July 25, 2026

I went to see Christopher Nolan’s new film version of The Odyssey last night. As it was shot on IMAX cameras for IMAX presentation, I decided that was the proper way to see it. Fortunately, the McWane Center, Birmingham’s children’s science museum, has a proper IMAX theater with the huge curved dome screen and it occasionally plays the summer blockbusters so I invited a friend to dinner and a movie. He had never been to the IMAX before. We’re suffering through the outer bands of tropical storm Bertha this weekend with fits of rain and occasional gusts of wind so a night in at the movies seemed just the ticket.

I was very impressed with the film and it takes its place, in my mind with some of the other classic Hollywood epics that are about a good deal more than they’re about such as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. I don’t think it should be taken as a straight forward adaptation of the Homeric epic that’s been around for three thousand years. When you do that you get caught up in the minutia as to whether this costume is historically accurate or whether that actor looks like what that historical figure might have actually looked like. It’s silly to do that. The collapse of the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization (which is the background of The Iliad and The Odyssey) was true enough but the legendary stories of the men, women, and gods of that time have little to ground them in historical fact. I think it’s best to think of the film as an interpretation of a legend for a 21st century film audience and just accept it as what it is.

Nolan gives us a non-linear narrative telling of the story through various unreliable narrators making it impossible to know the objective truth. In the liminal spaces of the story, magic can exist and we can believe in the gods such as Zeus and Poseidon manifesting themselves through natural phenomena. The sea, in particular, varying from an inviting blue to a threatening gray, to a deady black is as much a character as any human. The only one of the gods who takes on human form is Athena, but as the film develops, it becomes clear, that she may simply be a personification of Odysseus’ guilt has he grapples with the heinous transgression against men and gods he created with the Trojan Horse.

Using a cast of fine actors, many of whom were at their idyllic cinematic peak some decades ago, we get worn lived in bodies, etched with time and grief and not the perfect physiques of sword and sandals epics of days past. Nolan splits the long running time of the film (which never drags and earns every minute) between Odysseus (Matt Damon) trying to return home and long delayed by Calypso (Charlize Theron) and events on his home isle of Ithaca where his Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) try to keep order in his long absence while their home is continuously invaded by suitors for Penelope’s hand which would confer the Kingship.

The film’s script was written predominantly in 2024, prior to our most recent change in administration, with principal photography beginning in February of 2025, shortly after Trump took power. The theme that is introduced early in the film is that the most fundamental ethical and moral tenet of the society is Xenia, the law of Zeus. Welcome the stranger and treat them as you would wish to be treated. It’s sort of a Mycenaean variation of the Golden Rule which found it’s way into Christianity via Jewish scripture (composed at roughly the same time as Homer) and which also existed in other Mediterranean cultures and religions of the period. Hospitality was everything. In a world where journeys were terrifying and potentially deadly, depending on the kindness of strangers was everything. Odysseus’ trick with the horse shatters this precept and we are left by the end of the film to contemplate what will happen to a society which drifts so far from its ethical roots.

We have been doing the same thing in modern society. America was built and grew great on pluralism and assimilation and allowing anyone who wished to come and share in our society and values to come and prosper. We have spent four hundred years welcoming the stranger, not always perfectly, but with movement after movement towards a more perfect union. And now we are trying to tear it apart. The Trump administration is accelerating this but I have a feeling that even had the Democrats won the last election, we would still be seeing these deep seated trends. Rather than welcome the stranger, we are making them disappear from our streets through paramilitary personnel and fear. We are creating spaces not fit for livestock where they are confined and enriching people for doing so. The administration si trying to make the parts of history that tell stories of people unlike the mainstream disappear from museums and public record. In the name of anti-wokeness, the ability of hearing and learning from other perspectives is being curbed.

Somewhere in our military, there is a mind as brilliant as Odysseus’ who is busy creating a plan to end the current conflict in Iran. will the plan be a war crime? Will the blowback from it create confusion and moral uncertainty in our already weakened society? Will the leaders of our military, people who seem to think that injecting the troops with dangerous drugs in an attempt to make them more ‘masculine’ is a swell idea activate something from which we cannot turn back or recover? As I was watching the sack of Troy unfold on film, I coud not help but think about men hyped up on testosterone and amphetamines and the casual destruction of innocence that guarantees. They want to create a primal warrior. Are they ready for what happens when that primal brain is unleashed? It’s likely already happening behind the closed doors of ICE facilities. I have a feeling that when all of the truth comes out about ICE, Epstein, Iran, the current administration, all of it. That we will all need to atone.