Perhaps the most anticipated movie since, well, Oppenheimer, is The Odyssey, based on Homer’s dense tome which most of us were required to read back in our early years.  I did and don’t remember a thing about it.  These days I look upon Homeric history as legend and myth, more fantasy than reality, and so have little personal use for it (that probably says a lot about me, but I can’t really care).  If I feel that way, I can’t help but think that others do as well, which makes me wonder why the filmmaker now widely considered to be the best at his craft in this modern era would choose this particular project.

Christopher Nolan has adapted and directed Homer’s famous work into a three-hour adventure film in which the Greeks sack Troy and Odysseus (Matt Damon) spends most of the running time trying to return back to Athens, to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and his child (grown, Tom Holland).  This takes close to or more than twenty years.  The return, when it is finally made, is certainly dramatic.

I worried that I wouldn’t be able to relate to this hoary old story, and that was, at times, an issue for me, especially when Odysseus and his crew keep running into beings much bigger than themselves, and with little explanation of who those people are.  But I did not count on Nolan’s storytelling expertise.  Winding his way back and forth through those twenty years, the story is never dull and is occasionally mesmerizing.  Images and the thundering sounds and music that accompany them have power, and Nolan knows how to crescendo to ragged action while also allowing individual characters to communicate with intimacy and feeling.  We watch Odysseus make major mistakes and then suffer mightily for them, yet we root for him to get back home before everything he left behind is ruined.  Homer’s tale really is a heck of a story, even if I don’t appreciate it or even understand entire sections of it.  Yet I still wondered why Nolan would devote so much time and effort to this project.

The answer, for me, is revealed early on yet achieves full power only late in the story, and involves the invocation of Zeus’ law of hospitality: treat others as you would be treated yourself.  Honesty and honor.  This is related several times throughout the journey and has its most powerful telling as Odysseus recounts how his idea for taking Troy (the famous Trojan Horse) worked at the time, but also sealed his civilization’s slide into ruin.  By breaking Zeus’ law and using deceit to gain entry into Troy — and then utterly slaughtering all of its people — he himself has started the chain of distrust in all things and the discarding of honor and humility in favor of expediency and capitalization of every opportunity by those wielding power.  That is a powerful message and it rings throughout the narrative.

But here’s the thing.  Christopher Nolan did not include that message to stay faithful to Homer’s work, whether it is there in the book or not.  He is pounding this message into the heads of us as we watch this tale of old times, for our benefit today.  That’s why the characters speak in such modern ways rather than the typical formal, stylized speech of most Hollywood period pieces.  That’s why, while the more fantastic elements of the story are present and vividly presented, his focus remains on a good man trying to get back to his family and maintain the values that made him honorable in the first place.  Nolan sees our own modern world backsliding toward chaos and ruin and is using this story as a cautionary tale to set things right before it is too late to undo the harm that comes from lack of human respect and chasing wealth instead of doing the right things for the world at large.  I appreciate that effort, and that message.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  27 July 2026.