This article contains spoilers!
Director Christopher Nolan has done it again with his outstanding film The Odyssey, truly bringing the literary work to life. The classic tale follows Odysseus on his long and treacherous journey home to his family after the Trojan War. Having left to fight in the war, Odysseus left his kingdom without a king and his wife Penelope to fend for herself against endless unwanted suitors. The men who presume Odysseus to be dead seek Penelope’s hand in marriage and the power of ruling over Ithaca. Penelope does everything she can to prevent needing to pick a suitor, holding out hope that her husband will one day return. Odysseus’s son Telemachus detests the suitors just as much if not more than his mother does.
Little does his family know that Odysseus has been stuck on an island with the goddess Calypso for seven years. Calypso fell in love with him after he washed up on her shore and held him captive ever since, feeding him lotus flowers so he would forget his life before meeting her. As she finally allows him to remember what brought him there, Odysseus tells the story of what occurred in the years between the war and his arrival at her island.
When the Trojan War ended, Odysseus began his journey home with a crew composed of hundreds of loyal men. With time, he lost every one of them due to his own arrogance, failing his duty as their captain and king.
Odysseus’s actions prove he is the embodiment of the male ego, having done whatever he pleased without care for how what he did would affect the people he cared about. His desperation to prove his worth as a leader and as a man ultimately made him responsible for the loss of good men. Most if not all had families to come home to just the same as he did.
The first crack in the glass was their encounter with the cyclops, Polyphemus. Despite their hesitation, Odysseus convinced his men to stay and eat from the cyclops’s food. They find themselves stuck in his cave and have to trick the giant beast so that they may escape, but are unable to save their entire crew from his wrath. Polyphemus eats several of their men when Odysseus has the brilliant idea to provoke the already-agitated creature by shooting him with an arrow just as they are nearly in the clear.
To make matters worse, the cyclops was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea. Angered by their actions, Poseidon curses Odysseus’s crew by making their already difficult voyage nearly impossible. After many more instances where Odysseus fails his crew, they understandably lose faith in their captain.
Finally, Odysseus is warned by a prophet that his men will perish if they bring harm to the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios. When their crew ends up on the island of Thrinacia, Odysseus begs them to listen to him and to not eat from the cattle but ultimately the men give in. As predicted, his men die in a brutally violent storm. Odysseus, now completely alone, washes up nearly dead on Calypso’s shore, where he spends the next seven years under her spell.
Once Calypso lets him remember his life before meeting her, Odysseus leaves the prison that is her island and returns home to Ithaca. There he disguises himself as a peasant and defeats all the suitors in a seemingly impossible challenge chosen by Penelope. The suitors and Penelope come to the understanding that the peasant is their king, as Odysseus is able to shoot with the bow that only he could ever string. Once Odysseus’s disguise is revealed, he kills every last one of the unwanted suitors. The couple is finally reunited, but the time it took for them to be able to do so is undoubtedly a reflection of Odysseus’s own selfish desires.
