Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reimagines Homer’s epic as a psychological reckoning. Odysseus returns to Ithaca in disguise, discovers suitors plotting against Telemachus, and reveals himself through Penelope’s bow test. Gravely wounded after slaughtering the traitors, he abdicates to his son and sails away, unable to inhabit the kingdom built on the Trojan Horse’s moral catastrophe.
I wouldn't have ever imagined that a story like The Odyssey would ever need an ending explainer, but trust Christopher Nolan to exceed your expectations. Of course, Homer's epic poem has been reimagined a million times, each adapted to fit the era. But what makes the Matt Damon-starrer all the more gripping is the delicious (or should I say, heartbreaking) twist in the third half that turns the journey of the king on its head. Read on to find out what happened.
After years at sea, Odysseus (Matt Damon) finally reaches Ithaca. In Hades, the shade of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) had warns him not to walk into his own palace as a king; he needs to enter as nobody. Odysseus takes the advice and disguises himself as a beggar, and he finds out why: his court is overrun by suitors under Antinous (Robert Pattinson), who are already plotting to kill his son.
Still in disguise, Odysseus reconnects with his old and loyal swineherd Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), then secretly reveals himself to Telemachus (Tom Holland), the only person in the palace who treats a beggar with any decency. That single act of kindness is what convinces Odysseus his home isn't entirely lost. Later, alone with Penelope (Anne Hathaway]) and still unrecognized, he confesses what the Trojan Horse actually cost: not just a city, but the Law of Zeus himself, the highly revered rule of hospitality that lets people trust each other, and know that the person next to them won't destroy them on first sight.
Penelope, testing the room, announces a challenge only her real husband could pass: string Odysseus's old bow and shoot an arrow clean through twelve axe heads. Every suitor fails. The beggar doesn't, and the disguise comes off.
Just as it happens in Homer's version, Odysseus kills Antinous and Polybus (Corey Hawkins); Telemachus cuts down the treacherous Melanthius (Logan Marshall-Green), while the disloyal servant Melantho (Mia Goth) is executed for siding with the suitors. But Odysseus is heavily injured during the fight, and the we never know whether these wounds are survivable.
Now that the journey is complete, in stead of settling onto the throne he bled for, he hands the kingdom to Telemachus and sails off with Penelope toward open, unnamed water.
The film's biggest twist is a flashback buried inside Odysseus's memory. Athena (Zendaya) has guided him through the entire journey: cyclops, sirens, the underworld, all of it. She appears in fleeting moments, almost like a vision. But when Nolan finally shows the fall of Troy in full do we see where her face actually came from. The woman guiding Odysseus is not Athena at all. She was a priestess he watched get beheaded when Troy was ransacked, her death folded so deeply into his memory that he spent decades dressing his guilt up as divine company.
Every time "Athena" appeared to steady Odysseus through a crisis, it wasn't wisdom arriving from Olympus; it was a dead woman's face standing in for a war crime he can't put down.
And so, the major plot point of Homer's Odyssey, where Gods affected the fate of humans, is rejected by Nolan to be a product of man's subconcious. The poem asserts that Odyssey happened because of Poseidon's wrath over the sly king's treatment of his son, a cyclops named Polyphemus. Here the sea god's wrath is only a superstitious conjecture spread around by terrified seamen.
Gods in Nolan's world are just what guilt, fear and violence looks like when a person needs it to have a face.
Homer's Odysseus wants nothing more than Ithaca. Nolan's Odysseus is harder to read. Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), who made it back to Sparta in a fraction of the time. So Odysseus is asked, more than once, why his journey took so long, and he doesn't have an answer ready until he's back again, facing the ramifications of the Trojan Horse.
The truth he lands on isn't about Poseidon or bad winds. He watched what the Trojan Horse actually did once the gates opened, and some part of him has been circling the coast ever since. What waited for him at home, a wife, a son, and kingdom, waited for a version of himself that hadn't yet broken the one rule holding people together.
This Odysseus saw the end of the world when he saw his own men pillaging through a city at night just for the sake of victory. Circe (Samantha Morton) wasn't wrong in turning his men into pigs. They, after all were no different than swine that had developed a taste for human blood. So were all the rest who returned to their kingdoms after the way. Zeus's Law of Hospitality had been broken, and the victory of his side lay on celebrating this blasphemy. And the blame for all of it fell on his shoulders.
All this haunted Odysseus. Even more than that, he was terrified of returning to a world that would forever be changed because of his actions. And so, through one terrible misfortune to another, he kept wandering so that he wouldn't have to face the world his cunningness had given birth to.