Before watching the movie, I stumbled across one of those “the worst person you know just made a great point” posts, this one about Ben Shapiro’s thoughts on The Odyssey. Believe me, he was the last person I needed a take from. But what I read genuinely surprised me, and it rocked back and forth in my mind through the entire viewing.
Maybe the tweet primed me, but what I saw was a deeply Christian movie, thematically. Guilt is not new territory for Nolan; think of the terrifying thumping-speech scene in Oppenheimer. But here he stretches that theme across an entire epic. The Odyssey becomes the story of a man facing the gods’ wrath for breaking Zeus’s Law with the Trojan horse.
Xenia, the ancient Greek law of hospitality, is about mutual respect between host and guest. The film gives the traditional justification: any guest might be a god in disguise. You could even map that onto Jesus’s time as a mortal, born in a manger, walking among sinners, effectively undercover as the Son of Man.
But Shapiro pushed past that surface reading. Xenia, he argued, carries the biblical “Golden Rule” of treating others well because man was made in the image of God. In Jesus’s words: “And as you wish men would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31). That struck a chord with me, because it transforms a seemingly made-up rule into a moral, and quite Christian, realization.
The film shows the consequence of violating this law twice, as bookends. First, during the sack of Troy, Odysseus witnesses a young commoner (Zendaya) violated and beheaded at the very moment Athena’s statue is beheaded in her own temple. He looks on in disgust, shame, and horror, realizing what he has unleashed on the city. That is why the girl’s image fuses with Athena in his mind for the rest of the film: her image is the consequence of his violation.
The second instance is Antinous, Penelope’s prideful suitor, who insults and strikes a beggar at the banquet, breaking Zeus’s Law in Odysseus’s own hall. The beggar turns out to be Odysseus in disguise, and Antinous meets his end. It plays as if Odysseus were Zeus himself: a god in disguise administering the trial, and a man failing it. Both scenes deliver the same message, treat others as you would want to be treated, or else.
The Greek gods were never much for guilt and shame. They are an indulgent, incestuous, hedonistic bunch, and outside of set pieces like Sisyphus and Prometheus, consequence is not really their theme. Nolan changes that. He reframes sin as a domino chain, a karmic event.
Karma is a Buddhist concept, not a Christian one, but Christianity has its own version: sin contaminates. It is infectious, and it damages the world at large, not just the sinner. It recalls the Lord of the Old Testament surveying a world so infected that only a complete factory reset could fix it: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Hence Noah’s Ark.
Odysseus’s punishment is different in form but identical in theme. At first he defies it. He believes his power and wit can carry him and his men home in one piece. But island after island, monster after monster, temptation after temptation, he keeps violating Zeus’s Law, and the dominoes keep falling. Whether by the gods or by the nature of beasts, he loses everything, including the soldiers he believed were innocent of his crime. What he did at Troy was always going to come back to him.
So when he violates the law one last time, now as a host slaughtering his own guests, he finally knows what to do. Only through self-imposed exile, with his wife at his side no less, can he and Ithaca be redeemed.
This is an extremely gritty film. Everything is dirty and horrific. We have all heard the phrase “Catholic guilt,” that deep internal shame born-and-raised Catholics carry as the residue of sin, and I think that is the core of my reading. Nolan did not depict a hero’s journey. He depicted a sinner’s journey: a path toward salvation and forgiveness from God, or the gods.
In Nolan’s telling, Odysseus is not simply the warrior king who wins the battle and sails home. He is a man who comes to understand the violence, pain, and suffering he brought to Troy, faces the consequences, returns home, and redeems himself in exile. The bottom line is that you cannot get away with anything. The Lord is not a vengeful God, but He does want us sinners to grasp the gravity of what we have done, and to redeem it through confession and action.