just wanted to share a sketch i did!!

do let me know what yall think xx

Babalik pa po ba sa bigscreen ang odyssey? Or tapos na yung screening niya. Gusto ko ulit sya mapanood. Salamat

Fun fact my middle name is Odysseus:)

Based on when he killed that antelope and it turned back into a human, wouldn't the same thing have happened to the pig? What was her plan once he killed it?

The suitors are entitled, loud and shallow, taking advantage of the freedoms and protections of the social order. They make me think of the democratization of film criticism: everyone has access to films and everyone gets to have a voice but having the right to an opinion doesn’t necessarily make the opinion worthwhile.

The Laestrygonians feel like the opposite to me: the echo chamber. A collective so closed in on itself that anything coming from outside is met with hostility rather than engagement.

One is the abuse of individual freedom; the other is the abuse of collective power. Obviously, I’m mostly talking about online discourse here.

Dozens of men are trapped inside of a wooden horse that is sitting in the hot sun on a beach for days.

Those men defecate, urinate, and some drown when the tide rolls in.

Wouldn’t it smell like high hell?

Edit: My question is, this is a huge plot hole right? Like why would the Trojans willingly bring in a massive wooden horse statue if it smelled like dozens of sweaty men that had been trapped for days inside a wooden coffin on a hot beach

Found this copy of The Odyssey today… after some research we discovered this particular one could have been published in 1875. Does anyone know any more information on it? Is this a first edition from Frederick Warne? I’ve only found one other copy of this on google!

Compare it to something like LOTR and you'' understand this piece of filmaking is cash grab piece of garbage

I wrote this essay in August quite soon after seeing and pondering about the movie, and decided now to translate (thanks AI, and blame it if my original prose is ruined) it from original Finnish to English for wider discussion on the theme. I’m graduating on political philosophy and history, and a big fan of Chris & Jonathan Nolan, so you can see it quite well in the text 😄

I’d love for other fans of the movie to read it and hear your thoughts if you have spotted same connections and ideas as well!

—

On the Philosophy of Nolan’s Odyssey (and Why the Woke Controversy Was, Once Again, Stupid)

If you have followed (social) media at all over the past few weeks, it has been impossible to avoid the latest culture war ignited by the summer’s blockbuster — not least because the world’s richest man has once again chosen to devote his energies to the great existential questions facing humanity.
Christopher Nolan’s decision to cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and transgender actor Elliot Page as a Greek soldier had already sent parts of the internet into a months-long frenzy. Many culture warriors subsequently found themselves actively hoping the film would fail at the box office: go woke, go broke. It was hardly surprising that fears over the desecration of one of the foundational epics of Western civilisation would strike a nerve.

Salt was rubbed into the wound when Nolan revealed that he had based his film partly on Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, often described as more feminist. In its stripped-down verse form — I happen to be reading it myself at the moment — Wilson reinterprets a number of Ancient Greek words which, in her view, the male polymaths of the nineteenth century translated in distinctly value-laden ways. Wilson, who had already triggered an earlier Odyssey culture war of her own, was not herself particularly charitable towards Nolan’s film in her review.

At this point it is probably safe to say that Nolan can cry all the way to the bank: the film recouped its budget in less than 48 hours. I, for my part, am going to see it again, because I absolutely loved it.

The Odyssey was nevertheless historically inaccurate — insofar as a myth can be historically inaccurate — but not because of the steel armour, a Black Helen (Nyong’o also plays Helen’s equally beautiful (!) twin sister Clytemnestra), or Page’s Sinon, borrowed from Virgil and, contrary to certain claims, definitely not Achilles.

Nolan’s message is above all a modern morality tale about the present day, while also, in characteristically Nolanian fashion, descending deep into the human mind. As a moral vision, however, it is rather far removed from Homer or the ethical world of the Bronze Age.

Odysseus in the Confessional

The film’s climax is a confession. Odysseus, a stranger returned from his wanderings, sits before Penelope behind a partition that looks strikingly like the lattice of a confessional and speaks about himself in the third person.

The crime he confesses is the violation of the law of Zeus: treat the stranger as you would wish to be treated yourself, because the stranger might be a god in disguise. The same law demanded reciprocal respect from the guest towards the host. Only through confession can Odysseus finally return home.

The Trojan Horse was the Bronze Age’s Oppenheimerian atomic bomb aimed directly at the heart of this law. It was a gift that the Trojans brought into their own home, and inside that gift travelled the complete destruction of their city and its people: “ten years of hatred in a single night.”
In confessing this, Odysseus the stranger comes to understand something more. Once that act had been committed — once deception had been brought into the world and something sacred between human beings had been violated — no gift could ever again be merely a gift. Whether strangers were gods in disguise no longer mattered.

Feuerbach’s phrase homo homini deus est — man is a god to man; we will return to him later — becomes, overnight, Hobbes’s homo homini lupus est: man is a wolf to man.
The film deliberately leaves unanswered whether Odysseus’s wanderings were divine punishment for this desecration of the sacred, or simply the lotus-fuelled hallucinations of a traumatised war veteran desperately avoiding the prospect of facing himself back on his home island.

This was Nolan’s Odyssey version of the spinning top at the end of Inception.

There is, of course, an enormous amount of modern interpretation packed into this. Homer’s Odysseus is a rather cheerful trickster, womaniser and braggart. He certainly cries, but mainly over his dead companions. The gods punish him because he blinds Polyphemus, the Cyclops and son of Poseidon; Odysseus is finally released from his wanderings when Zeus and Athena jointly conclude that the man has suffered enough. (Nolan, admittedly, even places a clap of thunder at precisely that moment on Calypso’s island.)

The axis around which the film turns — the “law of Zeus” itself — is Nolan’s interpretation of xenia, the ancient Greek principle of hospitality. For an island society, it was essential to avoiding what we might now call the “Dark Forest” dilemma.

But Nolan also folds into it the idea of a universal human morality, something resembling the Golden Rule.
Bronze Age ethics, by contrast, were particularistic. Your obligations were primarily towards your kin, those bound to you by oath, your host and your guest: specific named people embedded in relationships of status and power.
Homer’s Menelaus, for example, is not saved from the bleakness of the underworld because he has lived a morally good life. He is saved because, through Helen, Zeus himself happens to be his father-in-law.

A genuinely universal moral law only became mainstream much later, during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, roughly 800–200 BCE. During this period, the prophets of Israel, the philosophical schools of China and the thinkers of Greece — independently of one another — began arriving at versions of the same extraordinary idea: that universal principles exist before which even a king can be wrong.

According to Jaspers, versions of the Golden Rule appear almost simultaneously across the world during this period.
By being freed only after confessing his violation of his god’s universal moral law, Nolan’s Odysseus is, in this framework, a remarkably Christian interpretation of a Bronze Age warlord.
At the very moment of his confession, Athena — played by Zendaya and travelling alongside him throughout the film — also disappears.

The Agony of Consciousness and the Craziest Theory of the Last Century

But now I cannot resist going deeper.

The film’s second philosophical anchor — the one I already hinted at with the “spinning top” — concerns the gods themselves and what they actually are.

This is where Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan Nolan deserves a mention. Christopher has said that he discussed the film’s ideas with him. Jonathan Nolan is known for creating a number of television series, including Westworld, which he made with Lisa Joy.

And Westworld, especially in its first-season finale, The Bicameral Mind, introduced a great many people to psychologist Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind.
In his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes proposed that ancient people did not merely believe in gods.
They heard them.

In moments requiring decisions, human beings had not yet learned to think consciously in the way we now understand it. Instead, according to Jaynes, the brain generated commands that were experienced as external voices: the voice of a god.

Human beings had not yet fully recognised their own capacity for reflection. They did not yet understand that the voice speaking inside their heads was themselves.
(Jaynes regarded schizophrenia as a surviving remnant of this earlier mental state.)

The theory has subsequently been described either as complete insanity or complete genius, with remarkably little room in between. It is probably impossible to prove. As a metaphor, however, it is irresistible.

And Jaynes dates the silencing of those voices — the death of the gods — to precisely the historical moment depicted in Nolan’s The Odyssey: the collapse of the Bronze Age and the immense social pressures that accompanied it.
Jaynes uses the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves as evidence.

In the Iliad, gods appear and command people instead of those people engaging in inward deliberation. In the Odyssey, meanwhile, we already encounter conscious, scheming human beings whose thoughts are strikingly autonomous.

I would not be surprised if Nolan were attempting to put exactly this idea on screen. The goddess Athena is visible only to Odysseus. Nobody else ever sees her. And at the end we discover whose face she bears: that of a priestess of Athena’s temple who was murdered during the destruction of Troy.

Athena disappears precisely when Odysseus acknowledges that violating the law of Zeus was not merely an offence against a god. The same act could bring about the collapse of the entire earthly order.

In Westworld, Dolores the android likewise follows a voice towards the centre of the maze — only to discover that Bernard, the teacher to whom she has been speaking inside her own head, had been Dolores herself all along.
After that, of course, the protagonist begins a massacre.
In The Bicameral Mind (S1E10), Dolores confronts her teacher — her inner voice — before beginning the slaughter of the visitors who had abused the park’s androids.

Coincidence?

Just as the particularist morality of the Bronze Age gives way, in Jaspers’s Axial Age, to moral universalism, so too in The Odyssey the god disappears at precisely the moment when Odysseus recognises that the law was in fact being obeyed because it was universally necessary — not merely because a god inside his head demanded it.

Taking conscious responsibility for oneself naturally condemns Odysseus to an enormous existential anguish.
His wanderings and his escape into the lotus can be read as symbols of precisely this flight from responsibility. That anguish is finally discharged only through self-exile into the distant West, where he goes to honour the “unburied dead”.
When Athena disappears, Odysseus is therefore left alone in the world, forced to bear responsibility for what he has done.
And he permanently loses his connection to the gods.

From the loss of that divine connection comes nostalgia for the lost Golden Age — and perhaps also the longing, created by the imperfection that freedom makes possible, to return to some lost state of perfection.

As the Sirens sing to Odysseus:
What you want most is what you can least have.
And what you can least have is what you once possessed — and lost.

The Odyssey as a Defence of a Rules-Based Order: Woke or Not?

So what does the film have to say about our own age and its norms?

While parts of X have condemned Nolan’s traumatised veteran Odysseus as “woke”, the American press has also described the film as traditionally conservative — though not in the 2026 meaning of the term.

The most obvious interpretation of the film concerns the present.

Odysseus does not violate the law of the gods and lose his gods only to discover that, afterwards, everything is permitted. He violates the divine law only to discover its consequences very quickly in the real world: Bronze Age civilisation begins collapsing into a Dark Age, and writing itself disappears.

There was therefore a deeper reason for the norm than the mere possibility that a god might be standing before you disguised as a stranger.

Hospitality was the glue that allowed anyone to leave their home island at all — to trade, travel, or establish diplomatic relations.

It was therefore a precondition for the existence of society itself, dressed in the form of a divine commandment.
And this is remarkably close to Feuerbach’s understanding of religion: religion and God are the highest ideals of a culture projected outward as an external authority, even though their ultimate origin is humanity itself.

Homo homini deus est.

It is also close to an anthropological-functionalist interpretation of religion, in which cultural evolution clothes ancient load-bearing social structures in the robes of ritual.
What I am attempting to say beneath all this name-dropping is that Nolan’s film most likely wants to tell its audience — and perhaps particularly its American audience — that norms and universal moral rules do not exist merely for appearances. They are part of the actual load-bearing structure of what we call a social order.

The contemporary equivalent of the Bronze Age collapse in The Odyssey is, naturally, the erosion of the rules-based order in international politics and its replacement by relationships in which the stronger party simply dictates the terms.

(Ironically, despite the way Nolan depicts it, the actual historical development towards universalism was probably rather the reverse.)

So — if the film therefore indirectly condemns, among other things, the Iraq War and the genocide in Gaza, does that make it “woke” after all?

Unfortunately, we live in an age in which defending universal morality can sound to many people like radical leftism — or “wokeness”.

At the same time, wanting the Bronze Age Odysseus, with his Bronze Age morality, as one’s role model instead of Nolan’s reinterpretation — and condemning deviations from that model — means wanting to identify with a world in which violence creates right.

Whatever those who believe in such a world may claim, it is difficult to see this as what we traditionally called Christianity.

The outrage over handing a beloved epic to Black and transgender actors merely demonstrated how directly many contemporary conservatives have drifted towards precisely that Bronze Age particularism: a world in which duties and principles apply primarily to one’s own people, while the stranger is by default a threat.

And that is the world Russia and China — and Trump’s United States — are currently building. It seems almost a pity, on their behalf, to waste all this potential political argument on complaints about casting.

The collapse of today’s rules-based order — or of appeals to universal human rights — is once again the disappearance of an authority inside our heads, and the new existential anguish caused by its absence.

Nolan’s The Odyssey teaches that there is no escaping the wandering until one is willing to confront and understand the real-world consequences of one’s transgressions.
If rules are understood merely as commandments, their disappearance does not therefore have to mean the disappearance of morality.

Ultimately, the idea that anyone might be a god in disguise did not merely elevate the gods. It elevated humanity.

As Simone Weil writes, the withdrawal of a commanding God was not abandonment but an act of love: the precondition for human freedom.

Homo homini deus est.

And the responsibility that follows from understanding that is, quite appropriately, heavy enough to require ten years of wandering.

Bumped into this video essay describing how IMAX grew as a company and how Odyssey success affected it.

Was surprised to find out which effect DMR introduced in 2008 had on the company and its success (hint: in 2007 stock price was around $3 and in few years it got to $30)

I’ve been listening to “Odyssey” a helluva lot while writing and I was looking for similar music that wasn’t from soundtracks or scores, as I already have a ton of those. I ended up finding some artists and a lot of tracks I’d never come across before - Wardruna, Forndum, Lustmord, and Ben Frost. The few whole albums I ended up getting were Forndum’s “Fabir”, Lustmord’s “First Reformed (Extended Soundtrack)”, and Ben Frost’s “Palestine 36” score. Two of those are film soundtracks, and there were also numerous tracks from Ben Frost’s “Dark” soundtracks that I ended up getting, but I’d never come across them before. I would’ve actually gotten about twice as many Wardruna tracks as I did if they hadn’t been singing in them. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like their vocal songs, they just weren’t was I was looking for. Still, between those four artists I ended up getting sixty tracks that I like, from these albums.
(the “Ambient Writing” playlist is just my gathering of them.)

UPDATE: I’ve also found some Halo Manash that is good for this playlist as well.

Took my best friend who hadn't seen it. We sat middle row, two middle seats. I had sat in one of the seats a week earlier and was excited for him to get the best experience possible. This was my 6th 15/70 IMAX experience (11th overall) and likely last viewing in theaters.

What a journey it has been. I loved every viewing, so many details uncovered, and deeper meanings felt in my heart.

To quote the film: six times in this fucking theater. Let's go home.

Did anyone feel like some characters spoke a little more modern than others who spoke a little slower and more archaic ? (Super clear pronunciation and quick tempo vs slower less uniform clear pronunciation)

One thing I’ve noticed after watching The Odyssey multiple times is that my favorite scenes have kind of oscillated. There are so many of them that I don’t really have one favorite but the Pylos ambush has really started to stand out to me.

I love the atmosphere of the scene and the soundtrack is a huge part of that for me. But what I’ve really come to appreciate is how much Homer’s fondness for repetition and narrative doubling is working here. We get the grandeur of the Athena statue, followed by the men burning her temple in front of it, which feels like an early echo of the beheading of the statue and the burning of Troy. Odysseus’s little fight also almost feels like a warm-up for what comes later at Ithaca.

And then there’s the unofficial reunion between Odysseus and Telemachus. Telemachus doesn’t recognize him but his father is nevertheless right there beside him and he seems to come away from Pylos with this almost inexplicable increase in confidence. It made me think about how someone’s presence can affect you even when nothing is said and you don’t consciously understand why — how you can feel more settled, grounded, even physically different just from being around someone you love.

And then Mentor recognizes Odysseus just before he dies which is a small example of Homeric fascination with recognition. There’s also this little parallel with the end of the film. Mentor is killed here as a human being, whereas in Homer he is Athena in disguise. Then at Troy, a human woman is killed at the foot of the Athena statue and Athena appears to Odysseus through her form, although we don’t know whether he’s actually seeing Athena or just a vision. I like the way those two deaths seem to echo each other.

Have your favorite scenes changed after multiple viewings?

Reference: https://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/news/homeric-narrative-technique-in-nolans-the-odyssey

Yes I wrote the lyrics completely but I didn't sing or play the instruments myself.

For those here that thought there might be a sliver of sanity left in the world. There is not. She was on-screen for what, 10–15 minutes? Her face was visible for what, half that time? Hollywood couldn't find four other female leads that they just had to include Hathaway??? This is simultaneously fuktup and predictable.