Amid the controversy over Christopher Nolan’s odd diversity casting, the director’s biggest change to “The Odyssey” has been ignored. This is not the Odysseus of Homer. He is a man shaped by the later Western tradition, especially Christian ethics and Machiavelli’s vision of human agency. That shift may make him less recognizable to scholars of ancient Greece, but it turns him into a hero today’s audiences can understand.

Three elements make “The Odyssey” feel timeless. First, it is about a journey home; the hero tries to return to the place where he began. Second, he succeeds, but his ordeal has permanently transformed him. Third, Odysseus is accompanied throughout his journey by the goddess Athena. She advises him, rescues him, and intervenes on his behalf.

The film retains these aspects of the poem. Still, as film critic Roger Ebert is credited with saying, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” In Homer, the great flaw of Odysseus is hubris. In Nolan’s film, it’s moral injury.

Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.

In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.

But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.

During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.

This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.

This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?

Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.

Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film “The Northman” asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But “The Northman” was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.

Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.

In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.

The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.

The ancient Greeks lived within what is often called an honor and shame culture. Moral conflict was largely external. A man worried about his standing, his reputation, his obligations, and the favor or anger of the gods. Their moral psychology was not organized around the same kind of private guilt that later became central to Judeo-Christian ethics.

Christian morality has become so deeply embedded in Western life that even secular people treat many of its assumptions as universal. They reject Christianity as a religion while continuing to believe that compassion is superior to force, that the weak and downtrodden possess inherent moral worth, that guilt should result from cruelty, and that forgiveness rather than retaliation is a sign of strength.

Nolan can’t resist placing a Christian (or secular Post-Christian) moral code within a pagan hero.

The film also gives him a more modern sense of control over his fate. He does not merely endure the will of the gods. He seems to believe that he can bargain with destiny and take responsibility for the outcome. This gives him an internal moral life that feels familiar to us.

Nolan’s Odysseus is skeptical of supernatural power. “We can’t live by omens and sacrifices,” he tells his crew. “The gods help those who help themselves.” This is not quite the Odysseus of Homer. It’s closer to the modern man who believes that fate may set the conditions of life, but human beings must still decide what to do within them.

The film makes this point through Athena. During a flashback to the sack of Troy, Odysseus sees a young Trojan priestess (portrayed by Zendaya) seized by Greek soldiers. The scene is intercut with soldiers beheading a statue of Athena inside her temple. The woman and the goddess become fused in Odysseus’s mind.

The Athena who appears to Odysseus during the rest of the film is not a goddess intervening on his behalf. She is also the memory of an innocent woman. She represents his guilt, suggesting that what drives him is not divine guidance but his own conscience.

This leaves the film suspended between realism and the supernatural. The gods might exist, but the characters are not their playthings. Human beings possess agency and bear responsibility for what they do. Calypso (Charlize Theron) identifies this quality in Odysseus when she tells him, “You’re a man who needs to control his fate.”

Machiavelli explored the same tension five centuries ago. As he wrote in “The Prince,” “I judge that it might be true that fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.”

In this sense, Nolan’s “Odyssey” can be read as a vindication of Machiavelli. Writing in the 16th century, Machiavelli was not shy about his preference for the Roman pagan virtues of strength, glory, and real-world effectiveness over the Christian ideals of mercy, compassion, and otherworldly salvation.

Both pagan and Christian morality can produce admirable lives, Machiavelli believed. But they cannot be obeyed fully at the same time. Each moral system asks something different of us, and each defines goodness in a different way.

As the political philosopher and Machiavelli translator Harvey Mansfield wrote of pagan morality, “Men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”

The most notorious metaphor in “The Prince” is as objectionable to modern readers as many scenes in Homer’s “Odyssey.” Machiavelli compares fortune to a woman:

“It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down. And one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a woman, she is the friend of the young, because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity.”

The metaphor is repellent by modern standards. But its meaning is central to Machiavelli’s thought. Fortune favors those who act rather than wait, who impose themselves on events rather than submit passively to them.

Nolan gives Odysseus this Machiavellian impulse. He does not trust omens, sacrifices, or the goodwill of the gods. He believes that fate can be bargained with and contested. Yet the film also gives him a Christian conscience that judges the methods he uses to contest it.

This version of Odysseus feels modern and psychologically rich, but is not recognizably Homeric. In trying to make Odysseus morally legible to us, Nolan makes him less true to the world that created him. Perhaps Nolan softened Odysseus not because he misunderstood the ancient character, but because he understood the modern audience.

***

Rob Henderson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.” His Substack newsletter is sent each week to more than 80,000 subscribers.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Menu

What Christopher Nolan Couldn’t Bring Himself To Do