Emily Wilson has critiqued Christopher Nolan's Odyssey for being shallow. Philosopher of ethics Kathryn Lawson goes further. Using Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil — three thinkers who turned to Homer to make sense of atrocity after the World Wars — Lawson argues that by giving Odysseus a conscience, Nolan made a dangerous mistake. Homer's Odysseus feels no guilt for his violence which serves as a warning that power rarely recognises its own cruelty and needs something external to stop it. By erasing that for a guilt-ridden hero, Nolan cuts the story’s ethical depth and leaves us with the fantasy that the powerful will change themselves once they understand what they've done. Real history, Lawson argues, suggests otherwise.

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In this summer’s blockbuster movie adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, the key theme is a variation of the Old Testament Hebrews 13:2, perhaps best known to literary types as the welcoming words written on the wall of the famous Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company:

“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

Writer/director Christopher Nolan’s main theme in the film blends this law of hospitality with the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have done to you,” another biblical invocation, this time in the New Testament’s Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:13. Together, these imperatives form the film’s “Law of Zeus”. Perhaps surprising for a summer blockbuster, the movie is predominantly a meditation on the ethical demands of the stranger, with a similar lesson to Nolan’s 2023 summer blockbuster Oppenheimer.

Film critics aside, the movie has had mixed reviews from philosophers and classicists alike. Classicist Emily Wilson found it to be shamefully written, although entertaining in a plebeian kind of way, while philosopher Slavoj Žižek argued that it was not the monster blockbuster he expected, but rather a modest chamber drama. But love it or hate it, it is undeniable that the main theme is a timely reflection upon our age of steadily rising social and political polarization and xenophobia. Here I will not offer a strict “review” of the film but rather invite a conversation between it and the twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Simone Weil, all of whom turned to Homer to consider this very theme during their own dark times. In this conversation between ages, I will consider the quietly hopeful arc of the film and why it ultimately fails to access the true crux of the ethical demand of the stranger.

Homeric ethics and the necessity of violence

For Arendt and Weil, Homer’s poem The Odyssey and its predecessor, The Iliad, are so miraculous because they narrate the war from the perspective of both the conquerors and the conquered. The implication of this narrative choice is that the poet(s) are able to recognize the humanity of those “enemies” in the city they have destroyed. The poem is able to contemplate a responsibility for atrocities without succumbing to the staggering abyss that may follow recognizing one’s own heinous crimes.