Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey became a target in online culture wars long before it was released. Much ado was made concerning its historical accuracy, largely from far-right posters on X.
Homer’s Odyssey is one of the most retold and reworked stories in literature, whether it’s set in outer space or Dublin in 1904. Nolan’s version is much more of a remix than a cover, using the set pieces and themes of the 8th-century B.C. oral poem to frame a critique of very modern reactionary movements in politics and culture and to warn that the destruction of norms of civility—especially toward immigrants, foreigners, and strangers—risks a broader cultural collapse.
If the film’s pre-release critics, enraged over Nolan’s decision to adopt a diverse cast, had waited for the release, they could have instead been angry over its themes, which position the film as speaking for the norms and civility of the Western civilization those critics claim to prize, but which violently rejects their xenophobia and dominance-oriented machismo.
“Historical accuracy” is a difficult framework for Homer. Homer’s poem itself is a mélange of historical elements scattered over the nearly four and a half centuries from when its events were to have taken place to its final composition. Homer freely mixes elements of the late Bronze Age with elements of his own time in the early Archaic and purely fantastical elements, creating a kind of free-floating timelessness.
Nolan likely likewise evades strict accuracy. While the film engages with the idea of the late Bronze Age collapse, a wave of site destructions and imperial destabilizations that occurred from c. 1220 to c. 1170 B.C., it is very much also a film about now, and Nolan has opted for a visual style that aims for fantastical timelessness.
While a handful of the props are authentic to the Bronze Age, most notably some of the weapons on the walls of Odysseus’s palace, most of the visual elements are designed for their visual impression, not for accuracy. Like the original poem, much of the narrative is told in flashbacks, fitting for the recollections of an Odysseus still very much processing his trauma. Agamemnon’s huge hulking black armor, for instance, has relatively little to do with historic Greek armor from any period, but it expresses his character in the film: an almost entirely faceless, frequently voiceless force of destruction that propels our main character toward the committing of what the film presents as a civilization-destroying original sin.
Benny Safdie plays Agamemnon on the set of The Odyssey in this undated photo.Universal Pictures
Nolan signals that he intends to depart from the strict text of the Odyssey early in the film, notably altering the recognition device between Odysseus and Penelope that serves as the ultimate climax of the poem. Odysseus’s stay on Phaeacia, where he meets Nausicaa and Alcinous, is also gone, its narrative elements instead transferred to conversations between Odysseus and Calypso. Characters are altered or merged, most notably with the film’s Sinon, a character from Virgil’s Aeneid rather than Homer, who takes on the role of Odysseus’s ill-fated companion Elpenor from the Odyssey.
Apocalypse shadows the story. Throughout the film, characters ominously mention rumors of the sea people, raiders from the sea whose identity remains vague until late in the film. Alongside this, both Odysseus and Penelope openly ask if their civilization is “collapsing”; the film ends with Odysseus commenting to Penelope that future generations would need bards to keep their stories because they would no longer be able to write.
This is rooted in a real historical question. The ancient Greeks offered a range of dates for the fall of Troy, most famously Eratosthenes’s date of 1184 B.C., which accords with the archaeological evidence for the destruction of a settlement layer at Hissarlik in western Anatolia, part of the broader late Bronze Age collapse that also consumes the Mycenaean palaces of Bronze Age Greece.
As these site destructions rippled eastward (they seem to have started in Greece), they created waves of armed raiders or refugees, referred to in Egyptian records as the “sea peoples.” Scholars now generally assess that the collapse began as climatic shifts caused political instability in the highly centralized palace economies of the region as more fragile states on the periphery began to collapse. This disrupted trade flows and created conflict and refugee flows that brought down the larger states in a domino collapse that eventually consumed much of the eastern Mediterranean littoral.
This was probably the closest any large region has ever come to a true “end of civilization” event, although the destructions were hardly universal even within the eastern Mediterranean. Greek civilization in this period did collapse so badly that writing was lost. When Greek writing reemerged in the 8th century B.C., it did so with a new alphabet based on Phoenician letters, the Greek alphabet and literary tradition with which we are now familiar.
Cadmus introducing the original alphabet, or Phoenician alphabet, to the Greeks. From ‘Hutchinson’s History of the Nations,’ published in 1915.Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The idea of the Trojan War marking the beginning of an end to an era was hardly alien to the ancient Greeks. Although the Greeks of Homer’s day (Homer wrote in the mid-8th century B.C.) had only an extremely vague cultural memory of the late Bronze Age and no real knowledge of its collapse, they did understand the warriors who fought at Troy and their children as the last generations of an age of heroes, before the world settled down into their own contemporary, far less fantastical age. There is a sense of tragedy and loss in the Nostoi, the returns of the heroes of Troy, who occupy a dying world in Greek mythology.
Nolan’s preoccupation with this theme, however, is distinctly modern. While scholars generally attribute the historical late Bronze Age collapse to a range of factors including climatic disruption, endemic warfare, economic interdependence, and large-scale refugee flows, Nolan’s vision is instead focused on moral failing.
As Odysseus himself reveals to Penelope in a moment of unvarnished soul-baring, the sea people are not some foreign threat, but rather the Greeks themselves (which is, as best scholars can tell, also an accurate statement about the historical sea peoples), the product of their violation of the norms of civilized behavior in the destruction of Troy, embodied in the sacrilegious deceit of the Trojan horse itself. The audience thus discovers that the trauma that Odysseus has been suffering for the whole film is his sense that he is ultimately responsible for the original sin, the first violation that has brought the collapse of civilization.
This civilization-ending sin is expressed through the motif of cruelty to strangers, invoked in the film as “Zeus’s law,” the Greek concept of xenia, or hospitality, in which a host has a responsibility to feed and protect a guest, and guests have matching responsibilities to their hosts. The suitors, in both abusing Penelope’s hospitality and equally abusing beggars and strangers who come to the palace as guests, violate xenia in both directions at once, but they are hardly the only ones. The violation of xenia and its consequences is one of the central preoccupations of Homer’s Odyssey, but whereas Homer treats this violation of xenia largely as an individual sin, Nolan transforms it into a civilizational one.
Robert Pattinson plays Antinous on the set of The Odyssey in this undated photo.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
It is cruelty to strangers that marks out the inhuman monsters—the cyclops, the Laestrygonians, and Circe—that Odysseus encounters in his travels. Yet these inhuman acts are paralleled in the narrative by the Greeks’ own cruelty to strangers, expressed by the suitors’ sadistic treatment of guests in Odysseus’s palace, Odysseus’s own men’s greedy raiding, and of course the brutal sack of Troy. Circe’s claim that the Greeks’ human shape is a false form, that their real form is that of pigs ruled by their greed and appetites, seems self-serving at first, until Odysseus at the conclusion of the film recounts the horrors of the fall of Troy and the audience sees that Circe was fundamentally correct.
Odysseus himself then brings the theme full circle, realizing to Penelope when they at last reunite that the Greeks themselves were the sea people, that in their barbarous sack of Troy they broke the rightful bonds between men, which has haunted Odysseus for the entire film. Odysseus in turn foresees that the contagious effects of these actions will spread until the whole of their own civilization collapses.
Nolan thus presents a vision of civilizational collapse motivated by the collapse of social norms of hospitality, kindness, and mercy. While Odysseus by the film’s end puts much of the blame for this breach on himself and goes into exile as a kind of expiation of his guilt, the film as a whole finds other figures to blame as well. The most notable is Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, who appears as a nearly silent, almost elemental force of menace in the film, the true author of civilization’s collapse.
This is a critique framed in terms of an ancient collapse that is nevertheless deeply embedded in the present. The repeated evocations of Zeus’s law of kindness toward strangers are surely intended to be read in light of the Trump administration’s shockingly inhospitable attitude toward immigrants and foreigners in the United States.
More broadly, the film’s morality rejects the domination- and strength-based masculinity of the Greek kings, an echo of contemporary MAGA machismo that often takes Greek and Roman civilization as a warped inspiration, as fundamentally counterproductive. Multiple characters, most notably Menelaus, repeatedly ask who will raise Ithaca’s armies in order to fend off the coming sea people, but of course it turns out that the sea people are Ithaca’s armies: The raising of an army of Greeks by their warrior-kings is the very cause of the problem, not the solution.
Dion Cini, left, and brother Tommy Cini hold up a Trump for King banner during the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday parade in Washington on June 14, 2025.Kevin Carter/Getty Images
Nolan does not, however, reject civilization itself. Nolan has his critiques for this society, to be sure: Penelope points out the inherent unfairness that despite having ruled Ithaca for 20 years, as a woman she cannot be its official ruler and is instead pressured to find a husband, while Nolan inserts a critique of wealth by having the rich and contemptible suitor Antinous use his wealth to avoid the Trojan War at the cost of the poor and genuine Sinon.
However, civilization itself is represented as a positive good, the decline of which is a catastrophe. The war and the suitors disrupt a society on Ithaca that is presented as largely wholesome and good, while Odysseus himself is quick to represent writing and song as arts that preserve wisdom by preserving the memory of past mistakes. The result is a fundamentally conservative, almost Burkean critique: Whatever structural problems society has, its catastrophic collapse comes not from those structural issues but from the violation of long-standing norms of behavior. Odysseus’s horse breached not only Troy’s gates, but also Chesterton’s fence.
Nolan’s The Odyssey, like the original poem, is self-conscious of its role in culture, opening with a bard beginning to sing the story of Odysseus in his own hall. Nolan thus levies a conservative critique of the current moment by using Homer’s story to position himself as speaking for Western civilization and the Western literary canon itself.
The film declares that far from being the thing to save Western civilization, the machismo that delights in cruelty to outsiders and strangers, which prizes the ruthlessness and stoic emotionlessness of Agamemnon or the savage cunning of Odysseus himself, is the very thing causing a contemporary civilizational collapse, by rupturing the bonds between men. We are the sea people, who, with our inhumanity and rapacious greed, have become the barbarians at our own gates.
