I will talk about the movie in this essay. This is going to connect to Christopher Nolan's new movie The Odyssey... eventually. However, we have a bummer of an opening first, then historical/philosophical context to get through. Maybe step out now if you're having a good day, I don't want to spoil that. If you just want to know about how cool the ocean looked in IMAX or if the cyclops was awesome, I'll write that review at the end of year when I'm doing my Top 15. First I have some other stuff to talk about.
In the poem and movie, it takes Odysseus ten years to come home from the east after destroying Troy in Homer's epic. He was the military genius who made possible the sacking of city that included the rape of innocent women, the murder of babies, the annihilation of a nation from history forever. The gods are punishing Odysseus. They are also granting him and his island kingdom, Ithica, a kind of mercy. Thousands of years later, outside the world of myths and gods, we live in the United States, in the general European "West". We still go east, and we still destroy. But no gods will be merciful to us.
On February 28th, 2026, the US military fired a missile into the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran just next to the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex. The attack was ordered by sloppy leaders based on faulty intelligence, just one of the many miscalculations in a war that was based on complete fantasies. There was no coup d'état, no quick victory, no easy way out of the conflict, and nobody wanted this*. Our government just did it on a whim, erupting a quagmire of confusion and incompetence that has lasted months and destroyed the freedom of global trade. In a way though, commerce and politics feel trite compared to the human impact of this one act. It feels disgusting to worry about gas prices when you consider the infinitely larger cost to the families in Iran. We do not yet know whether this particular attack was an accident or an intentional act of terror. Intentions matter a lot less when you look at these kinds of consequences. The missile collided with the structure, exploding instantly, causing the roof of the school to collapse sometime around 10:30 AM, only minutes after the American-Israeli joint attack on Iran began. They were hit before there was any hope of evacuation. 156 civilians were murdered. The estimate now is that 120 of them were little girls guilty of nothing more than sitting in a classroom.
We may never know the name of the operator who fired the missile, this soldier, agent, or contractor, just somebody who pressed a button. The person who fired that missile was probably sitting at a desk behind a computer in a room full of coworkers on a base. They took illegal orders from criminal officers, on the direction of a criminal civilian government, and pressed a button. On their screen, a little dot connected with some structure, followed by a flash, and that was as close as they ever got to their victims continents away. It was just another task in probably a very busy, very stressful day of many more buttons being pressed. Maybe they have reasonable deniability that it was their button and their missile that killed 156 people, 120 little girls.
I'm going to engage in some fiction writing to imagine who this person is, because we'll never have the truth, let alone justice. I imagine they were here in the US as they worked. Some minutes or hours later, this button-presser's shift ended and they left the room. I imagine they just clocked out, said goodbye to their exhausted coworkers, got in a car, and drove outside the military checkpoints, putting the war behind them. It is that easy to go from killing hundreds to going back home now. They drove on an American highway next to a thousand strangers in their own cars, no monsters, no adventures, just making a final turn on some regular street, down a perfectly mundane neighborhood, to return to their home and family. I bet they smiled as they were greeted at the door. Their dog welcomed them, their children told them of their day at school, they had a meal, and their spouse shared their bed.
That's how easy it is to welcome that much evil back home. That button-presser, that family, that nation, that culture, will never wash the sin away. You may think there are no consequences because things appear so normal, but you could never imagine the psychic horror that is seeping out of this house. This is the most haunted place in the world, we should bury it in a sarcophagus of concrete for 10,000 years to seal away the radiation. We won't, and that moral pollution is spreading to all of us. One day every single one of us will have to explain why we killed those 156 people, 120 little girls. I have excuses, but I've been here long enough, breathing in this air, drinking this water, these are my countrymen, and I'm guilty too.
Nobody will write an epic about this button-presser's journey, or direct a blockbuster about it. It is an awful story with no ending.
The Odyssey is one of the great classics, one of the foundations of Greek and therefore, Western civilization. It along with the Iliad, are two immensely important works, that for the sake of simplicity, I'll just agree to believe were written by a blind poet named Homer around 700 BC. They are two parts of a greater Epic Cycle, most of which has been lost, about the mythological Achaean (Greek) vs Trojan War and its aftermath, set at the end of the Bronze Age around 1100 BC. This was ancient even to the ancients. These were not just great stories, they were considered central to Hellenistic culture, the cornerstone of written language, teaching, and philosophy. People have been studying them and searching for greater meaning since before the Bible was finished.
It is notable which parts of this war story were saved: not the capture of Helen, not beginning of the war, not the sacking of Troy, not the death of Achilles, the great warrior and star of the Iliad, or the death of Paris, the Trojan who started all this, or the fate the Agamemnon, the Greek leader. The Greeks felt the Iliad and the Odyssey were special. The other parts of the Troy story were mediocre or derivative, which might be why nobody bothered to preserve them. The awesome power of their ancestors and their victory over foreigners were not the stories the Greeks cared about.
Instead, the surviving poems put the Greeks in a fairly poor light. The Iliad is about Achilles' cycle of grief and revenge. This is somebody who willingly chose his fate of a young death to be immortal in history, thinking it would because he would win incredible battle. Instead he is immortal because he was a proud little brat whose petulance nearly ruins the Greek cause and gets his boyfriend Patroclus killed. Then Achilles goes off, finds the mightiest Trojan warrior, the good family man, Hector, his better in every way, and murders him, abusing the body afterwards. The cycle of revenge and hatred continue until King Prium of Troy appears at Achilles' tent, reveals his own sorrow and mourning, and Achilles allows his enemy to bury his dead. There's great battles and gods, at one point Diomedes fights off a good chunk of the Olympic pantheon. But he doesn't have an epic. Achilles does, this shitbag who is going to die before this war is over, without ever seeing the inside of Troy. Because Achilles has an arc and learns to recognize humanity in his enemies.
It is interesting that Odysseus of all guys in this war ends up the star of a sequel. Achilles is the greatest of all the heroes and is super hot, so obviously he's getting an epic. But why Odysseus versus say, Agamemnon or Ajax or that other Ajax? If you remember the story, Odysseus also kinda sucks. His claim to fame is not even in a surviving epic - we lost this part too. Odysseus conquers Troy through treachery and deceit, not manfully while driving a war chariot but within a false wooden horse. This is not the immortality of deeds that a hero like Achilles wanted to die for. Odysseus betrays the rules of war, in a false offer to the gods, and sacks a city.
The gods, even as divided as they were during this epic, unify together to make sure the Greek return is not easy. There is no empire and glory waiting for them, just ruin. A kind of lesson for those who would imagine conquest is an easy path to profit, nations do not win wars. Some heroes drown in the wine-dark sea, some are murdered by their wives. Odysseus uniquely is punished by being made the star of his own story. He loses his entire army, all his treasure, sees his kingdom taken over by greedy suitors who nearly cuckhold him from his queen, and he returns home a beggar, forced to fight one more battle to retake his throne.
On one level, the Odyssey rules because there's a cyclops and guys turn into pigs and all these places with fantastic things. But there's always been something very weird about the Odyssey. It feels unfocused, shaggy. There is the in medias res story-telling conceit (maybe why a director like Christopher Nolan wanted to do this), which means we jump all over the place in time, much of it narrated by the eponymous Mr. Odyssey himself. The Odyssey is broken up between Odysseus' wanderings and the journey of his son Telemachus. Telemachus' mini-epic has been theorized by scholars to maybe have been a separate work bolted onto this one. Some people say the last book of the 24 parts does not belong with the rest of it. There's two more chapters of coda of bizarre romantic comedy with all of Odysseus' various children and wives, which have been lost. The big adventure part of the epic ends in book 13, with half the narrative still to go. Odysseus seemingly does everything he can to not simply retake the throne, like Hamlet delaying murdering Claudius. Until finally we end on a massacre of the suitors. Only one man makes it home from the war, and the war comes with him.
Personally, I'm all about the esoteric reading of the Odyssey. Odysseus is not just going home, this is the journey of his soul. Each episode in Odysseus's wild travels are not just weird for weirdness's sake. Each island is about shedding a broken part of this king and restoring a part of his humanity. This is not a new interpretation, it is thousands of years old. The Stoics were all about this, turning the gods into metaphors for forces of nature. The Neoplatonist scholar Porphyry believed the poem had allegorical elements, this is rejecting the empty pleasures of the physical realm while acquiring wisdom and spiritual rebirth, the soul ascending to higher planes of knowledge. Even without going all dualism here, this is a story of Odysseus' destruction and restoration.
Odysseus blinds the terrible cyclops and in so doing, makes himself blind, having no idea how to get home through mysterious seas that make no sense on any map. There is gluttony that transforms you into pigs or magic flowers that allow you to forget your past. There's the Sirens that offer false self-destructive knowledge that you must ignore. Odysseus will travel to the underworld to find his way back. And he is effectively dead at this point. What is death but the loss of all connections to the world: your glory, your army, even your mind? Odysseus' family mourns him, he is but a memory when he lands back in Ithica. Now just a wretch in rags he build himself anew with the memories of home: the love of a dog who has waited for him, the familiar touch of a maid who cares for his body, the loyalty of old servants. Slowly, he works himself up to the heights of manhood (these are the ancient Greeks, so it will be gendered): the status of a father, the strength of a warrior, the office of king, and at the very last and perhaps height of humanity, husband and lover. Every part of the ascent must be earned for a man as terrible as Odysseus, and only then, can he be forgiven.
Let me finally talk about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, where Odysseus is now Matt Damon, the accents are American English, and we've traded in verse for IMAX cameras. Since I put so much trouble into this essay, you can probably guess that I think this movie is really really good. Nolan had to be attracted to his story for a number of reasons, and I believe primarily it was the spectacle of giant wooden horses and adventure and spooky armored dudes. I don't think he's ever read any Platonism, Neo or otherwise. But he recognized something in this story that has survived the downfall of its civilization and its religion.
Let's remember Nolan's most recent film, Oppenheimer, which yes, was an excuse to pull off a huge explosion in the desert and catch that on camera, and also make a dry historical epic with verve and energy as a flex to prove he could do it. However, Oppenheimer mainly is about the guilt of the father of the atomic bomb. That movie ends on a grim statement that the world will be destroyed, that we cannot stop the inevitable march towards a fire that will consume the entire planet. Meanwhile, here in The Odyssey: The Movie, Nolan has incorporated some history he's read about the end of the Bronze Age, the coming of the Sea Peoples. Nolan's Odysseus is another genius who has destroyed his world, betraying his faith, and soon the Minoan Greece will fall, a darkness that will last for centuries... until, so the Greeks believed, a blind poet named Homer wrote two stories that brought light back into their world.
But all that is a little undercooked as an idea. We never see these Sea Peoples in this movie, nobody mentions the Hittite Empire falling or anything, and Nolan did not use Universal's checkbook to decipher Linear A. I imagine some audiences didn't get the reference to the Bronze Age Collapse at all. But what they did get was the burden of guilt, and this a movie all about burdens.
There are two ghosts haunting Odysseus. First there is Zendaya as the goddess Athena. It was exciting for me to see how Nolan would handle the gods in his version. Nolan is not very spiritual, he's a very literal guy whose passion in filmmaking is capturing real things in camera. Even the realm of dreams in Christopher Nolan's imagination is one with very exact timing and stable rules. Inception is not exactly Jodorowsky or anything. In Homer, there is no question of the gods being real. You can even stab them if you're Diomedes. Modernity doesn't have gods, not even the abstract ones of the Stroics, and realist filmmaking is definitely going to struggle here. Wolfgang Peterson's Troy from twenty years ago, the Brad Pitt one, would not allow such nonsense as magic or gods interfering with the, severe scare quotes, "historical" adaptation. Well, Nolan is a bit of a Stoic himself, his gods will be a metaphor.
Zendaya's Athena is revealed in the final act to be not a guide but a weight. We see the beheading of a statue of Athena in Troy multiple times in Odysseus' memories during the sacking. Yet only in the final flashback do we see that this memory is a replacement for a war crime. We now see the complete picture, with one of his men chopping off the head of a young priestess, also played by Zendaya. It is ambiguous here, maybe Athena is dead for good and Odysseus has killed the gods, or maybe there never were Olympians at all. We don't get a universe as simple as one where fates are decided and stories are written out for us. Remember, this is an ancient story but in American accents for a reason. This Odyssey isn't for Spartan audiences, unless you live in Sparta Township, NJ. Odysseus can only punish himself. Athena asks Odysseus why he cannot go home. And she is the answer to her own question.
The other ghost is that of Sinon (Elliot Page), a character who is not even in the Odyssey. This figure is imported from the Aeneid, a Roman epic that I know a lot less about, a Greek soldier who tricked the Trojans. In Nolan's take, Sinon is Odysseus' most loyal soldier, who only is in Troy thanks to the cowardice of a richer boy, Antinous (a wonderfully slimy Robert Pattinson), now the chief suitor. You can see some Hollywood neatness in the script here. Sinon knew nothing of the plan, and the movie opens with his death by Trojan spears, selling the con. Odysseus meets Sinon again in Hades, and must suffer the wrath of a betrayed underling. Sinon's ghost is not with Odysseus in Ithica, rather Odysseus takes on their name as part of his disguise. He again, cannot let go of his past and his ghosts.
Both ghosts are Odysseus' chief victims, Athena is the Trojan civilians, Sinon is all the men who died under Odysseus' failures as a leader. Until Odysseus can honor their memories through piety or bloody revenge, he cannot be a king, a father, or even a man who can use the name "Odysseus" again.
It would be great if the world were well-ordered and people who sacked cities were punished by ten years of reflection. If you press a button to kill 156 people, 120 little girls, what storm will stop you from getting home? Ithica only welcomed back one soldier and a massacre followed. Meanwhile, everybody who created this war has never left at all. Everybody who created the last wars that Christopher Nolan had in mind when making this movie never left either. Not even one giant whirlpool got in their way of home. Ithica was lucky, we are completely fucked. We are just not interested in becoming ourselves again. The work is too hard, and anyway, thinking about it is un-profitable. The AI will give us the wisdom we need.
We do not have Sea Peoples coming to punish us for what we've done, what we allowed to happen, what we will continue to allow to happen. Such a reaction is inevitable one way or another. The aftershocks of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged us deeper and deeper into darkness, and here comes another one. Christopher Nolan is not warning us of the end of the Age of Bronze, he's warning us of the end of this Age of Plastic and Circuits. Between Oppenheimer and The Odyssey, he seems to think it is already too late. And I'm not sure we deserve better.
What would Homer think? If this is what 3,000 years of philosophy, writing, and faith could create then what was it all for? All we have are schools full of the dead while our leaders party on global TV, smirking as the confetti fills the skies, without fear of punishment for any of their crimes. It could not be a more miserable state of affairs. If 156 murdered people, 120 murdered little girls, is what the West is, it was never worthy of his teachings. Homer might as well have not bothered singing at all.
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* I'm bringing back footnotes for this one. Have not done that in years, but I feel it is necessary. Let me be clear: This is not an invitation to debate. I'm not asking for your opinion as to why you like this war if you do.
The American people, to their credit, never wanted a war like this, and still want it to end. Part of Trump's appeal, as twisted and hate-filled as his entire movement has been, came with the rare positive that he was, so he claimed, the dove to Democratic hawks. That was a lie, he lied to you. If you voted for him, you have your excuse to turn away now. The American people emphatically Do Not Want This. But we elected political machines that have decided to insulate themselves against all popular opinion and choose to believe all criticisms are false conspiracies against them. Thus, nothing you say will ever matter to them.
If you support this war, your opinion matters to your leaders as much as mine does. And you are in a shrinking minority. I don't care what you tell yourself to make you believe your politicians are innocent. I don't care if you don't believe the attack happened, or if there's some elaborate formulation showing that Iran was in fact guilty. Don't quote me some history or some massacre that means the moral balance is somehow righted. The ends do not justify the means, and the ends haven't worked out anyway. This war is an embarrassing disaster. It is a complete failure agnostic of moral grounds, even accepting such a psychopathic perspective for the sake of argument. On moral grounds there are no words.
And do not simply reveal your naked evil and prejudices and be proud about it. If that's what you are, then please, bullshit me, I beg you to bullshit me instead. Bullshit yourself too, never be honest. Maybe in your lies you'll find a way back to humanity. Maybe.
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