Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features plot details of The Odyssey.
No one loves a third-act twist more than Christopher Nolan. It’s been his calling card since Memento put him on the map 25 years ago. He even made an entire movie just to introduce us all to the concept of “the prestige” in a magic act. From Batman Begins to Interstellar to Tenet, Nolan’s work relies on withholding a key piece of information only to deploy it for maximum emotional impact later, like the much-teased conversation we finally see in full at the very end of Oppenheimer. When it comes to the third-act rug pull in The Odyssey, however, Nolan swerves. Instead of withholding something plot-based and then revealing it in the end, the film’s twist is an emotional reorientation. Nolan has spent the past three hours telling his audience that Matt Damon’s Odysseus isn’t the hero of this story. We just weren’t watching closely.
More than anything, Nolan anchors his take on The Odyssey around the concept of “Zeus’ Law,” the ancient Greek commandment that you must treat any visitors who arrive at your home with the utmost generosity and respect—ostensibly because they could be a god in disguise, but really because life in the Bronze Age is impossibly hard and the only way to get through it is to help one another. Anyone could eventually have to become a traveler relying on the kindness of strangers to survive, so do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s a concept that a group of sleazy suitors have spent years taking advantage of in Ithaca, as they know Odysseus’ wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) can’t break social norms by refusing to feed and shelter them while her husband is away on his 20-year journey.
In contrast to all that, Odysseus seems to stand as a hero. He’s reluctant to go to war in the name of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) and Menelaus (Jon Bernthal). He’s dedicated to his men, even if he has to make tough choices about their survival. He’s clever enough that he won the war by thinking up the Trojan Horse. He’s strong enough not to fall for the temptations of the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) and the god Helios. And he’s so nice he literally plucks his bowstring to let his prey have a fighting chance before he hunts them. Though it’s clear Odysseus is a flawed man facing impossible circumstances, the fact that his family and former servants believe in him so fiercely gives us every reason to take that perspective too.
After building up that “great man” narrative, however, Nolan quietly shatters it. When Odysseus returns home in disguise, he puts aside the heroic songs of the Trojan War to tell Penelope how it actually felt to be there. What is the Trojan Horse if not the ultimate breaking of Zeus’ Law? He took an act of godly generosity and used it to attack an unexpecting civilian population in the middle of the night—allowing Agamemnon and his rage-filled men to lay waste to an entire city. Is it any wonder that once that line was crossed, civilization as a whole started to crumble?
There’s a tiny bit of new information revealed in the full flashback to the Siege Of Troy, most notably the fact that Odysseus’ vision of Athena (Zendaya) is inspired by a young woman he saw murdered that night. But, for the most part, the confession simply snaps the story we’ve been watching into focus. This is why Odysseus wanted to take a dangerous, uncharted route home rather than spend any more time with Agamemnon. It’s why the sirens told him he didn’t actually want to return to Ithaca. It’s why he was so eager to eat the memory-erasing lotus flowers Calypso (Charlize Theron) served him for seven years. It’s why Circe condemned his men as boorish, greedy pigs.
In fact, everything we need to know about the duality of Odysseus is there from the film’s first set piece. Sure, it’s heroic that he dives back into the dangerous cave of the Cyclops to ensure that his men aren’t stuck in there alone. But he’s also the one who wandered into a creature’s home, ate its food, and then blinded it in order to escape. From the first moment we see him in action, Odysseus is breaking Zeus’ Law, which demands that guests respect their hosts. The movie just doesn’t ask us to fully grapple with what we’re watching until its final act. Years of sword-and-sandal epics have primed us to see Odysseus as a hero doing his best in a broken world, not as one of the men who broke it in the first place.
Crucially, however, he didn’t break it alone, which is another thing that separates the third act of The Odyssey from Nolan’s previous rug-pulls. A Nolan twist tends to be literal and personal. Christian Bale has a twin. Matthew McConaughey led himself to outer space. Guy Pearce already got his vengeance. Even Oppenheimer is a man feeling the weight of his own horrifying scientific invention. Yet The Odyssey‘s twist operates on a much broader, more metaphorical level meant to comment on our current historical moment as much as Odysseus’ personal guilt. Hollywood loves to make the contradictory point that war is evil but the soldiers who fight in it are valiant, something even Nolan himself did with Dunkirk. In The Odyssey, he removes the doublespeak and looks at the truth: War, invasion, imperialism, patriarchy, greed—they’re all part of the same cycle that dooms a civilization to fall because its leaders refuse to learn the lessons of those who came before.
Early on, Odysseus’ second-in-command Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) sneers to a panicked villager that they’re Greeks, not foreign invaders known as “The Sea People”—a real-life collection of seafarers who were at one point thought to have caused the Late Bronze Age collapse. As Penelope eventually figures out, however, the legend of the devious Sea People did spring from Odysseus and his crew. It was just easier to divide their heroic actions into one myth and their villainous actions into another, rather than grapple with the reality that one group could be responsible for both. Penelope’s greedy suitors aren’t a contrast to Odysseus, they’re there because he cracked open the world to the point where social propriety has crumbled beyond repair. Odysseus helped shape a realm where powerful, evil men feel free to take whatever they want from those desperately trying to hold onto basic human decency. The biggest twist of The Odyssey is that it’s not really another Nolan story about a troubled father yearning to get back to his family. It’s a story about us.
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