Odyssey

The Odyssey — A Journey Home

The film beautifully begins with the idea that the tales of the Trojan War have been sung for twenty years.

A face.

A fleet.

A man.

A war.

A trick.

A trick that broke the walls of Troy.

I just rewatched The Odyssey and what stayed with me wasn’t the scale of the adventure, but the transformation of Odysseus.

Homer’s poem already gives Nolan a fascinating structure  fragmented, nonlinear, built around stories being remembered and retold. But underneath all the mythology is something much simpler: a man slowly becoming aware of the consequences of his own intelligence, pride and choices.

1. “You have wise eyes. Athena’s eyes.”

Telemachus believes that there could be something divine in people. Odysseus, after everything he has experienced, tells him:

“Don’t search for gods in men. You’ll be disappointed.”

That one exchange beautifully captures the difference between them.

Telemachus still has faith in people.

Odysseus has experience.

And perhaps growing up is simply the journey between those two things.

2. Honouring the Dead

When one of Odysseus’ men dies, his soldiers want to carry his body and honour him.

Odysseus says:

“He helped us escape. We honour him by escaping.”

That idea stays with him.

As more men die, Odysseus slowly understands that honouring the dead doesn’t always mean carrying them with you.

Sometimes it means continuing the journey they died trying to complete.

The dead cannot return home.

So the living must.

3. The Sirens

One of the most beautiful ideas in the film is:

“What you most want is what you can’t have, and what you can’t have is what you already had and lost.”

That is the tragedy of desire.

We don’t always want what is in front of us.

Sometimes we want the past precisely because we can never have it again.

The Sirens don’t tempt Odysseus with something new.

They tempt him with everything he has lost.

And that makes the scene deeply human.

4. The Art of Surrender

Odysseus spends the entire journey fighting fate.

He believes he can save everyone.

He believes his intelligence can overcome prophecy.

But that belief eventually becomes his greatest weakness.

He cannot bring every man home.

He cannot undo Troy.

He cannot defeat death.

And when Calypso reveals how long he has been trapped, Odysseus begins to understand that perhaps it wasn’t only Calypso keeping him away from Ithaca.

It was his guilt.

He finally learns that surrender isn’t defeat.

Sometimes surrender is accepting what cannot be changed and still choosing to move forward.

5. The People of the Sea

The mysterious “people of the sea” initially feel like a physical threat to civilisation.

But I think the film reveals something more interesting.

The real plague is the idea that individual desire can become more powerful than the values holding a civilisation together.

The Trojan Horse is the beginning of that collapse.

Odysseus’ greatest strength his ability to deceive becomes the weapon that destroys an entire civilisation.

And that makes his character tragic.

His intelligence saves him.

His intelligence destroys others.

And eventually, he has to live with both.

The odyssey isn’t really about monsters, gods or the journey across the sea.

It’s about what happens to a person when he spends years fighting everything except himself.

Odysseus begins by believing he can outsmart fate but he ends by understanding that he must accept it and maybe that’s what coming home really means.

Returning as someone who can finally live with the person you’ve becomel

Will always stan this movie.