It's been a busy year for me, which is why I haven't written anything on here since my favorite 2025 movies list toward the beginning of this year. Like just about everyone else, though, I did make time to watch The Odyssey. I saw it the Tuesday after it opened with my wife, then in imax (or at least the best imitation of it available in San Diego) with a friend. Overall, I really liked it!
In the lead up to its release, many of the worst types of rightwing commentators tried to get their audience to skip the movie due to Nolan casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Paige as... well, a pretty unimportant side character that they just couldn't help but whine about anyway. Their attempt to take momentum away from the movie failed spectacularly, of course, but it has created some discourse around what exactly the its story is communicating thematically. For some, this has meant trying to figure out where it stands politically.
For me, I'm not sure if The Odyssey fits anywhere neatly on the standard political spectrum. Since I started reflecting on what school of thought I could most clearly identify in the story and its themes, I just couldn't find a clean fit with liberalism, conservatism, socialism, or any other "-ism" that we usually think about. Instead, I thought of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. While I doubt it was intentional, I think Christopher Nolan ultimately made a film best understood through a Confucian lens.
The rest of this post will, of course, be dedicated to explaining what led me to this conclusion. That means THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. If you haven't seen the movie, I'd highly recommend watching it before reading this!
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S THE ODYSSEY
What else can be said about that great epic poem The Odyssey? It's one of the oldest stories we have in recorded human history. It tells the tale of Odysseus, a brilliant general who served in the Trojan War, a war whose details (and perhaps even very existence) historians of the ancient world still debate to this day. It follows Odysseus as he makes his way home. Along the way goes through as many trials and hardships as one could possibly imagine. Fortunately for him, he's helped by many people and even some gods throughout his journey, who all help give him a fighting chance against everything he encounters. When he finally gets home, he then has to reclaim his household in a showdown against all the suitors for his wife that have taken advantage of his absence.
Nolan makes some interesting choices when telling his version of the story. First off, the gods are barely present. He sets the tone for this pretty quickly, beginning the movie with a text scroll that says this tale takes place "in a time of apparent magic." Note the word "apparent" there, casting doubt as to whether there is really any magic at all. There is, of course, at least a little bit in that world- there are giants and monsters, spells and prophecies, among other things- but gods? Only one god regularly shows up in the movie: Athena, played by Zendaya. We'll get to her in a minute.
As for Odysseus himself, this is a man who (like most Christopher Nolan protagonists) carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. Whereas the traditional tale casts him in the light of glory, this movie places him in a shadow of responsibility and regret. We follow him on his journey home as the weight of this responsibility and regret bear down on him.
Like in the traditional tale, Odysseus is helped by people along the way. Unlike the traditional tale, Nolan emphasizes "Zeus's law", which tells people to help and trust others because you don't know who may be a god in disguise. Because Nolan loves slapping you in the face with ideas he wants to get across in his movies (I say that affectionately, I like him a lot as a director), we're regularly reminded of the importance of Zeus's law toward maintaining some sort of civilized society in the world.
What we find out at the end, though, is that Odysseus carries the regret that he does because he violated Zeus's law in a profound way. The Trojan horse ploy that is portrayed as a brilliant tactic earlier in the movie (and indeed in the entire original tale itself) is shown from a different angle here, and it's not a positive one. It makes sense when you think about it. After all, ultimately what the Greeks did by hiding in the horse and attacking Troy was violate social trust in order to go about slaughtering an entire city. It's a brilliant tactic, but also pretty messed up when you really think about it. And boy has Odysseus thought about it!
This takes us back to Athena. The Athena entity we've seen throughout the movie turns out to be the spitting image of a priestess the Greek forces slaughtered in part of their rampage against Troy. We don't know for sure if this entity who has followed Odysseus throughout the movie truly is Athena, or the ghost of the woman he killed, or perhaps even just a figment of his guilt-ridden imagination. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. What matters is that he betrayed Zeus's law, and the "Athena" that's followed him on his journey is a reminder of that betrayal. Because really it's a betrayal of humanity itself, gods or no gods.
From there, Odysseus goes about defeating the suitors who have taken advantage of Zeus's law by mooching off of his household in the years preceding his return. Taking on the suitors is itself an act that violates Zeus's law, though, which is why he fights the suitors alone and doesn't let his son Telemachus assist him in the main battle. He doesn't want Telemachus to have to carry the weight of the sins he has. So he fights the suitors himself. Eventually he triumphs and goes into exile with his wife Penelope to begin atoning for what he has done. The ending reflects on everything that has happened. We see the breakdown of society through the erosion of Zeus's law, but also a glimmer of hope in the possibility of renewal.
So what does this have to do with Confucianism? Before answering that question, let's have a quick crash course on Confucianism itself.
A BRIEF CRASH COURSE ON CONFUCIAN ETHICS
Chinese civilization goes back to ancient times. Many dynasties have risen and fallen through Chinese history. Their longest lasting dynasty, the Zhou Dynasty, technically lasted from around 1100 BCE to around 250 BCE. During the last two hundred years or so of the Dynasty, though, war and chaos engulfed the land. Historians call this tail end of the Zhou Dynasty the "Warring States" period for reasons you can probably guess from the name. It was in this era that Confucius, along with many other iconic ancient Chinese philosophers, emerged.
Confucianism is based in large part around social relations and maintaining societal harmony. One of its core tenants is the idea of the "five relations" that define society*, which are ruler/subject, parent/child, husband/wife, elder sibling/younger sibling, and friend/friend. The idea was that if everyone put proper effort into cultivating and maintaining these relationships, you would have social harmony. We are social creatures, after all, and our relationships with one another are key components of our lives both individually as people and collectively as a society. If we all had healthy relationships in our own lives, then, that would ripple outward to create a healthy society.
With that said, all of these relationships are hierarchical except for friend/friend. The subject is expected to obey the ruler, the child the parent, the wife the husband, and the younger sibling the elder sibling. In that way, there's something conservative about Confucianism. At the same time, though, Confucius made it explicitly clear that, while these relationships were hierarchical, there was mutual obligation on both sides. Rulers had to take care of their subjects, parents had to take care of their children, and so on. This takes us to the concept of "ren."
"Ren" (also translated as "jen") is a Chinese idea that can roughly be translated to "humanness" or "benevolence." For Confucius, ren is the crucial ingredient to make everything work. We all must be good to one another regardless of our place in any given hierarchy for society to function. If you're a ruler, for example, you need to treat your subjects well and look out for their well-being. Simply put, you need to fulfill your end of the bargain. This is a large part of why, during his own lifetime, Confucius was dismissed as too idealistic when he tried to become an advisor to a variety of local Zhou-era leaders. They wanted advisors that would tell them how to win wars and build a state, not someone preaching the importance of humanity toward your fellow human beings.
A status of Confucius in Shanghai, China
So we have these five relationships and ren as two of the key underpinnings of Confucianism. But how does one actually act to try to achieve these things? There are many things Confucius would encourage, ranging from educating and refining yourself toward becoming a "gentleman" ("junzi" or "jun-tzu"**) to simply just being decent to your fellow human beings in the spirit of ren. But one particular thing that he placed a lot of emphasis on was ritual ("li"). He was very much in favor of people practicing ancient traditional Chinese rituals, such as those related to ancestor worship.
Interestingly enough, though, he did not necessarily believe in the divinity of these rituals. He did not write much about doing them so that you would get a good harvest or be able to literally communicate with your ancestors. Rather, he believed the act itself of participating sincerely in these rituals was what mattered, because it taught you to revere something greater than yourself- as he put it, to teach you to "live life as a reverential bow." It also put you into community with those around you, strengthening your social bonds with them. For Confucius, then, ritual wasn't necessarily about divine rewards, but about the personal and societal effects that such rituals cultivated.
There is, of course, much more that could be said about Confucianism, but these are some of its most important concepts, as well as some of those most relevant to Nolan's film. So lets get to showing how the two are connected.
*I modernized these relationships (just like Christopher Nolan modernized The Odyssey!), because originally they were more gendered- parent/child was father/son, for example. Shit was super sexist back in the day, so women were not assumed to be an important part of philosophical thinking.
**Though "junzi" is the term more often used, "jun-tzu" is a much better phonetic translation of the term.
TYING IT ALL TOGETHER
Honestly I just Googled "Confucius Ancient Greece" hoping I'd find a suitable pic, and I did!
So why is Confucianism such a good lens through which to view Nolan's The Odyssey? Let's start by looking at the relationships in the movie. We saw almost all of Confucius's five relations play out. Odysseus is a king, and we see loyal subjects like Eumaeus, his old servant. We of course see his husband/wife dynamic with Penelope and his father/son dynamic with Telemachus, and we even see a bit of a friend/friend dynamic with his second in command, Eurylochus. The only one we don't see is elder sibling/younger sibling, though a bad example of that dynamic sort of plays out between Telemachus and Antinous, played in a delightfully villainous way by Robert Pattinson.
It's worth noting that Nolan doesn't really seem to question the fundamental inequalities of these relationships themselves. Eumaeus is basically a slave in the movie and is explicitly a slave in the original story, but Nolan doesn't really question the justness of that dynamic any more than the original tale does. Instead, we get the impression that Damon's Odysseus was a good king to Eumaeus and the rest of his subjects, hence Eumaeus's loyalty. Same with the care between Odysseus and Penelope. Penelope is devoted to her husband and anxiously awaits his return, even twenty years later. While she expresses frustration at how systemic misogyny has prevented her from being able to take the reigns in Odysseus's absence, she still mostly just wants him back as her king and husband (as she says explicitly in an argument with Telamachus).
In terms of Odysseus's relations with those around him, then, Confucius would approve of Odysseus. He would see that Odysseus had fulfilled his obligations as a good king to his subjects, and in turn had the enduring loyalty of the best among them. But that is not the whole story, of course.
Odysseus and some of the people closest to him, in some way or another
While Odysseus may have done a good job ruling justly, as a general he profoundly violated Zeus's law in what he did with the Trojan horse. The betrayal of trust he masterminded was not only a violation in and of itself, but led to the slaughter of an entire town.
Speaking in Confucian terms, Odysseus obviously violated the spirit of ren/humanness through his actions. It's not very humane to deceive your enemies with promises of peace and slaughter everyone, including civilians. But it was more than that. Because by breaking Zeus's law, he was also breaking a shared societal practice of social trust that helped create functioning societies in the Greek world. He not only defied the spirit of ren, then, but also li/ritual. In this case, the two were one and the same.
While his actions angered the gods, we don't actually see the gods themselves. What we do see, though, is how regression from Zeus's law of hospitality and trust is making the human worse a worse place. This takes us back to Confucius's outlook on rituals- how the personal and social effects of a ritual are what we should pay attention to. That's what Nolan is paying attention to in his version of The Odyssey. Without humanity and shared ritual to improve us as people and connect us with one another, all is lost. Or at least all that is worth preserving.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Nolan's story ends lamenting the descent from civilization to chaos and barbarity. Confucius and the other philosophers of his day cultivated their philosophy during the Warring States era, which itself was an era partially defined by the sort of chaos and barbarity Nolan's Odysseus helps unleash on the Greek world. In our own world, too, international law and cooperation are eroding at an alarming rate. Gaza is perhaps the ugliest example of that in recent years, but it is by no means the only example.
Yet we should neither idealize the past, nor give into despair. The post-World War 2 order that defined our world until the present had some good things about it, but it also had great acts of barbarity within it too. Even in the eight decades since World War 2 ended, we've seen plenty of atrocities, war crimes, and even genocides. Some of these happened by the very "protectors" of the international order, such as the United States and Great Britain. While things will likely only get worse as our international institutions of diplomacy erode, we're not leaving behind an innocent world order. In many ways, its legitimacy has eroded thanks in part to its own crimes, hypocrisies, and excesses. Much like with Odysseus and the erosion of Zeus's law.
As for not giving into despair, it was during the Warring States era that Confucius and his fellow philosophers came up with the schools of thought that they did, changing China forever. Many of these philosophers would inspired countless great acts, and beautiful forms of cultural and societal connection. In our world, we are ruled by some of the most malignant, barbaric, vile people who have ever held power. But there are good people fighting to make themselves heard, too. And as a historian I can confidently say that you never know what will happen next after a period like this- sometimes things do get worse, but other times the worst comes just before things get better. Or, to quote another Nolan classic, "the night is darkest just before the dawn."
I don't know what's next for us in this world. All I know is that we can, and should, try our best to make it better in whatever ways we can. Things are tough, but they've been tough for most people through human history. Better things have never come without struggle. Let's do what we can, while we can, and hope for a better tomorrow.
