only thing he can do to redeem himself is to honor them by going west and laying their bodies to rest. Penelope, who had long ago urged him to sail away with her, joins him, while Telemachus takes the throne.
It’s another departure from Homer’s epic, in which Odysseus, who prided himself on being a great warrior and trickster, seemed never to be able to escape the battle. This Odysseus is repentant and longs for peace. As Odysseus and Penelope sail off into the sunset, the ending calls to mind J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and many of the heroes’ ultimate destination in the Undying Lands. (It’s probably no coincidence that Nolan’s Sack of Troy plays like the Scouring of the Shire, and The Odyssey’s firm antiwar stance reflects Tolkien’s own.) Has Odysseus finally redeemed himself and can begin his journey towards some kind of (interestingly Judeo-Christian-inspired) heaven? Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s just the beginning of another long odyssey.
