SPOILERS AHEAD

![[Auramemnon.webp]]

[figcaption: Agamemnon AKA Auramemnon]

*Eurylochus: What was the song of the sirens like?

Odysseus: All the things you wanted to be and then all the things you wished you never wished for. It was a delicious itch you want to scratch but you find it under the skin and can’t reach it.

So the delicious itch becomes unbearable.

It told you what you most want is what you most can’t have and that the most you can’t have is what you already had and lost. It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep.

And it told me I don’t really want to go home.*

Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, tells a simple story: Odysseus tries to get home.

Along the way, he goes through various trials and tribulations and is influenced by the gods. At the same time, his son, Telemachus, and his wife, Penelope, try to maintain control of the throne of his island, Ithaca, from 108 suitors seeking her hand in marriage.

Not sure if you know this, but The Odyssey is pretty old. I’m still not going to spoil anything crazy though, especially because Christopher Nolan’s retelling of it is slightly different from how I remember it to be. Not drastically, though.

![[xenia.jpg]]

Nolan’s work focuses a lot on the concept of xenia, known in the movie as Zeus’s Law. What xenia is, is guest-friendship. A quick search on Wikipedia says this:

1. The respect from hosts to guests. Hosts must be hospitable to guests and provide them with a bath, food, drink, gifts, and safe escort to their next destination. It is considered rude to ask guests questions, or even to ask who they are, before they have finished the meal provided to them.
2. The respect from guests to hosts. Guests must be courteous to their hosts and not be a threat or burden. Guests are expected to provide stories and news from the outside world. Most importantly, guests are expected to reciprocate if their hosts ever call upon them in their homes.

This idea of common courtesy was prevalent in Greece because many believed that when you interacted with a stranger, you were possibly interacting with a god in disguise. It also probably helped them establish the civilisation they did - after all, if I were treated warmly by strangers, I’d feel more likely to establish diplomatic relationships and do business with them later on. There’s a whole thing about game theory going on here.

Within the movie, Zeus’s Law is depicted in multiple ways - every island Odysseus and his crew visit, Zeus’s Law is violated in some way or another.

When Odysseus visits the first set of islands, the people have fled and left supplies for the troops. They did not offer hospitality or baths. Odysseus’s men also pillaged, as seen by the houses set on fire. (Or did they themselves set their own houses on fire? I don’t remember…) ((from some youtube short I watched, Odysseus’s men did indeed ransack the village. That’s not very nice.))

When Odysseus visits Polyphemus’s island, the cyclops violates xenia by immediately eating his crew. What the heck. He deserved what he got, to be honest.

When Odysseus visits the island of the Laestrygonians, they also violate Zeus’s Law by killing his crew. Messed up. You’d think Zeus would personally intervene with all these violations. Anyway, Odysseus returns to a different part of the island and what’s left of his men are turned into pigs by Circe after she promises them food and stuff. Seriously?

Odysseus then makes way for Hades, where he reconnects with his fallen comrades from Troy. He offers them sacrifice, and it seems like the shades from Hades are pretty welcoming. Sort of. Sinon chews him out a bit, but Agamemnon is pretty chill and gives him advice and a warning. Then all the spirits of the men Odysseus didn’t honour in death (which he does a lot. I mean it’s practical though, he wanted to save his men and himself - can’t be wasting time on burial rites and whatnot) get angry and chase them off the island.

On the final island, Odysseus literally tells his men not to slaughter and eat the cattle of the sun god, and what do they do? You guessed it. To be fair though, they were aware of the consequences. Better to go out on their terms I guess.

When you think about it, while Odysseus’s crew definitely were on the receiving end of bad hospitality, they themselves weren’t exactly honest and upstanding people. Odysseus himself seems to realise this, as he later confesses to Penelope that they were the Sea Peoples rumoured about throughout the movie. Once they broke xenia and lost their civility, they turned into the barbaric Sea Peoples on their way home.

While Odysseus’s crew suffered the consequences of their actions, Odysseus was busy being held captive by Calypso. I guess no one cares about Zeus’s Law anymore. These are some of the worst hosts in history.

But, guess what. When Odysseus finally atones for his sins and returns home to Ithaca, finally, we get an example of proper guest-friendship. And it’s from his own loyal servants and family, who is unaware they are being so generous and respectful to their king.

To me, it reads as what separates modern civilisation and the magical barbarianism that Circe, Polyphemus, and most of the other islands symbolise is the concept of xenia.

And yet…

*What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if… one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore.

What if… when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?

We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that’s ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home.

What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain-and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow…

What if he knew exactly what he’d done?*

When Odysseus tricked Troy into accepting a gift and using that gift to destroy and burn the city, he violated xenia. What he saw that day was the consequence of breaking, what he himself described as, “all that’s ever sacred between people”. Forever.

And that’s what leads us to the crux of the movie, in my opinion. Christopher Nolan makes it very apparent that this movie is anti-war. The Trojan Horse which, up until now, was portrayed as an act of cunning and brilliance by Odysseus in most media is now the last resort of a man at his wits end to deceive the enemy. Odysseus, who was an honourable man all his life - to the point of plucking his bow before a hunt to turn it into a fight, broke his own moral code in order to get that Win. And he immediately regrets it, after seeing how the Greeks burnt down the city, executed priests, and, as he saw it, brought an end to the civilised age.

And now we realise that all of what Odysseus went through on his way back to Ithaca may simply have been divine retribution for what he did at Troy. All the violations of xenia by his hosts - Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, Calypso…. maybe they were the gods’ way of punishing him. He definitely regrets planning the Trojan Horse - he even confesses that the Sirens’ song told him he didn’t want to return home.

We have to acknowledge Odysseus here though, he still tries to compensate for the ultimate sin in whichever way he can - he doesn’t resort to trickery without giving his opponent the opportunity to flee or fight before it, as we see with Circe’s deer-man-thing.

At the end of the movie, Odysseus brings it full circle - when he returns home to Ithaca, he is treated rudely by the suitors in his own hall. They violate xenia, and he is now the divine punishment from the gods. This time though, he does not resort to trickery. He plucks his bow. The hunt turns into a fight.

My thoughts

I personally felt like the Odyssey was an 8 out of 10. I really liked the music (as you can see by me attaching Sirens to this post), and I thought it was an interesting depiction of such an old piece of literature.

The actors did a great job. I was particularly impressed with Anne Hathaway and Robert Pattinson - especially the latter. His character was not particularly complex (although deeper layers to his personality were hinted at, I felt they were not given enough time to develop unfortunately), but he portrayed it very well.

![[beggars.webp]]

However, I don’t think it’s Nolan’s best work. The Odyssey being such an anti-war piece, where the main character experiences regret and horror at bringing about the fall of civilisation mirrors a lot of what went down in Nolan’s previous movie, Oppenheimer. In that regard, I think Oppenheimer executes that theme a lot more gracefully than the Odyssey, and it feels a little bit recycled.

Additionally, I think reducing something as grand and complex as The Odyssey to something of a war veteran’s PTSD for the sake of portraying a narrative is a little bit wasteful. I also noticed that Nolan omitted certain details about Odysseus’s character to help control the narrative (Odysseus was not nearly as honourable as he is portrayed in the film, from taunting Polyphemus after blinding him to being perfectly fine with cheating on his wife with Circe and Calypso).

That being said, the execution of his vision was very well done and I definitely enjoyed the 3 hours I spent in the cinema. As always, I am excited to see what his next project will be.