Why The Odyssey Proves Christopher Nolan Is GENIUS

What if I told you the Odyssey is genius, not just for the epic scale of the film, but for the powerful philosophy at its core?

It’s actually a philosophy that Christopher Nolan added to this 3,000-year-old story, and somehow he honors the core themes of the epic poem with this addition.

It’s wild! And in this video, I’ll break it all down for you.

About a month ago I ordered the Odyssey from Amazon so I could read it before watching Christopher Nolan’s film. I loved the book, and felt it presented Odysseus as a wily, cunning character who uses his wits to defeat opponents. The book seemed to praise these traits, and used each foe he encountered—like the cyclops, the suitors, or Circe— to show this cunning in some way.

But after the first 45 minutes of watching the film, I felt really confused. The tone of the film felt way different from the book. Sure, there’s sadness in the poem, but not on the same level as the film, and certainly not for the same reasons as the film.

But the more I pondered these changes, the more I thought it showed Christopher Nolan’s brilliance.

To help you understand what Chris did with the film, I’ll use one of this epic story’s most famous symbols as a metaphor: the Trojan horse.

About 50 minutes through the film, Menelaus tells Telemachus the story of the Trojan Horse. Telemachus says something to the effect of “who hasn’t heard of the Trojan horse?” to which Menelaus replies “what about from the inside?”

We then get a jarring sequence from inside the Trojan horse. We see men drowning as the tide comes in, and Menelaus talking about the smell of piss and shit from inside that thing as they waited for their chance to strike. At one point, a guy gets stabbed with a sword after a soldier pokes the horse with it, and Odysseus quickly wipes the blood off the blade while Menelaus covers his mouth.

In the book, Menelaus talks with Telemachus about the Trojan horse, but it’s a much different story. In his 20-line account, he talks of how his wife Helen mimicked the voices of the soldier’s wives from outside the horse, trying to lure them out. A few soldiers were close to caving, but Odysseus put his hand over their mouths to keep them from making noise.

And that’s… all we get. No drowning, or poop talk, or soldiers getting stabbed by wayward blades. Just a story designed to show Odysseus’ mental discipline and restraint.

It’s here I want to present an idea to you. Nolan’s telling of the Odyssey is a LOT like his depiction of the Trojan Horse. In the film, Telemachus essentially says to Menelaus, “we’ve all heard the Trojan Horse story,” to which Menelaus says, “What about from the inside?”

The poem version of the story seems exultant in nature. The victory at Troy isn’t seen as a war crime like in the film—it’s seen as a martial triumph worth singing about.

But in the film, Odysseus carries significant guilt for the sacking of Troy, viewing it as an appalling act that fundamentally breaks the sacred bond between men, ending civilization as he knows it.

Nolan’s saying with this film, “Here’s what the songs left out.”

A few key lines of dialogue prove my point. When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, finally talks with Penelope in the film, they have this exchange..

Penelope: You know my husband Odysseus?
Odysseus: Of course.
Penelope: Through the songs?
Odysseus: I was at Troy, ma'am.
Penelope: The songs probably seem silly, then.
Odysseus: They make me cry.

At the end of the film, the Bard, played by Travis Scott, says, “The darkness of victory shrouds the writers in legends. It makes bards and blind beggars of us all.”

In other words, the songs and stories make the victory at Troy—and those responsible—legendary, obscuring the dark reality of what actually happened. It also essentially makes these figures gods in our minds, relegating us to the status of beggars in comparison.

It’s here we arrive at the genius of what Christopher Nolan did with the Odyssey. He reconciles the difference between the grandiose poem and his gritty film by suggesting the poem is just a glamorization of what really happened. But not in terms of the mystical elements like the cyclops, or the sirens, like you might expect, but the Trojan war!

I mean, the film starts with a bard shouting the tale of Troy in Odysseus’ halls. Minutes later Penelope asks him to stop, saying, “I don’t want a song of Odysseus, I want Odysseus.”

In other words, Penelope wants the real thing.

Nolan also uses this contrast between grandiose poem and gritty reality to make a point about the pride of men.

In perhaps the most important line of dialogue from the film, Calypso, just before she lets Odysseus set sail for home, says, “You’re a man who needs to control his fate. But you cannot control this. You must give yourself to the storm, and take your punishment. Give up the fight, give up control, and live. It is a leap of faith you haven’t yet made, Odysseus.”

The difference between Odysseus at the start of the film and Odysseus later in the film is humility.

He comes back a beggar to his own home. The great Odysseus! Who, across the Greek world, they sing songs about. He washes up on shore with nothing but a pair of raggedy pants to call his own. In the book, he actually disembarks on Ithaca with a bunch of gold given to him by the Phaeacians, and Athena makes him look like a beggar purely as a disguise.

In the book, Odysseus’ beggar look is a disguise, but in the film, it’s meant to showcase his newfound humility.

The Odyssey is full of examples of how pride, and ambition, ultimately get you nowhere. Agamemnon wins the war, and is welcomed back home as a hero, but ultimately gets killed in bed by his own wife. Odysseus’ Trojan horse idea wins the war, but destroys the world. After Odysseus escapes the Land of the Dead, he looks back and sees a hoard of fallen soldiers standing like ghosts in the mist. One of Odysseus crew members shouts, “Is that our fate?!”

We see further proof of this when Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter for favorable winds. Or when Odysseus sacrifices Sinón to sell the Horse gift to the Trojans. Or how Odysseus sacrifices civilization itself—for victory at Troy.

With each of these “sacrifices,” the outcome does not justify the sacrifice. And in each example, the price that’s paid hits closer to home than they imagined. In Agamemnon’s case, his wife doesn’t forget the sacrifice of her daughter, and gets revenge by killing him. In Odysseus’ case, he sacrifices Sinón, his strongest bond to home and a symbol of his own honor. And in the case of the Trojan Horse, what’s sacrificed is human civilization as a whole, which threatens everyone’s home.

Remember Zeus’ Law? The way it’s defined in the film is, “treat others the way you want to be treated.”

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The Odyssey book places the gods front and center in the story a lot more explicitly than the film. I mean, Book 1 of the Odyssey is a scene with all the Gods on Mount Olympus talking about Odysseus. In the film, the Gods influence is a lot more subtle, manifesting itself more-so in the form of Karma, which I feel is a brilliant move from Nolan.

There’s a scene that visualizes this brilliantly.

On Circe’s island, Odysseus hunts for a deer while Circe turns his men into pigs. After Odysseus delivers the killing shot, he comes upon the body to see a man laying naked in the grass, shot in the back.

This is a perfect visualization of what Odysseus did at Troy. In sacking Troy, he gained victory, but he killed man—he killed civilization—in the process.

Odysseus tells Penelope later on, while disguised as a beggar, “We destroyed all that was sacred between people, and turned a fight into a hunt.”

This move from Nolan—to more-so make Karma the manifestation of consequence rather than the Gods—makes sense for his more grounded tone. For example, Agamemnon. He sacrifices his daughter to “the gods” for favorable winds. When he gets home, his wife murders him for it. Is that the gods judgement, or his wife simply remembering what happened and getting revenge?

Is the blowback to civilization from Odysseus’ trick with the Trojan Horse the gods judgement, or men simply adjusting to this new paradigm?

The film blurs the lines, I feel, suggesting that even if you don’t believe in the gods—there are certain rules about how the universe works—how men work— that are so constant they’re indistinguishable from the work of the gods. Rules like Karma, and Zeus’ Law. The film argues that you will only receive what you give, because people remember what you did to them, so tread carefully.

When Odysseus tells Penelope, “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire,” he’s explaining karma. He’s explaining Zeus’ Law. And that cosmic justice is as real for us, the audience, as it is for Odysseus and his men in the Odyssey.

The Odyssey is a story about how we can’t escape retribution. It’s a message about how, the more prideful we are, the more we think we can control our destiny, the harder that retribution will fall on our heads—whether from gods or men.

It’s a message of humility. The characters in this story do things—go to war, sacrifice children, sacrifice friends, break the sacred bonds of man—and are too prideful to realize that retribution will come. Nolan’s Odyssey says, “You’re a fool to think that.”

Circe tells Odysseus the Gods have already decided his men’s fate, to which he replies, “Then I defy the Gods.” He also says early on, “The gods help those who help themselves.”

Odysseus pride is an element that’s present in both the books and the film, but in Nolan’s adaption, he expands it beyond just Odysseus to talk about the pride of man in general.

Odysseus’ visit with Circe spells this out explicitly. After Circe turns his men into pigs, she says, “this is what they are,” and “Men, with their appetites, too much is never enough!”

The way the men eat her food, which is cursed, is jarring. They laugh and slurp and can’t hold themselves back from stuffing their faces. It reminds me of how the suitors sound and act in Odysseus’ halls—a connection I feel was intentional.

One of my favorite lines of dialogue comes when she turns the pigs back into men. She says, “Go back into your disguises.”

When Odysseus talks with Tiresias about the fate of his men in the Underworld, he says, “I can still save them from the Gods,” to which Tiresias replies, “But not from themselves.”

Tiresias is talking about the short-sightedness of man here. Our pride, our ambition, our belief we’re in control of our own destinies. Odysseus’ pride, and the pride of his crew, is ultimately the cause of their downfall.

When Odysseus hears the siren song, he describes how it sounds, saying:

“It told you that what you most want is what you can’t have.
And what you most can’t have is what you already had, and lost”

Odysseus’ Trojan Horse idea was cunning, and smart. He didn’t weigh the consequences of this action, though, and in sacking Troy, Odysseus destroys his home, and the world. What he wants most is to return to the world he destroyed—a fact his pride didn’t allow him to see before everything happened.

But it’s funny. When Odysseus returns home with his white beard and raggedy clothes, and stands up on the shores of Ithaca with his chiseled body, he looks like a god. The more humble he gets, the more god-like he looks and becomes. The greeks believed beggars could be Gods in disguise, and lo and behold Odysseus comes home dressed as a beggar to his own home, and comes out of the shadows to string his bow, a feat fit for a God, and slays everyone abusing Zeus’ Law in his own home.

I think that what Christopher Nolan is trying to say is, it’s godly to be humble. Even if you don’t literally believe that gods exist, staying humble is the closest you’ll ever get to being one.

Hunting is a huge motif in Nolan’s Odyssey film. We see Odysseus hunting a boar at the start of the film, Telemachus and Menelaus hunting birds at Sparta, and Odysseus hunting a deer on Circe’s island. Remember the animals that Odysseus and his men see on their way to Circe’s hut? A cheetah, a panther, and a lion. Funny, Agamemnon’s armor has clasps with lions on it that hold up his cape.

All of these animals are hunters—apex predators. Then we obviously have Odysseus’ hunting dog, Argos, who waits for him to return.

I think Nolan is trying to say, too, that when we treat out fellow man like animals to be hunted, we turn into animals ourselves. Like how Circe turns Odysseus men into pigs.

If we want civilization to continue, we need to remember Zeus’ Law. We need to remember that nobody is above these rules. That, even if there are no gods above us, Zeus’ Law plays out in front of us all the same. Others will treat us how we treat them, and if we compromise this law, inescapable retribution will come eventually—whether it’s from gods or men.

Remember, it’s only after Odysseus lets go of his pride, humbles himself, and gives in to his punishment, that he’s able to return home and make things right. Maybe it’s the same for all of us holding on so tightly to our pride, trying to escape punishment for what we’ve done. We must let it go, give in to the storm, and make that leap of faith, as Calypso says.

What did you think of the Odyssey? Let me know in the comments down below! And if you liked that film analysis, subscribe to my channel. I publish at least one new video per week breaking down the greatest films of all time. Thanks so much for watching! I’ll see you next time.