The Odyssey Ending Explained: One Big Change From Homer's Epic

Spoilers follow.

Christopher Nolan's new film adaptation of "The Odyssey" might be part of a thematic trilogy that also includes his films "Dunkirk" and "Oppenheimer." Nolan seems to be unknotting how he feels about war. "Dunkirk," in practice, was a rah-rah World War II movie about the brave Dunkirk evacuation. That film fetishizes war, and is an excellent movie for any rivet-counters in the audience; it treats war as an object of fascination and an opportunity for humans to commit acts of heroism. 

On the flipside, however, we have "Oppenheimer," about Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and the development of the atomic bomb. The first half of "Oppenheimer" is very rivet-counting adjacent, obsessing over the scientific and engineering principles that went into developing a massively destructive weapon. Once the bomb is developed, however, Oppenheimer immediately begins to realize that a weapon that can kill the whole world might be the single most immoral thing our species can invent. 

"The Odyssey" is the link between those two movies. It initially declares the glories of wartime victory, but ultimately ends with messages of war's terrors. Near the end of "The Odyssey," Odysseus (Matt Damon) has flashbacks to the final moments of the Trojan War as described in "The Iliad" and realizes that the famed Trojan Horse is actually his atomic bomb. What some people call brilliant tactics are actually just a way to kill a lot of people. War is a gross impulse, Nolan argues. This is far from the "triumphant homecoming" that Homer's epic poem usually ends with. 

Homer's epic ends with a mood of victory, of completion. Nolan's ends with a moment of guilt and defeat. It's a striking departure from the classic.

A lot of the specifics of Homer's "Odyssey" remain intact for Nolan's film version. On the way home from the Trojan War, eager to rejoin his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) after a years-long absence on the throne of Ithaca, Odysseus gets lost among various magical Greek islands. He encounters a man-eating cyclops, faces off against the giant Laestrygonians, and sees his men transformed into pigs by the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton). Odysseus visits the land of the dead, sails his ship between a rock and a hard place, and ends up on the island of Calypso (Charlize Theron) for eight years. Naturally and eventually, he returns home. 

At home, Penelope has been fending off the boorish advances of dozens of suitors (represented by Robert Pattinson) who wish to usurp Odysseus' throne in his decades-long absence. When he finally gets home, Odysseus will have to subtly infiltrate his own house and kill all the suitors. All of this is going to be familiar to the teens who read Homer's epic in school. 

What Nolan inserts throughout the film, however, is that Odysseus is plagued by shame. The Trojan War, he begins to realize, wasn't a victory, but his greatest moral failing. When Circe turns his men into pigs, she points out that she was returning the violent, warlike men to their true form. When he visits the land of the dead, he is excoriated by Sinon (Elliot Page), a character borrowed from Virgil's "Aeneid." Sinon was killed after a Greek retreat, and points out that Odysseus has done nothing to honor the dead, and failed to think of fallen soldiers as victims. 

Odysseus begins to realize that he is responsible for endless death. "War hero" is an oxymoron.

Sinon is kind of the key to "The Odyssey." Earlier in the movie, Sinon took another's soldier's place in the Trojan War draft, a replacement that Odysseus oversaw (none of that is in Homer's epic). Sinon seemed convinced that fighting in the war was an act of bravery. When Sinon is killed as part of a tactical retreat — a kill that Odysseus knew would happen — all that nobility seems futile. Soldiers killed in war, Sinon points out, are merely angry spirits, murdered in an effort to commit more murders. Sinon's death recontextualizes Odysseus' plan to infiltrate Troy with a giant wooden horse. His "brilliant plan" was just a way to murder women and children and ultimately disrespect the gods (in a potent symbol, a statue of Athena is decapitated). 

When Odysseus slays the suitors, it's staged like a thrilling action scene, but the violence is regrettable. He confesses to Penelope that his absence was, like his war effort, futile. And the film ends on a bleak line of dialogue that implies that no lessons will be learned. Only the stories of war and triumph will be told. We modern audiences, still clinging onto an epic that predates the English language, have failed to acknowledge that Odysseus was a guilty, shame-riddled failure. This is a very, very different take than we might remember from our high school classes. 

Like with "Oppenheimer," Nolan is finally starting to figure out his views on war. Even going back to the ancients, wars are just a bleak impulse we follow. Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), who started the Trojan War, is the impulse come to life. Odysseus is war's guilty conscience.