Coco Parkinson–Huggins & George Lapshynov review Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’. What if the stranger we should fear is ourselves? 04/08/2026
Why do stories written nearly three thousand years ago still captivate us today? Because the greatest stories are rarely about the past: they become mirrors in which every generation sees itself.
Few stories have proved more enduring in this respect than Homer’s Odyssey. Enter Christopher Nolan’s take on it, a blockbuster and star–studded screen adaptation of one of the most famous and influential stories in the Western cultural canon. It is perhaps unsurprising that Nolan decided to make his own version of the poem. As classicist Emily Wilson and others have argued, themes of journeying, homecoming, meaning and, indeed, a sense of man (and, in Nolan’s case, only ever of man) standing on the edge of world–historical change, are deeply Nolan–esque, from Interstellar to Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.
These are themes of Nolan’s work for a reason; they speak deeply to our contemporary moment. Whether it is the nonchalance with which tech giants affirm that AI may well destroy humanity, what appears to be the ever–deepening polarisation of politics, or the increasing frequency of climate change–related disasters, there is a strong sense that we are collectively on the edge.
That atmosphere permeates Nolan’s Odyssey. Hanging throughout the film is a sense of impending crisis. Within the story’s historical context, this takes the form of the Bronze Age Collapse. Within our contemporary context, to which the story alludes, it refers to notions of a collapse of the West (whether perceived or actual). Characters whisper about the approaching “people from the sea”, mysterious outsiders who will bring about the end of their civilisation. The mood is unmistakably eschatological, and it is difficult not to hear in it echoes of the End Times, including the biblical language of judgement and endings.
What struck us most, however, was what this impending coming of “the people from the sea” was accompanied by: the breakdown of “Zeus’s law”. Whilst questions of travel, migration and the encounters with strangers are certainly strong themes in Homer’s original, Nolan arguably makes xenía, the sacred duties between host and guest, far more explicitly the moral axis of the story. Indeed, Nolan’s depiction of Zeus’s law bears a striking resemblance to biblical ideas of hospitality, as Krish Kandiah and others have pointed out. If the Odyssey has shaped the minds of most Western writers for centuries, then so have biblical stories which repeatedly present the stranger as a figure through whom God (Genesis 18, Matthew 25) and his angels (Hebrews 13) may be encountered.
Across Nolan’s film, there is a persistent sense that this moral order is fraying. In much the same way, contemporary political language across both the Left and the Right in Britain is filled with anxiety about the erosion of the moral assumptions on which our common life depends. Whether expressed through concerns about the “rules–based international order” governing global cooperation, the decline of trust in public institutions, or the loss of a shared national cultural inheritance, depending on one’s priorities, there is a seemingly universal sense that something which once held society together is becoming harder to sustain. Can a society survive when trust and hospitality cease to be? The Odyssey offers an imperfect (and somewhat gratuitously violent) but compelling parable of what happens when our common life is no longer rooted in shared moral commitments.
In this context, the Trojan horse is not only a brilliant military trick; it is portrayed as a sacrilege against hospitality, an attack on what holds society together. It becomes, argues Joseph Earp, the moment when trust breaks down, when a horse is no longer simply a horse and appearances can no longer be believed. Not simply the lies we tell, but the institutions, technologies and political projects that promise security or prosperity while quietly corroding the trust on which societies rest.
The irony is that through its shallowing and blockbuster–ing of much of its characters, the film undercuts the very themes it wishes to explore. The female characters from Penelope through to Calypso are all but hollowed out. Even the choice to parachute some of Hollywood’s biggest names into leading roles distracts from the serious themes it wishes to discuss. Meanwhile, the film’s breathtaking photography and the scale of the production overwhelm the human stories of suffering it intends to honour.
Just as he does not realise that it is his own acts of destruction on this journey home that are contributing to its tearing it apart, the film calls us to reflect – in a somewhat heavy–handed way – on how the forces eroding our own common life are not only beyond our borders but also within our own habits, institutions, and actions. Every civilisation fears the stranger. Nolan asks a more uncomfortable question: what if the stranger we should fear is ourselves?
Perhaps that is why The Odyssey still matters. It reminds us that every civilisation eventually faces the same question: not simply whether it can defend itself, but whether it still remembers the moral vision that made it worth defending.
Nolan’s film cannot fully answer that question. It remains, ultimately, a Greek tragedy in which violence restores order only temporarily. Christianity offers a different ending, one in which homecoming comes not through vengeance but through grace.
Even so, Nolan leaves us with an important warning. The forces capable of unravelling a civilisation are not always waiting beyond our borders. More often, they begin within us, whenever trust gives way to suspicion, hospitality to fear, and our shared moral imagination begins to fade. The question is, what are our Trojan horses?
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