Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

My specific screening and the sold-out audience

As I walked into the IMAX for the preliminary screening—first screening on a Thursday, and the first public screening, I suppose, is what it could be called, Unless there were some early screenings, this constitutes the very beginning night, and the IMAX theater was completely sold out.

I had bought four tickets, though I had to go alone due to Taco Bell's diarrhea outbreak and Vacation Bible School. I think that there were maybe ten seats open in the whole thing. So it certainly would be considered 'sold out' by todays standards, when you understand that others in the theatre also likely had extra tickets. I have a feeling it is sold out across the entire country because of the marketing campaign and just the sheer engine that is Christopher Nolan’s productions.

The scale of the hype

To say that this is one of the most hyped-up movies of all time is, uh, probably an understatement. Truth be told, I mean, I look at movies like Schindler’s List or Titanic as some of the big, big names. It’s more these movies about things that are, uh, in the psyche of Western modern culture. Things like Titanic are just a story that we know, and then modern storytellers can re-mix the narrative to fit a broader, modern audience. This isn't always good, but more on that later.

Expectations, cultural portrayal, and the action

Going into The Odyssey, I think that most people expected, with the casting of Elliot Page, the movie to incorporate what is often classified as “woke ideologies.” And I have to tell you, that’s just absolutely unfounded and completely untrue. The movie is legitimately one of the most based movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life, meaning that the narratives and portrayals are for the most part of traditional Grecian life in the highest order.

It describes Greek and Roman culture in a way that I’ve never seen done on screen. It has the best fight scenes since 300, and he blows Zack Snyder away when it comes to the fight scenes. It’s just—300 looks like a comic book. This looks like you’re—it’s like you’re in 300 A.D., or whenever it’s supposed to take place, right? Absolutely incredible stuff across the board.

Nolan’s nonlinear structure

In The Odyssey, we’re faced with an out-of-order narrative story, which is what Nolan has just absolutely become a master at. This begins with Memento, which is a story told in a completely, narratively wrong order. We then begin to see him mess around with things like this in his last three or four movies, where you just see cuts out of sequence, and it’s sort of up to the audience to make sense of the entirety of the narrative.

But the writing is so impeccable, which is based off Homer’s epic work, so that’s to be expected. And it has the entirety of Hollywood behind it, so, you know, we always hope that these sort of things get a good adaptation.

The Cyclops and the Nephilim interpretation

While I agree there are some interpretive differences from the epic, I think for the most part they portrayed the narrative well for a modern audience while maintaining most of the core conflict. To me, the most groundbreaking part of the entire movie is that it shows a Nephilim. It actually shows multiple types of Nephilim, one being the Cyclops, and the Cyclops is called the son of Poseidon.

So, at a time when everyone is talking about Enochian lore and what the Nephilim are, you can see very, very early, uh, the giants, right? I’m telling you, these creatures: The Cyclops, as it is depicted, is just a thing of shame, right? It’s a creature that has no purpose other than to eat, sleep, and destroy. And because he has no true purpose, he just eats and eats in which his human side becomes severely depressed.

And because it’s a conscious creature, because it has this, like, human quality. It’s only choice is to be absolutely miserable for the entirety of his existence. Instead of parody, Nolan goes for a more frightening encounter, and it's quite worth going to an iMax theatre during the run to see.

The sacrificial cave and other creatures

Additionally, what we see Odysseus stumble upon, too, is a sacrificial cave that feeds the Cyclops—i.e., the son of a god, i.e., the son of an angel, or an angel-human hybrid, meaning angel-human hybrid. This entire side-bred line is noted as men of renown in Scripture.

The depictions of the Cyclops and then the spider creature—and then there might be a couple of other Nephilim examples—but it’s worth going to see those depictions alone.

The Cyclops is a giant. And so, when you read “giant” in your Scripture, Bible book, or in any of your occult literature, this is what a giant acts like in some sense. It’s great to have in your mind, overall, because these creatures were seen as HIGHLY destructive and eventually they become horrid monstrosities.

Hades and the fallen soldiers

The second thing that they show that is kind of a scriptural thing is Hades, which is described in the New Testament. And Hades, in the depiction of Nolan, is an island. And on the island, a sacrifice is made, and then the dead come and partake of a sacrifice in order to have a moment of reprieve or, I guess, their consciousness back, is essentially how the writers are framing it all.

And you really see the blame that’s placed on Odysseus by his fallen soldiers. And at this point in the story, we start to see this conflict: it appears that Odysseus doesn’t want to go home. And the character drama intertwined with all of that is just fantastic.

Performances

Multiple great actors. There are performances that can absolutely blow it out of the water. Anne Hathaway, who remains one of my favorite actresses of all time—I think she’s absolutely perfect in everything that she’s in—Anne Hathaway blows it away as the queen.

And my boy Spider-Man does a pretty good job as baby Odysseus.

Matt Damon as Odysseus - I am not certain if he will win an award for this, but he does some insanely cool fight scenes, and I can't imagine this movie without him being the lead. In my opinion, this is a a similar phenomena as Chris Pratt in everything he touches.

Landscapes and cinematography

There are landscapes filmed of Greek and Roman culture that are just beautiful. The cinematography is out of this world. I could talk more about this in specifics, but that would probably need to be its own sort of analysis. This serves as a review, and so what I would like to do is end this review by saying two things. You should go to the iMax screening mainly for some of these backing scenes. Beautiful, beautiful film imagery.

Odysseus as a theological metaphor

The point made at the end of the movie is absolutely wildly compelling at this juncture. And, in addition, the metaphor of Odysseus is almost exactly similar to Tolkien’s Return of the King metaphor, which was about the rapture—not meaning the taking away of saints as believed by John Darby, but of the return of the leader of the our theocracy, right? Jesus returning. That was how most of these guys used that metaphor.

So I think, for Christian viewers, that they will see Odysseus as this figure that toppled the structure of the gods. That’s ultimately what Christ came and did. But don’t get too hung up on that, this is not a Christian film. There is, however, no nudity, no language, and it's one of the most frighteningly violent (not in a gory way) movies I have ever seen. Hard to describe without it being seen, but the Witch (similar to the Witch of Endor) scene may turn some viewers off.

Rebellion, Subterfuge, and the Cost of Victory

Rebellion against the order of things

The narrative ultimately is that when men rebel against gods, society can be destroyed. And I don’t mean that in the simple sense of, you know, Zeus gets mad, lightning bolt comes down, everybody dies. It’s more complicated than that. What the movie seems to be saying is that there is an order to the world—political order, spiritual order, military order, the order between a king and his men, between a husband and his wife, between human beings and whatever powers govern the sea—and Odysseus is constantly testing that order.

Sometimes he tests it because he has to. Sometimes he does it because he’s clever. And sometimes, if we’re being honest, he does it because he believes his cleverness has put him above the consequences that ordinary men have to live under.

That’s the dangerous thing about Odysseus. His intelligence saves everybody, but his intelligence also creates the next disaster. The same mind that gets him out of one impossible situation is often the mind that puts him into another one. He wins, he speaks, he boasts, he reveals himself, and then the cost of the victory begins to expand.

And that’s not just a story about an ancient king. That is a story about civilization. You break an order because the order is preventing you from winning, but once you demonstrate that the order can be broken, everybody else learns the same lesson.

Subterfuge does not end with the first victory

You can go against the order of things and use subterfuge to take out your enemies in ways that ultimately will then be copied by everyone else.

That’s the problem.

Everybody remembers the Trojan horse as this great act of cleverness, right? It’s one of the most famous military deceptions in all of human storytelling. You build the horse. You make the enemy believe the war is over. You allow them to carry the weapon through their own gates. Then, in the middle of the night, the soldiers come out and destroy the city from the inside.

And from the standpoint of Odysseus and the Greeks, it is brilliant. It ends the war. It accomplishes what ten years of direct combat could not accomplish. It saves the Greeks from continuing to throw men against the walls of Troy.

But there is another side to it. The Trojan horse destroys more than Troy. It destroys the assumption that surrender means surrender, that a gift is a gift, that an abandoned battlefield is actually abandoned, and that the walls of a city separate the war outside from the people inside.

After the horse, the protected space is no longer protected. The enemy can now be anywhere. The weapon can now look like a gift. Peace itself can be camouflage.

That’s a gigantic change in the psychology of warfare.

The Trojan horse as a strategic threshold

Not to get sidetracked, but the nuclear taboo is very similar to what we see here with the Trojan horse narrative.

I don’t mean that a wooden horse and a nuclear bomb are physically the same thing. Obviously they’re not. I’m talking about the threshold. I’m talking about the moment when somebody invents a way to win that permanently changes what victory means.

Before the Trojan horse, the question is whether you can breach the wall. After the Trojan horse, the question is whether you can trust anything that comes through the gate.

Before the atomic bomb, the question is how many planes, soldiers, ships, and artillery pieces are required to destroy a city. After the atomic bomb, one weapon can do what once required an entire campaign. The scale changes. The speed changes. The moral calculation changes. And once the weapon exists, it cannot be uninvented.

That is what makes the comparison interesting. Both are victories achieved through an innovation that does not remain confined to the original conflict. The innovation becomes knowledge, and knowledge travels.

The Greeks do not merely defeat Troy. They teach the future how Troy can be defeated.

Nolan’s recurring interest in weapons that alter the world

It’s interesting that Nolan does two movies back-to-back about changes in combat style that lead to drastic changes in the world.

In Oppenheimer, the decisive innovation is technological. Human beings discover a method of releasing enough energy to place entire populations under the threat of instant destruction. The bomb does not merely end one war. It reorganizes international politics around the possibility that the next war could end civilization.

Here, the decisive innovation is strategic. Odysseus turns trust into a vulnerability. He turns the enemy’s own judgment into the mechanism of their destruction. He does not overpower the walls. He persuades the Trojans to make the walls irrelevant.

Those are two different kinds of weapons, but they produce the same kind of historical break. There is the world before the weapon, and then there is the world after it.

Maybe Nolan will find a third one. I don’t even think I could think of the perfect example off the top of my head while I’m driving. Maybe it would be artificial intelligence. Maybe biological warfare. Maybe cyberwar, where you don’t destroy the city—you destroy the information that allows the city to function. Something where the invention itself changes not only who wins, but what every future conflict is going to look like.

Because that seems to be the thing Nolan is fascinated by: not merely the man who creates the weapon, but the man who realizes too late that the weapon has created a new world.

The inventor becomes subject to the invention

Odysseus believes he can control subterfuge because he is the master of it. But once deception becomes the law of the world, he has to return home through a world governed by deception.

And that is where the story becomes almost perfectly circular.

He destroys a city by entering it in disguise. Then he eventually has to enter his own kingdom in disguise.

He wins by making the enemy misunderstand what they are seeing. Then he comes home and discovers that nobody can immediately recognize what he has become.

He uses concealment to destroy another man’s house, and later he needs concealment to reclaim his own.

That is not accidental. That is the consequence returning to the inventor.

The method Odysseus uses to win the war becomes the method he must use to survive the peace. He brings the logic of war home with him because, after twenty years, he does not know how to exist without it.

The gravitas of victory

What Odysseus reckons with at the end is the gravitas of victory.

Victory at all costs is sometimes not victory at all, because what you lose is greater than what you could ever hope to gain from winning.

Odysseus wins the Trojan War. His name becomes immortal. He becomes the architect of the idea that finally brings Troy down. Songs will be sung about him. Kings will know what he did. Generations of people will use his name as a synonym for intelligence, endurance, strategy, and cunning.

But he misses the life that all of those accomplishments were supposedly meant to protect.

That is the exchange.

He receives historical immortality, but he loses ordinary time.

He becomes a legend to the world while becoming a stranger to his own household.

And I think that is what gives the ending its real weight.

It would have been very easy to make the return home into a simple victory lap. The king is back. The enemies are dead. The queen is restored. The son has his father. Order returns.

But the movie appears to understand that restoration is not reversal. Odysseus can reclaim the throne. He cannot reclaim the years.

Time is the casualty that cannot be avenged

With Odysseus, he dwells on the time lost more than even the men lost.

And that initially sounds strange because the dead men are obviously the greater tragedy. These are human lives. These are people who followed him, trusted him, fought beside him, and in many cases died because of decisions that he made.

But the dead become part of the story that he tells himself about the war. They become guilt. They become ghosts. They become accusations. And still, the thing he appears almost incapable of accepting is that time continued without him.

His son grew up.

His wife aged.

His father declined.

His kingdom changed.

The people who waited for him were forced to construct entire lives around his absence.

And there is no enemy Odysseus can kill to get those years back. There is no final act of cunning that restores the childhood of his son. There is no monster whose death returns him to the man he was before the ships left for Troy.

That is the one opponent he cannot outsmart.

Time does not care how clever Odysseus is.

The difference between justice and restoration

This is how most of us are. We lose people who are dear to us, and our souls, man, often just cry out for justice for the things that happen to us.

We want somebody to pay. We want the scales balanced. We want the person who took something from us to experience an equal loss. And there are situations where justice is absolutely necessary. Evil cannot simply be ignored. A kingdom cannot survive if betrayal and murder are treated as harmless misunderstandings.

But justice and restoration are not the same thing.

Justice can punish the men who invaded Odysseus’s house. It cannot give him back the evenings he never spent there.

Justice can restore the crown. It cannot restore the young family that existed before the war.

Justice can identify who was right and who was wrong. It cannot erase the consequences of what happened.

And that is where mercy and grace enter the picture—not as weak substitutes for justice, but as answers to a problem justice alone cannot solve. Justice can tell you what is owed. Mercy can interrupt the endless collection of the debt. Grace can create something after the original thing has been destroyed.

These are the things Christian culture has since come and taught, or at least attempted to teach when it is functioning properly. You cannot punish history until it gives you your life back. At some point, there has to be resurrection. There has to be forgiveness. There has to be the creation of a future that is not merely an extension of the injury.

The final question of Odysseus

So the final question is not simply whether Odysseus can defeat the men occupying his house. Of course he can. This is Odysseus. Once he understands the battlefield, those men are finished.

The real question is whether he can stop being the man the war required him to become.

Can he live without another enemy?

Can he return to his wife without treating love like a strategy?

Can he speak to his son as a father rather than a commander?

Can he accept that coming home does not mean going backward?

Because the Trojan horse solved the problem of Troy, but it created another problem inside Odysseus. It taught him that there is always another angle, always another disguise, always another way to turn another person’s expectations against them.

That mentality can conquer a city.

It cannot necessarily sustain a home.

And that, I think, is the real gravitas of the victory. Odysseus has defeated Troy, the sea, monsters, rivals, and death itself in a certain symbolic sense. But at the end of all of it, he still has to confront the one thing no warrior can conquer:

The life that happened while he was away. How much time costs us all. How the greatest things in our life are often lost early, never to be able to be recovered, no matter how hard we try.

Online reactions to the casting

I will leave you with a final takeaway, and that is that all over Twitter, and I’m certain all over all other social-media pages, there have been a lot of, like, mocking things of two things in particular.

The first is Elliot Page, who is a transgender actor. A lot of clips are surfacing of this actor. I don’t think that the use of Elliot Page in the movie is that distracting. And, in fact, if I had a balanced take on all of this, the fact that the trans character is sacrificed at the very beginning of the movie is almost like a troll regarding the Hollywood elite. Nolan may be on our side after all.

Helen of Troy

Helen of Troy being—I think it’s Helen of Troy—being played by, like, an African American actress or whatever. Okay, I don’t know. I thought she did a good job. And, uh, I don’t know. I just didn’t really understand the issue behind that one, but I do—I get it. I do understand. People think the culture is being stolen.

And I don’t know. I have to look up pictures of Helen of Troy, and me is a stupid, stupid dumbbell American with a dropout degree. You know, I never got to that part of, uh, whatever class would have taught me about the epic that led to this movie. And so now, I think Helen of Troy was Black. Christopher Nolan. Christopher Nolan shame on you.

You know, in a hundred years, like, all the history books change the race of some of these people based on movies. I don’t know. I think the history books are so messed up at this point that it’s a little bit silly, so please, tell them I was something other than I was if you're writing the history books in the future, I'll get a big laugh about that.

Closing assessment

Overall, Nolan has done a great job of interpreting a great myth, and he incorporates so many other just deeply, deeply deeply moving sequences. There are multiple plot points that all resolve in the writing, and just reading a transcript of the movie would likely be a wonderous experience.