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Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of The Odyssey isn’t out in theaters til Friday, but it’s already the film that launched a thousand tweets. For months, conservatives like Elon Musk have been having racist tantrums about Nolan’s decision to cast Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. They’re also in a transphobic tizzy about Nolan casting Inception star Elliot Page as a Greek soldier. But angry as they were about a rumor that Page would play Achilles, the mythic hero with a bum heel, they’re going to be furious about his actual role in the film—assuming they see it at all. They’re not going to like the greater message of Nolan’s Odyssey, either.
That’s because the first person we see in The Odyssey isn’t Matt Damon’s Odysseus, the epic poem’s titular sojourner—a brilliant strategist and king whose 10-year trip home from the Trojan War forms the spine of the story. It’s not Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, his long-suffering queen, or Tom Holland’s Telemachus, his long-fatherless son. It’s not misandrist enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton), sexy enchantress Calypso (Charlize Theron), or gray-eyed Athena (Zendaya), goddess of wisdom and Odysseus’s celestial champion.
The film opens, instead, on Page’s character: an infantryman named Sinon, a figure based in mythology who doesn’t actually appear in Homer’s Odyssey. (Musk and co. are going to love that.) Sinon is the poor bastard responsible for telling the Trojans about the giant wooden horse that the Greeks have left behind: a horse the Greeks would simply love Troy to have as a gift, Sinon says. The Trojans kill the messenger, then haul the horse past their walled city’s impenetrable gates. You can guess what will happen next.
Yet Nolan, a filmmaker who never met a complicated timeline he didn’t love, doesn’t actually show us the resulting carnage right away. After this prologue, he moves the action instead to Ithaca: Odysseus’s seaside homeland, which has devolved into a hive of scum and villainy in the 20 years since its king first set sail for Troy.
The polytheistic Greeks abide by a strict code of hospitality, which The Odyssey calls Zeus’s Law. As the film rather didactically explains, they’re obligated to treat strangers well because for all they know, those strangers could be gods in disguise. Ithaca’s extraordinary circumstances have turned this religious duty into an albatross: Because she can’t break Zeus’s Law, Odysseus’s wife Penelope must indefinitely host the ill-mannered suitors who have flooded her home, each of whom hopes to marry her now that Odysseus seems to be gone for good. (The standout of the group is Antinous, a smarmy SOB played to villainous perfection by Robert Pattinson.)
Penelope can’t rule the kingdom alone, due to the ancient laws of misogyny. Telemachus can’t officially take over as long as Odysseus may still be alive out there somewhere. And Ithaca isn’t the only chiefdom that’s gone to seed following the war.
Telemachus learns from another king, Trojan War–vet Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), that there’s unrest among his subjects as well. In the wake of the conflict, Sparta’s citizens have become consumed with fear about unspecified “people from the sea” invading their country and destroying their way of life. The people of Ithaca, too, have heard that the “people from the sea” are coming.
We don’t hear Spartans or Ithacans openly stressing about immigrants stealing their jobs and eating their dogs—but it’s not hard to draw a direct line between their xenophobia and the well-documented, real-world conspiratorial anxieties of people like Musk.
It’s ridiculous for the anti-woke contingent to complain about the Odyssey not being “historically accurate;” this is a story about gods and monsters and gorgeous women who hatched out of eggs. The “people from the sea” throughline does, however, seem like a direct reference to hateful rhetoric from the real world—spoken by people who consider themselves to be the guardians of Western civilization, the true inheritors of Homer and his ilk. The rest of the film makes very clear what Nolan thinks of such incivility, primarily through its depiction of Odysseus himself.
The Odysseus of legend is known for his cunning and his eloquence. He’s clever to a fault and a bit of a scoundrel; the Trojan Horse was his idea. But in Nolan’s hands, and Damon’s, the character is no glib trickster. This Odysseus is world-weary and weather-beaten, a man who seems to feel the weight of every minute of the two decades he’s spent away from home: 10 at war, 10 trying to return.
What’s more, he has a conscience. One of the film’s most effective moments comes when Odysseus journeys to the literal ends of the earth, where it’s possible to commune with the dead. He’s hoping to connect with the departed soul of Tiresias, a powerful prophet who might finally be able to tell him the way home. (It’s not mentioned in the movie, but the Tiresias of myth was also gender fluid, living as both a man and a woman at different points. Just a detail certain parties might appreciate!)
When Odysseus summons the dead, though, he’s also confronted by someone else: Sinon, the soldier he left to be slaughtered by the Trojans after convincing them to bring the horse into their city. The ghost of poor, loyal Sinon excoriates his commander. Odysseus couldn’t give him a proper burial, he says—a big no-no for these guys—and didn’t even tell him the truth about the horse: that it was filled with Greece’s best soldiers. On a moonless night, that Alpha team crept silently from the statue’s belly and wrenched open the gates of Troy, decisively ending the war in their favor.
Nolan obviously has a keen eye for action. When we finally do see the fall of Troy, it’s appropriately spectacular and visceral: flashing weapons, spurting blood, swirling sweat and sand and swords and sandals. But the slaughter is not painted as an unmitigated triumph for the Greeks.
Throughout the movie, Odysseus is tortured by flashbacks to that attack’s barbarism and chaos. In his memory, he keeps flicking his eyes back to his horrific horse: a false peace offering, a gift that concealed a nightmare. Odysseus’s guilt is palpable, practically a character in its own right. When his ship sails past the famously alluring Sirens, their song isn’t merely seductive: it tortures Odysseus by forcing him to confront his true nature, to consider his deepest faults and failures.
With time, Odysseus and the audience both realize that he is the one who irrevocably broke Zeus’s law. By building and deploying the horse, he’s responsible for the schism that has rippled across the ancient world, destroying old notions of propriety and decency. To put it in terms a Nolan fan might appreciate: Odysseus is Oppenheimer. The Trojan Horse is the atomic bomb.
It might sound heavy-handed—preachy, even—when you boil the movie down to this thesis. But the craziest thing about The Odyssey is that Nolan’s interpretation absolutely sticks the landing, adding an unexpected dimension to one of our culture’s most told and retold sagas. This is a film stuffed with bravura set pieces and awesome effects; it’s also mature and thoughtful, a character study disguised as a blockbuster.
A mythic hero traumatized by his own actions? A lush, entertaining film that both adapts and deconstructs one of Western civilization’s foundational texts? A trans actor cast as the story’s most noble character, someone whose killing winds up being the film’s original sin? All woven together by a master storyteller the right would love and have tried to claim for themselves?
The Bronze Age Perverts of the world are going to hate this. But if they really engaged with Nolan’s Odyssey, they just might learn something from it.
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