Film: The Odyssee

Being in the Sea

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and the question of what a hero can still be today.

Warning: This text contains spoilers.

Even the Universal logo seems more immeasurable. It wraps itself around its world more powerfully and almost brutally; the world suddenly seems older, darker, almost vulnerable. Even before a human being can be seen, Christopher Nolan sets an archaic tone: Something big is coming now. But not just something spectacular. Something human. And indeed: For the first time, despite plenty of inner resistance, I say — IMAX, yes please.

Normally, I tend to belong more to the advocates of arthouse cinemas and art films. Inside me stands this invisible Tarkovsky hurdle: the idea that a film screening has to transform me completely, reassemble my perception, perhaps even destroy my patience and everything primitive first, before it is allowed to be art. With Nolan’s Odyssey, I was remarkably forgiving. This time, it was enough for me simply to watch something, illustrated at the highest possible level. And I explicitly do not mean “illustration” in a negative way. Quite the opposite.

Old Memories in HD

I translated parts of the Odyssey in Latin class and actually enjoyed it back then. Perhaps it was the first time I felt that an ancient text does not have to be dead. That language can be a time machine. That people almost three thousand years ago apparently already had the same problems we do: They wanted to go home, they wanted more than was good for them, they confused power with meaning and realised far too late what they had possessed all along. (Warning: interpretation of a fifteen-year-old smart-ass grammar-school student, but perhaps what remains of this youthful urge to explain everything will get me through the first part of my film review.) For me, Nolan’s film was therefore also a reunion with an old memory — only in HD, gigantic, loud and on a screen larger than my reasonable resistance to the whole campaign madness. Because of course this is a huge machine. A hyper-commercial movie experience built out of global stars, IMAX, marketing and that scale of magnitude which Nolan now promises simply through his name. All the more, I like that he does not place himself above the supposedly “sacred” text. He does not stick slavishly to every detail of Homer; individual scenes are reinterpreted, psychologised or newly invented. But he does not treat the source material as raw material that first has to be made interesting by a modern director. The Odyssey, after all, is already full. Full of sea, temptation, violence, memory, hunger, loyalty, guilt — or at least what we today first read as guilt — gods, animals, the dead and people who think they are cleverer than they are. There is no need to forcefully reinvent it. You can show it. And that, for me, is initially exactly where Nolan’s strength lies.

Palaces That Become Somewhat Habitable Only Through People

What is astonishing is how minimalist this gigantic film looks in many places. The rooms are not crowded. The castles and palaces are not historicist hidden-object pictures in which every vessel screams: Look, we did our research! They are empty, brutalist, strict and clear. Precisely because of that, they become timeless. These archaic spaces are almost dressed only by their people. Bodies, voices and power relations become their actual decoration. A king is not a king because a thousand golden objects stand around him. He is a king because other people behave towards him as if he were one. And as soon as this order breaks apart, only a frighteningly empty room remains. That supports Nolan’s archetypal investigation. This is not about a museum-like antiquity. It is about the human being in power, the human being in fear, the human being at sea. But above all: about the human being who destroys something beautiful and only later understands that it was beautiful.

The First Stone into Ruin

I really felt the pain when Odysseus looks back at Troy in the night and recognises what he has set in motion with the trick of the Trojan Horse. I am a feminist. I feel the patriarchy. Odysseus, in Nolan, does not simply recognise a victory, but a first stone thrown into human ruin. The starting signal for a struggle between archetypes, empires, men and their ideas of greatness. What might he have spared all of us if he had not had that damned cunning, damned nasty horse idea?

So nasty! So nasty!

Again and again, the film shines back towards this origin of decay. The admired strategist becomes the man whose genius has put something into the world that he can no longer control. He has proved that even the most sacred rules can be broken if only one is clever enough about it. That hospitality, trust and trade can be exploited as weaknesses.

The exception of war becomes a principle that afterwards poisons the whole world. “We lived in a world of palaces and trade and language, blind to its beauty.” We were together. We traded. We were happy. And then someone had to want more. Predictable male will to power: not being able to let beauty bloom because one has to possess, surpass or subjugate it. For the entire film, we hope that Odysseus makes it home. And at the same time, Nolan eventually forces us to ask: How stupid was the impulse, really, to follow this greed for more in the first place?

Being in the Sea

The strongest motif of the film is the sea. This complete lack of footing. This being at the mercy of things on a brutal and at the same time frighteningly fragile wooden belly that carries a few people across something that could swallow them at any moment. The ship protects them, but it does not really separate them from the water. It is only a thin assertion between human beings and the abyss. I physically felt this relationship between sea and ship. You are not simply on a journey across the sea. You are in the sea. Permanently. The water is not a path between two safe places, but a permanent state. There is no solid ground to which you could internally retreat. Only movement, weather, dependence, crew, memory and the hope that somewhere land still exists. God, how happy I was every time we had land beneath our feet during those three hours. Is that not pretty much exactly our feeling of life today? We live in a permanent in-between. Politically, climatically, emotionally, professionally. Certainties that still looked like land yesterday suddenly move beneath our feet. Relationships have to be built in the middle of constant options. We are supposed to be flexible, available, mobile and always ready to reinvent ourselves. And perhaps we are not longing for the next island at all. Perhaps we are longing to finally feel land inside ourselves again. Nolan’s Odysseus carries the sea inside him long before he arrives back in Ithaca.

“Then It Wasn’t True”

My favourite scene belongs to Calypso, played by Charlize Theron. She asks Odysseus: “What if memory destroys your happiness?”And he replies: “Then it wasn’t true.”

Mega.

Because these two sentences do not only hit Odysseus. They hit every contemporary relationship in which, at some point, the question appears whether we want to remember the truth or rather the version with which we can go on living. What if memory destroys happiness? What if, looking back, we realise that we were not only victims, but participants? That we hurt people, squandered possibilities or left a love because we thought there had to be more waiting for us somewhere? Or if we stay without there still being a love that looks at everything, and from which we want to look at everything that we are. Odysseus’ answer is radical: A happiness that can exist only through repression was not true. Perhaps that is romantic. Perhaps it is brutal. Perhaps it is exactly the kind of sentence one can easily say as long as one does not yet know which memory will return. But it establishes something decisive: Truth is not the enemy of happiness. It is its condition. Building relationships today would also have to begin there. Not with the question of how long one can avoid conflicts, but whether two people can endure each other in the truth. Whether love also allows the view of the sea. Whether preserving something does not mean that nobody is allowed to look outside anymore, but that one creates a place to which both can truthfully return.

The Song of What Is Already Lost

I found the Sirens scene almost poetic. In Homer, Odysseus has himself tied to the mast while his men close their ears with wax. Nolan turns this into something even more psychologically threatening. A warrior jumps out of the boat and swims towards the Sirens. This concrete male stupidity, giving up one’s whole life for a hunger, a call, a promise, is Nolan’s addition. It is moving nevertheless. Later, Odysseus tells through tears what the Sirens are actually offering him: not simply sex, fame or adventure, but exactly what he already possessed and lost. That is their actual temptation.From here on, something changes.

Guilt becomes visible in Odysseus — at least through my modern view of him — no longer only as a burden lying on him from the outside. It becomes consciousness.

He looks inside himself. And with this insight comes the knowledge that there is no return to the man who entered Troy. Before that, in several places, he still seems as if he wants to mirror us: wife, child and family — quite nice, but perhaps not really his thing. A hero has to go out. A hero has to act. A hero needs another trial, another island, another temptation, another opponent. Then he recognises another truth: Preserving is not automatically renunciation. Perhaps it is even the more difficult form of adventure. Taking a love seriously does not mean never looking at the sea again. It means not confusing every sea with the task that it has to be conquered.

Women Who No Longer Want to Be Scenery

Especially interesting, therefore, is the treatment of the female characters — even where I would have wished for more space for them. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is, for me, the actual hero of Ithaca. While Odysseus travels through the world, she holds a world together. Already in Homer, her strength does not consist in physical superiority, but in intelligence, patience and her famous trick: During the day she weaves the burial shroud, after the completion of which she supposedly has to choose a new husband; at night she unravels her work again. She preserves, but she is not passive. She acts within an order in which her possibilities are limited and turns time into her weapon. Perhaps there lies a new definition of heroism: not always being the person who goes out and makes history, but the person who prevents everything from falling apart in the meantime. Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen and Clytemnestra, Samantha Morton Circe and Charlize Theron Calypso. Each of these women occupies a role that men have assigned to her — the most beautiful, the waiting woman, the witch, the seductress, the murderous wife — and tries to place her own accent within that role. Clytemnestra simply cannot bear being with a conqueror anymore. With a man who was apparently prepared to do anything, even to sacrifice his own daughter. That Agamemnon’s story keeps appearing as a dark subplot is important. In Homer, too, his fate becomes the warning counter-image to Odysseus’ homecoming.

With Nolan, Clytemnestra now gets an image, a body and a moment of action. One can condemn what she does and still understand that here is someone who no longer wants to be part of the conqueror’s household. Circe too, played by Samantha Morton, the so-called pig witch, takes possession of the role assigned to her. She turns the men into pigs — or perhaps only reveals what was already there. She does not sleep with Odysseus; what would that have intensified? It feels almost Clarice-Lispector-like that she does not meet Odysseus sexually: There is passion, there is already transformation as revelation, and the renunciation of any further estrangement. Odysseus seems to be surrounded by pigs. Circe sets this accent. She listens to him, recognises something in him, puts her faith in his loyalty and at the same time gives him up. At some point, his rescue too has to become his own task. Circe went to Therapy.

In the end, a bitter realisation remains from all these women: How much male energy is spent wasting time that could have been peace. Who still finds that sexy today?Perhaps we really do have to redefine the hero. Because who do these men still want to prove something to today? Which Penelope in the year 2026 still finds it sexy when her husband is simply gone — physically absent and emotionally about as available as Odysseus in the bed scene at the beginning? How many whole lives are lost because people believe love alone is too small for them?

And Yet Every Love Probably Contains Enough to Survive, Once One Truly Devotes Oneself to It Honestly

The classical hero is characterised by the fact that he leaves. The new hero could be the one who stays without giving himself up. Who returns without expecting everything to have waited for him. Who understands that preserving is not a female side task, but a shared human achievement. Odysseus is a demigod, but only a demigod of his own journey. He does not control the sea. He does not control his men. Often, he does not even control himself. In the end, perhaps his greatness lies less in surviving all the dangers than in eventually recognising how unnecessarily many of them existed at all.

The Sun God’s Cow

The funniest moment in the film is therefore at the same time a perfect comment on everything: “You think the Sun God doesn’t see it when you eat the cow silently?”

Wonderful.

As if one could simply eat a sacred cow particularly quietly and thereby escape the consequences. Are we not constantly exactly like that? We know that something is wrong. We do it anyway and hope that the world is looking away at that moment. We call it pragmatism, necessity or having no alternative. We take beauty for granted and prefer to devote ourselves to taking possession rather than preserving. And then we are surprised when the bill arrives.

The Odyssey in the Year 2026

We live in days in which Paris swells in the heat, crises smoulder and real wars are still being fought — wars like those that have always existed and yet should long ago have ceased to be necessary. Perhaps that is why, precisely now, we need this Odyssey. Not because it calms us, but because it shows how fatal it is to take beauty (cf. John Dewey: truth) for granted. How civilisations do not begin to collapse only when the palaces burn, but in the moment when people begin to understand trust and, above all, mercy as weakness.

The Odyssey Has Long Been Written into Our Sense of the World

We speak of the “Trojan horse” when something reaches us as a gift that in truth carries danger inside it. At a job interview we feel “as if we were entering the lion’s den”, even though different mythological and religious traditions become mixed together in our everyday language. Exactly that shows how strongly these old images continue to work. We use them without even having to think about them anymore. The Odyssey does not belong to men. It is with us across gender. Everyone knows departure, getting lost, being seduced and the question of whether a return is even still possible. Nolan is of course not the first to take on the Odyssey. For centuries, this story has been painted, translated, set to music, filmed and rewritten. But perhaps precisely now it is again decisive that its text is still there. That it still means something. That it exposes something deeply human and is now simply painted onto our retina in hyper-HD.

As of the beginning of August 2026, the film has grossed more than 911 million dollars worldwide; the reported production budget was around 250 million dollars. Box-office revenue is not the same as profit, but the scale shows that this almost three-thousand-year-old epic reaches an enormous audience even as contemporary mass cinema. “Have you heard,” people were saying at the beginning of the year in break rooms everywhere, from university to Rewe, “Nolan is doing the Oddyssey!”

Something like that moves me in much the same way as when I see children marching in mass demonstrations for climate protection along Rue Soufflot or Frankfurter Damm, holding signs in their hands that have to plead because human beings are so fond of pretending to be stupid. They were the same children in Paris, Berlin and all the little streets where I happened not to be stumbling out of a library carrying five Deleuzes or having a doppio. It was the child and its worry itself that rolled towards us. They are the same tears that stand in my eyes when the bartender and barwoman in the Paris café where I sometimes write turn up “Le Chassur” loudly and sing along as if it were the last thing they would ever do! So thank you that the Odyssey passes by us once again today — or rather: washes over us — in this completely oversized, hyper-commercial movie experience. One can smile at the campaign madness. One can accuse Nolan of megalomania. One can say that the film also deals with Nolan’s neurotic tendency towards technical novelty that has already existed before. I somehow find that human. (At this point, I would like to suggest typing “The Odyssey, shot on IMAX” into Google!)

Still: I Felt the Sea.

And I understood that “being in the sea” is perhaps the normal state of our life today. That we still have to carry each other, in this brutal, fragile wooden belly. That learning, translating, remembering and expanding one’s own being through a language are never stupid, pointless or irrelevant. Just as learning a language cannot be wrong, neither can returning to an ancient text. These are the kinds of things we have to give one another to hold on to today, while everything seems to be in flames: stories that remind us that power is not the same as greatness. That homecoming does not mean regression. That preserving is an action. And that what we are searching for most may be exactly what we already had — and did not have to destroy.

There Is Still Something to Say; We Are Guests of Nolan.

And perhaps at this point I have to turn my own reading against itself once again. Because of course what I have written here about guilt, insight and preserving is not simply “the Odyssey”. It is already our Odyssey. More precisely: Nolan’s Odyssey, seen by me, today.

That is important.

Because Homer’s world certainly knows responsibility, shame, transgression, punishment and also the knowledge that one has violated an order. But it does not simply know that form of inner guilt with which we look at Odysseus today. Certainly not this almost Christian model: I have sinned, I recognise my guilt, I regret, I seek forgiveness and through this recognition become another human being. The famous opposition between ancient “shame culture” and later “guilt culture” is scientifically too crude to simply adopt one-to-one; nevertheless, it names an important difference. The Homeric world organises the human being very strongly through honour, reputation, reciprocity, obligation towards guest and host, family, gods and community.

There is timē, honour and social standing. There is kleos, the fame that is supposed to outlive one’s own death. There is aidōs, shame, reserve, the awareness of the gaze of others. And above all there is xenia: the sacred relationship between stranger and host, protected by Zeus.

One takes in a stranger, feeds them, respects them — not out of modern niceness, but because the world can only continue to exist as long as such orders remain in place. The stranger might even be a god. Whoever violates this order therefore damages more than an individual feeling. They damage the structure within which human beings can live together at all. Perhaps Nolan refers precisely to this xenia as a core of his interpretation.

That also changes my view of his Troy narrative. When Nolan’s Odysseus looks back and begins to break because of his own trick, I immediately see guilt in it. Trauma. Remorse. Perhaps even the beginning of a moral purification. But this looking back is already very Nolan, very today. Homer does not need the same psychological path. His Odysseus does not first have to confess in the Christian sense for his homecoming to gain meaning. And “forgiveness” works differently in Homer as well. Christianity turned forgiveness into one of the most radical moral movements imaginable: You did something to me, and nevertheless I refuse to let retribution become the final truth of our relationship. In the world of the Homeric epic, restoration, compensation, revenge, divine punishment and the restoration of a violated order are much more immediate. After all, Odysseus does not return to Ithaca in order to embrace everyone in one great act of reconciliation.

He kills the suitors.

One should not forget that when describing this film using our modern moral vocabulary. And perhaps I like Nolan’s film better precisely when I do not allow it to dissolve Homer for me. It is Nolan’s Odyssey.Apparently, even 70-millimetre film cannot close off the Odyssey.

Perhaps it cannot be “taught” at all.

Anyone who wants to get to know Homer has to read Homer — and in doing so try to enter at least a little into that foreign Greek world from which this poetry comes: an orally shaped culture of epic poetry; a society in which hospitality is a religious obligation; in which fame is supposed to survive death; in which gods are not metaphors for psychological states, but acting powers; in which family, house, ancestry, honour, gift and counter-gift possess a different social force than they do for us. The Odyssey itself probably became tangible in written form towards the end of the eighth or the beginning of the seventh century BCE, but it looks back on a much older, orally transmitted heroic world.

Commercial cinema, especially with this monetary weight, is rooted in the present and always in its audience. Even the most historically conscientious film will be seen by people who enter the cinema with their contemporary concepts of love, trauma, war, family, gender, guilt and power. Nolan cannot operate the Christian, psychoanalytic, post-heroic human being of the year 2026 out of us. That was probably clever.

Today, when I watched this film, this illusion was briefly enough for me. The illusion of having, for three hours, an infinite multitude of ancient forces before me: Sea. War. Loyalty. Cunning. Power. Family. Death. The foreign. The familiar. The house. The ship. The man. The woman. And finally the question of whether this distribution is really as natural as it has been told for thousands of years. Because perhaps one of the great achievements of Greek mythology and poetry begins here in the first place: human beings become figures, figures become constellations, constellations become something in which later generations can recognise themselves. One should not simply impose the modern concept of the “archetype” onto Homer — but here lies one of the birthplaces of that literary work on the human from which we later learned at all to think in recurring figures: (Warning: generative feminine forms) the one returning home, the warrior, the one waiting, the seductress, the father, the mother, the daughter, the queen, the stranger, the trickster, the lover. And this thinking in forms and archetypes is something towards which the visual arts in particular repeatedly place their creative Da Vinci finger: Look again. You know this figure. Perhaps you are it yourself right now.

Art does not educate by telling us the correct answer. It educates our gaze for the beautiful and the sacred. That is why, despite all my objections, I am happy that young people are currently running into this huge cinematic event. Not because afterwards they “know the Odyssey”. They do not.

Nolan has not fulfilled an educational mission, and the Odyssey is not learning material that can be ticked off after three hours of IMAX. But perhaps they get a first encounter with something. And this will, God willing, become another inner movement, perhaps the most important of all: wanting to understand even more deeply. Heroism that suddenly becomes suspicious of itself. War that does not simply end after victory. Archaic forces that continue to work inside human beings to this day. The question of whether cunning is really wisdom if it destroys a world — or art. Homecoming that might be more important than conquest. Preserving that is no less heroic than possessing. A hero who perhaps becomes interesting precisely where we stop forgiving him everything simply because the story bears his name.

That is not Homer. That is Nolan.

… at this moment my random music playback shifts to Hildegard Knef:

Illusionen …

Well, if that wasn’t the gods!