The film opens, instead, on Page’s character: an infantryman named Sinon, a figure based in mythology who doesn’t actually appear in Homer’s Odyssey.
The film opens, instead, on Page’s character: an infantryman named Sinon, a figure based in mythology who doesn’t actually appear in Homer’s Odyssey. (Musk and co. are going to love that.) Sinon is the needy bastard responsible for telling the Trojans about the giant wooden horse that the Greeks have left behind: a horse the Greeks would simply love Troy to have as a gift, Sinon says. The Trojans kill the messenger, then haul the horse past their walled city’s impenetrable gates. You can guess what will happen next.
Yet Nolan, a filmmaker who never met a complicated timeline he didn’t love, doesn’t actually show us the resulting carnage right away. After this prologue, he moves the action instead to Ithaca: Odysseus’s seaside homeland, which has devolved into a hive of scum and villainy in the 20 years since its king first set sail for Troy.
The polytheistic Greeks abide by a strict code of hospitality, which The Odyssey calls Zeus’s Law. As the film rather didactically explains, they’re obligated to treat strangers well because for all they know, those strangers could be gods in disguise. Ithaca’s extraordinary circumstances have turned this religious duty into an albatross: Because she can’t break Zeus’s Law, Odysseus’s wife Penelope must indefinitely host the ill-mannered suitors who have flooded her home, each of whom hopes to marry her now that Odysseus seems to be gone for good. (The standout of the group is Antinous, a smarmy SOB played to villainous perfection by Robert Pattinson.)
Penelope can’t rule the kingdom alone, due to the antique laws of misogyny. Telemachus can’t officially take over as long as Odysseus may still be alive out there somewhere. And Ithaca isn’t the only chiefdom that’s gone to seed following the war.
Telemachus learns from another king, Trojan War–vet Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), that there’s unrest among his subjects as well. In the wake of the conflict, Sparta’s citizens have become consumed with fear about unspecified “people from the sea” invading their country and destroying their way of life. The people of Ithaca, too, have heard that the “people from the sea” are coming.
We don’t hear Spartans or Ithacans openly stressing about immigrants stealing their jobs and eating their dogs—but it’s not difficult to draw a direct line between their xenophobia and the well-documented, real-world conspiratorial anxieties of people like Musk.
It’s ridiculous for the anti-woke contingent to complain about the Odyssey not being “historically accurate;” this is a story about gods and monsters and gorgeous women who hatched out of eggs. The “people from the sea” throughline does, however, seem like a direct reference to hateful rhetoric from the real world—spoken by people who consider themselves to be the guardians of Western civilization, the true inheritors of Homer and his ilk. The rest of the film makes very clear what Nolan thinks of such incivility, primarily through its depiction of Odysseus himself.
