Nolan’s “Odyssey”: Between the Scylla of Anti-War Moralising and the Charybdis of Post-Imperial Melancholy

But the main feature of Homer's poem is that beneath the wrapper of heroic epic lies a filling made of the history of a region that has lost its stability and is rapidly falling apart. The destruction of Troy is one stage in that collapse.

It is precisely this “double blow” that makes Nolan's choice so interesting. On the one hand, “The Odyssey” is a thoroughly Hollywood, epic genre. It has everything, and above all the cult of the hero, of his adventures, of his countless enemies and, as the reward for all the ordeals, the return home. Strictly speaking, the story of Odysseus is built on the classical structure of the heroic myth.

On the other hand, it contains no factor of triumph. That option is left behind in the past immediately after the destruction of Troy, and it is cancelled out with every new misfortune that befalls Odysseus and his companions.

The premise of the film is that the world changed over the course of the war. Changed so much that the old order turned out to be fragile and victory failed to resolve the tasks that had been set. What is more, according to the contemporary interpretation of the collapse of the “Bronze Age”, it pushed the victorious Mycenaean civilisation and the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole into decline. The victory turned out to be, as people would later put it, “Pyrrhic”.

The victor cuts the branch of stability on which the region is sitting and sets in motion processes that destroy it very quickly. Victory changes its status from an achievement into a problem because, as we know, the victor overstrains himself. So much so that he can no longer withstand the Dorians, the “Sea Peoples”, natural disasters and economic collapse all at once — forces that bury the brilliant palace culture of Mycenae beneath them like an avalanche.

Despite the incredible distance in time, Nolan's film is more than relevant at the beginning of our turbulent twenty-first century. If only because the ghosts of colonial wars are surfacing again, together with their counterpart — the deconstruction of imperial grandeur. A hydra that never did die after the destruction of the Reich and the collapse of the USSR. Whose regrown heads keep hissing and biting the neighbours. And which may yet overstrain itself in a world that, just as three thousand years ago, does not tolerate technological archaisation. Only back then iron swords defeated bronze ones, whereas today the rhythm is set by drones with AI.

Nolan's “Odyssey” is not only about the end of the “Bronze Age” and of the space of the Eastern Mediterranean, but also about the end of the figure of the “imperial hero”, who is lost under the pressure of less noble conquerors, the destroyers of several empires at once.

The world of the Bronze Age: trade instead of romance

In order to understand the political basis of “The Odyssey”, one has to step outside mythology and look at the era that produced its plot.

Homer's story is one of the cornerstones on which our memory of the Late Bronze Age of the Eastern Mediterranean (the 13th—12th centuries BC) rests.

For a long time historians described this period as a conglomerate of several powerful and, at first glance, self-sufficient entities such as Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Akkad and Hatti.

Modern archaeological research, however, has recorded a somewhat different picture, one that left no room for phenomena such as isolation and autarky.

One of the leading Marxist methods of geopolitical analysis, known as Wallerstein's world-systems analysis, points to the existence of cores and peripheries, of resources and logistics, of exchange and competition.

The algorithm by which this space operated indicates a considerable interdependence between its regions.

The Mycenaeans themselves depended on metals, on trade, on craft production and, above all, on bronze.

The world of the Late Bronze Age was therefore very different from that of the Early Bronze Age. Chariots and swords gave way to caravans and logistics.

Troy — an important logistical hub of the era

The traditional, mythological reading of the Trojan War hinges on an enormous number of personalities and on the conflicts between them. In essence, Homer appeals to the moral side of the matter, whereas the real cause of the war was undoubtedly economic.

The main question that arises in this case is a very laconic one: why Troy?

Analysis of the myth provides no answers. Analysis of the geopolitics of the day does the opposite. The point is that Homer's Troy lay not far from the entrance to the Dardanelles, which means it controlled the logistics between two ecumenes — the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Given this, and given the geodynamics of that part of the Mediterranean, the city was doomed. If only because it had everything the kings of the Achaean coalition required. Resources and influence first of all.

The modern model of Homeric Troy points to two previously unknown but very important details. First, the Trojans were not Greeks but Luwians. Second, they belonged to the sphere of influence of the Hittite empire without being an immediate part of it. Either way, both Anatolian cultures — the peripheral Luwian and the mainstream Hittite — were destroyed at roughly the same time (around 1200 BC), by the same means (military expansion) and with the same weapon (iron). Although probably by different peoples. The Luwians by the Mycenaeans, and the Mycenaeans and the Hittites themselves by the “Sea Peoples”.

In geopolitical terms, then, “The Odyssey” is the tragedy of a once flourishing civilisation of the Eastern Mediterranean that failed to cope with ecological disasters, economic collapses, a young demographic profile and the newest technologies.

Troy is only the first gateway into the hell of the Bronze Age Collapse.

It is the victory of those whom Toynbee called the “external proletariat”, and the deconstruction of virtually every imperial space and administration available in the region.

The role of the “external proletariat” in the deconstruction of imperial spaces

For a long time the Bronze Age Collapse of around 1200 BC was described as the mysterious demise of great civilisations under the blows of the “Sea Peoples”. Today, however, it is increasingly productive to see it not as a one-off invasion of barbarians but as a systemic crisis of the entire Eastern Mediterranean world. The Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite state, the cities of the Levant and Egypt were all embedded in an extraordinarily complex network of trade, diplomacy, warfare and resource exchange. Its resilience was simultaneously its weakness: the destruction of a few nodes triggered a chain reaction across the whole system.

This is where it is worth recalling Arnold Toynbee's concept of the “external proletariat”. That was his term for groups located outside the political core of a civilisation but in constant interaction with it: peripheral peoples, migrants, mercenaries, nomads, warriors. They could serve empires, trade with them and master their military technologies while remaining excluded from their political order. At a moment of crisis such a periphery ceases to be a passive object of the core's expansion and becomes a historical subject in its own right.

It is in this perspective that one can also try to read the enigmatic “Sea Peoples”. There is no need to imagine them as a single people or as an army of conquerors that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Behind the name there may have stood heterogeneous groups — migrants, warriors, mercenaries, refugees, pirates, the populations of ruined or peripheral territories. In other words, part of that same Bronze Age world, but its unstable periphery.

The Bronze Age Collapse then appears not simply as the destruction of imperial spaces from outside, but as their deconstruction from within and from the periphery at the same time. The core is no longer able to maintain the roads, the palace bureaucracy, international trade, the armies and the system of redistribution. The periphery stops recognising its rules. Space that had previously been organised around the palace, the king and the great trade routes fragments into local worlds.

In this sense the ruins of Mycenae, Hattusa or Ugarit can be read not only as traces of “the end of civilisation”. They are traces of the end of a particular way of organising space and power. The imperial map, with its core, its dependent periphery and the controlled routes between them, disappears. On its debris new political communities, new routes and new identities emerge.

The Bronze Age Collapse is interesting precisely as the moment when the periphery stops being the periphery. The “external proletariat” enters the space of history, and imperial space, which had seemed natural and eternal, turns out to have been merely a temporary construction.

The left-wing critique of “The Odyssey”: from the trauma of war to the problem of the imperial hero

If a historical analysis of the Bronze Age allows us to see “The Odyssey” as the story of the collapse of a complex civilisational system, contemporary criticism of the film raises a different question: does Nolan really move beyond the traditional heroic myth — or does he merely give it a tragic colouring?

This is where the main dividing line between the film's defenders and its critics appears.

For some, “The Odyssey” is the story of a man paying for a war that exceeds his own understanding. It is a film about a veteran returning from a conflict in which victory turned out to be morally empty.

For others it is merely an updated version of the old imperial narrative: a man goes to war, endures trials, suffers, but in the end returns in order to restore his status as ruler.

In other words, the question is not whether Nolan shows the cruelty of war. He does show it.

The question is a different one: does he cast doubt on the very logic that produces war?

The answer to that question is modal. Its continuum is extremely long even within the left-wing spectrum taken on its own. To understand that answer better, let us look at several notable reviews of the film.

TRAUMA

Author: Matthew J. Hunter

Title: Everyone Just Wants to Go Back Home: A Review of The Odyssey (2026)

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Date: 21 July 2026.

Central to Hunter's reading is the trauma of return: Odysseus longs for home after the catastrophic Trojan War, yet the return proves fundamentally impossible. The author formulates this through an important distinction: home, for the hero, is no longer so much the geographical Ithaca as the time before the fall of Troy and before the loss of his own humanity. Odysseus' journey therefore appears as the movement of a traumatised man who physically survived the war but is unable to return to his pre-war self. The exhausting form of the film itself — horror, violence, storms, incessant movement — is intended, in Hunter's view, to make the viewer not merely see but bodily feel this traumatic journey.

At the same time, trauma in the review is not reduced to the psychology of an individual veteran. In Hunter's reading, Nolan turns the Trojan War into the collective trauma of the entire Bronze Age world. The destruction of Troy becomes a primary catastrophe whose violence spreads further: plunder and killing, the violation of xenia, the appearance of the “Sea Peoples”, the disintegration of trade networks and, ultimately, the collapse of an interdependent civilisational system. The author draws a direct parallel between the fall of Troy and the atomic bomb in “Oppenheimer”: an event after which trauma no longer belongs to its immediate victims alone but changes the world itself.

Most importantly, Hunter treats this trauma not as an accidental misfortune but as the return of imperial violence to its own creators. Odysseus and his men are at once traumatised by the war and producers of trauma themselves: they destroy Troy, plunder coastlines, enslave people, tear apart social bonds. Hence a closed circle of violence that does not end even with the return to Ithaca. In such a reading trauma becomes a political category: empire traumatises the periphery, but the violence it creates ultimately destroys the core as well. For Hunter, then, the question “can you go back home?” means above all this: is a return to normality possible after violence has destroyed the bonds on which that normality rested?

SUFFERING

Author: The Deep Dish

Title: The Odyssey (2026) Review

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At the centre of this review is a critique of the way Nolan turns Odysseus from a morally contradictory Homeric king into a modern, traumatised “good guy”. Odysseus belongs to the ruling class: he is a king, a military commander, the conqueror of Troy, a man endowed with power over others. In Homer his greatness is inseparable from cunning, violence, lies, plunder and a readiness to break the rules for the sake of his own aims. Nolan, however, shifts the centre of gravity away from the violence Odysseus commits as a representative of the military aristocracy and onto Odysseus' own suffering from the war he has lived through: the fall of Troy traumatises him, and he is tormented by guilt and by his awareness of the horror of war.

This produces a characteristic inversion: a representative of the ruling class who was the subject of conquest becomes the principal victim of his own story. The reviewer regards this as a fundamental simplification of Homer. The Homeric Odysseus does not condemn his own position as king and warrior, nor does he follow a modern therapeutic trajectory from violence to repentance. Nolan, by contrast, endows him with moral reflection, restraint and emotional vulnerability. As a result the social inequality between the king and those whom he commands, robs, kills or subjugates recedes into the background, and war becomes first and foremost a source of psychological trauma for the most privileged hero of all.

The upshot is that Odysseus' suffering is universalised: what we see is no longer so much a conquering king as a man carrying the burden of war and wanting to return to his wife and his home. This is precisely where the review makes the class problem of Nolan's adaptation visible: the suffering of a member of the ruling class eclipses the suffering of those over whom that class exercises power. In place of Homer's uncomfortable hero, who is at once a victim and a source of violence, Nolan creates a morally acceptable hero with whom the viewer can easily sympathise. Thus the story of a king, a warrior and a victor turns into the story of his personal trauma — and political responsibility gives way to psychological justification.

AMBITION

Author: Vincent Prince

Title: The Odyssey (2026) — Review

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Date: 26 July 2026.

Vincent Prince's review makes it possible to read Nolan's “Odyssey” as a story about the ambitions of elites and the catastrophes they produce. The author places the film within Nolan's own “imperial period” after “Oppenheimer”: his protagonists are powerful men who first realise their own grandiose designs and then mourn the “original sin” they have released into the world. In this perspective Odysseus belongs to the same type of elite subject: a king, a strategist and a victor, capable of changing history through his own will and inventiveness yet incapable of controlling the consequences of the decisions he takes. The ambition of the elite turns out to be at once the source of its greatness and the cause of catastrophe.

Prince then transfers this problem from Odysseus to Nolan himself as a representative of the cultural elite. After the success of “Oppenheimer” the director enjoys what is effectively unlimited credit — the opportunity to make extremely expensive auteur blockbusters on his own terms. “The Odyssey” therefore becomes the product of a double elite ambition: an ancient king seeks to subdue space and to determine the fate of others, while a contemporary director lays claim to turning one of the foundational texts of Western culture into his own monumental cinematic project. Prince ironically describes Nolan as a fashionable insider from Hollywood's backstage world, assembling an epic out of those elements that lie within his authorial comfort zone.

This is why ambition appears in the review not merely as a property of an individual hero but as a mechanism by which an elite functions: the possession of power breeds the conviction that one is able to organise the world and to endow it with meaning. Prince, however, finds the result considerably less radical than the scale of the design. The archaic, contradictory material of “The Odyssey” submits to the rhythms of contemporary commercial cinema, while its potentially destructive contradictions are filled in with meanings a modern audience can readily grasp. The paradox of elite ambition therefore lies in the fact that a claim to grandeur does not necessarily produce complexity: in this reading both Odysseus as ruler and Nolan as author seek to order the world according to their own design, and it is precisely that claim to control which exposes the limits of their power.

ANTI-COLONIALISM

Author: Mohamed Sleiman Labat

Title: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey used occupied land as a film set. That feels like a betrayal

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Date: 16 July 2026.

Mohamed Sleiman Labat, a Sahrawi artist from the refugee camps in Algeria, builds his critique of “The Odyssey” on a fundamental contradiction between the anti-colonial motifs of the story itself and the colonial conditions of the film's production. Nolan shot part of the film in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara — on the land of a people who, in the author's words, do not enjoy an equal right even to document their own lives: Sahrawi journalists and filmmakers risk imprisonment, while the authorities grant the international film industry access to those very same territories. This looks especially paradoxical because “The Odyssey” tells a story of exile, separation, the loss of home and the painful longing to return, while the Sahrawis themselves have been living through what Labat calls their own brutal odyssey for more than half a century.

Labat's anti-colonial critique is aimed not only at Nolan's particular decision but at the extractive logic of the Western culture industry. He places the use of Western Sahara's landscapes on a par with the extraction of its phosphates, sand, fish and other resources: the territory is turned into a resource, while its indigenous population is removed from any right to determine the meaning of its own space. Western cinema, in his view, operates in much the same way — taking the landscapes, the faces, the clothing and the material culture of the Global South and turning them into scenery for other people's stories. In this sense colonialism manifests itself not only as political domination but as power over representation: who has the right to show a territory, to give it a name and to tell the stories connected with it.

Hence the central anti-colonial paradox of “The Odyssey”: a film can deconstruct conquest, exile and imperial violence at the level of plot while reproducing a colonial structure at the level of its own production. Labat refuses to treat Western Sahara as a neutral “exotic” backdrop for a Western epic: for the Sahrawis it is not scenery but an occupied homeland, and the right to represent it culturally is part of the right to self-determination. A genuinely anti-colonial perspective, for the author, therefore means not simply telling stories about the enslaved and the exiled, but returning to the colonised themselves the right to tell their own stories and to determine how their space is used and represented.

DECONSTRUCTION OF THE MYTH

Author: Stephanie Zacharek

Title: The Odyssey Is Just Another Reason for Despair

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Date: 15 July 2026.

Stephanie Zacharek examines Nolan's “Odyssey” as an attempt to deconstruct the heroic myth by dismantling the image of the unconditional hero-victor. The film returns again and again in flashback to the brutal capture of Troy under Odysseus' command, reminding us that his glory as a warrior is built on mass violence. His subsequent adventures are likewise stripped of any unambiguous heroism: blinding the Cyclops merely provokes fresh disaster, Odysseus' men die, and Circe literally turns his warriors into swine, claiming that she has done no more than reveal their true nature. In this way the traditional myth of great deeds is gradually re-signified as a story about the dehumanisation of a man by war.

Zacharek, however, considers this deconstruction too straightforward. Nolan replaces the old heroic myth with a new one, modern and just as simple: Odysseus becomes a traumatised veteran, Athena a kind of embodiment of his guilt, and the ten-year return a path towards recognising the consequences of war. Meanwhile the more complex and potentially disruptive elements of the Homeric world are weakened: gods, magic, cunning, corporeality and the ambiguity of relationships between the characters give way to a moralising that a contemporary audience can readily understand. This is why Zacharek reduces the film's message to roughly two formulas: “war dehumanises men” and “civilisation is once again standing at the edge of the abyss”.

As a result the deconstruction of the myth remains incomplete in Zacharek's account: Nolan destroys the image of heroic war but does not create a more complex mythological world in its place. The Trojan victory ceases to be a triumph and becomes a primary trauma; Odysseus is no longer a flawless hero but a man responsible for violence; and civilisation itself is a fragile construction capable of falling apart under the weight of war. Yet Homer's polysemy is reduced in the process to a contemporary anti-war parable. By Zacharek's logic, then, Nolan deconstructs the archaic heroic myth only to construct a new one in its place — the myth of the traumatised warrior and the self-destructive civilisation.

EGALITARIANISM

Author: Emily Wilson

Title: An Uncomplicated Man

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Emily Wilson sees one of the main problems of Nolan's “Odyssey” in the fact that the director simplifies the human being precisely where Homer deliberately keeps him complex. Homer's Odysseus is at once a hero, a king, a liar, a manipulator, a killer, a victim, a husband and a wanderer; he cannot be reduced to any single moral definition. Nolan turns him into a psychologically legible modern protagonist: a man traumatised by war who longs to get home. Wilson underlines the paradox: a director famous for his complex narrative constructions has created a strikingly uncomplicated man. The complexity of the film's structure does not compensate for the simplification of its central character.

This problem is not confined to Odysseus. The Homeric world is built on the constant testing of human identities: a host can become a stranger, a victor a victim, a traveller an invader, a wife her husband's equal in cunning. Penelope is especially telling: in Homer she possesses her own mētis — intelligence, cunning and the ability to conceal her intentions — so that the couple's final meeting is in effect a meeting of two strategists. In Nolan she is largely reduced to a woman who waits. Wilson sees a similar simplification in the female and the divine characters alike: spectacle, scale and legible psychological motivation crowd out the ambiguity of the Homeric human being.

The “simple man” in Wilson's account is therefore not a humanist ideal but the consequence of reducing a complex archaic subject to a familiar modern psychological model. Nolan wants to bring Odysseus closer to a contemporary audience, but in doing so he takes from him exactly what makes the Homeric hero alive: his contradictoriness, his moral inconvenience and the impossibility of finally deciding who he is — hero or criminal, victim or aggressor. The problem with the film, in other words, is not that Nolan changed Homer but the direction in which he changed him: he turned the complex human being of ancient epic into an easily comprehensible modern man, and along with that simplicity he lost a substantial part of the anthropological complexity of “The Odyssey”.

FEMINISM

Author: Zoe Williams

Title: Why has Christopher Nolan got rid of all the sex in The Odyssey?

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Date: 28 July 2026.

Zoe Williams approaches Nolan's “Odyssey” through the fact that the director effectively desexualises the Homeric plot, and it is here that the feminist problem of the adaptation arises. In Homer, Odysseus' sexual relationships with Circe and Calypso are not incidental adventures: they are built into a system of gender inequality, power and double standards. Calypso matters especially, since her relationship with Odysseus contains elements of coercion and control, while Circe's story makes it possible to raise the question of the asymmetry between the sexual freedom of male gods and that of goddesses. Williams notes wryly that male gods are permitted to sleep with mortals, whereas female sexuality appears as a problem that has to be kept under control.

Nolan removes this sexual tension and thereby, paradoxically, does not modernise Homer's treatment of gender but impoverishes it. Circe loses the erotic dimension of her relationship with Odysseus, Calypso the sexual motivation for her possession of a man, and the sirens cease to embody sexual desire, turning instead into an abstract call of lost innocence or of the past. Odysseus, meanwhile, has to remain faithful to Penelope — something Williams links directly to the demands of the present day. A complex Homeric system in which male and female sexuality are bound up with different forms of power and unfreedom is thus replaced by a far safer model of the monogamous hero.

From a feminist perspective the problem is precisely that removing sex does not remove the patriarchal construction. On the contrary, the female characters are deprived of one of the main instruments of their power and ambiguity, while the male hero receives a moral cleansing: his long absence from home is now explained not by sexual adventures but by the trauma of war. Williams also notes a contradiction in this new model: if Odysseus is so traumatised by violence, his final mass killing of the suitors looks odd. Nolan is thus trying to adapt an archaic text to contemporary gender sensibilities, but he ends up removing Homer's sexual politics instead of rethinking it, and along with it he simplifies both the female characters and the problem of gendered power itself.

MODERNITY

Author: Olivia Popp

Title: Review: The Odyssey

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Date: 15 July 2026.

Olivia Popp proposes reading Nolan's “Odyssey” not so much as a traditional hero's journey as a story of the gradual destruction of the heroic image. Odysseus — the conqueror of Troy, king and military commander — returns not as a triumphant victor but as a man broken by struggle, by loss, by failure and by his own hubris. His recognition of his responsibility for the Trojan horse and for an army that committed monstrous violence becomes especially important. It is at the moment when the hero begins to see himself not only as a victor but as a perpetrator that he becomes, for Popp, an anti-hero — and the ancient plot acquires a distinctly contemporary resonance.

That contemporaneity also shows in the shift of perspective: Nolan tries to show the war not only through the eyes of the great victorious male but also through those whom the traditional heroic narrative left on the periphery. Penelope appears as a queen who is not recognised as an autonomous political subject and is turned into an object; Circe speaks of the rapes and the plunder committed by soldiers; Athena watches the burning of Troy in horror. Popp cautiously calls this a not entirely feminist reading, but an obvious attempt to attack the patriarchal context of the source. The old myth is revisited through contemporary questions about power, about the responsibility of victors, about sexual violence, objectification and the right of victims to a perspective of their own.

“The Odyssey” thus becomes a kind of mirror of the present: an ancient plot makes it possible to speak about a society that is less and less willing to accept the history of war as a tale of great men's exploits. Popp emphasises that Nolan is at his most interesting precisely when he abandons the simple heroic gaze and introduces perspectivism — the possibility of seeing a single event from the position of the victor, of a woman, of a victim or of the perpetrator of the violence himself. In this sense the ancient myth works as a model of the contemporary crisis of the heroic narrative: the question is no longer whether Odysseus won, but at what price the victory was won, who paid that price, and whether the victor can remain a hero afterwards.

What do these critical positions have in common?

Taken together (GeeSee, The Deep Dish, Letterboxd, the Guardian, Time, the LRB and Cineuropa), they reveal one shared line.

Practically all the critics agree that Nolan is not making a straightforwardly heroic film. He really is interested in trauma, in loss, in the cost of war, in the loneliness of the victor.

Where the critique diverges is elsewhere: is that enough to call the film anti-imperial?

The left-wing critique answers: No. Because empire is not only the suffering of its warriors. It is a system that produces wars.

An anti-war film can show a soldier's pain. An anti-imperial film has to ask the question: why was that soldier in this war at all?

And this is where the main weakness of Nolan's deconstruction lies.

He shows the ruins of empire. But he does not necessarily call into question the logic of imperial desire itself.

Is Nolan's “Odyssey” an anti-imperial film?

After the historical, the world-systems and the critical analysis, the answer to that question remains twofold. Nolan undoubtedly destroys one of the oldest constructions of heroic epic — the idea of war as a path to glory. His Odysseus returns from Troy not as a triumphant victor but as a hollowed-out man who has lost his comrades, survived a catastrophe and carries the consequences of his own victory.

War does not make him greater — it destroys him. But an anti-war optic does not yet amount to an anti-imperial one. One can condemn the horrors of war while leaving the figure of the great warrior untouched: the old imperial epic glorified the hero who won and brought order, while the new tragic epic mourns the hero who won and paid a terrible price for it. In both cases it is he who remains the centre of the story. Nolan calls into question the price of imperial victory, but far less the logic of victory itself.

This contradiction is already inscribed in the figure of Odysseus. He is not Achilles and not the embodiment of brute military force: his main weapons are intelligence, cunning and the capacity to survive, which is why he converts so easily into a complex hero close to our own age. Yet Odysseus remains a king, and his homecoming is simultaneously a return to power. The climax of the story is not the creation of a new order but the restoration of the old one: Odysseus destroys the claimants, regains control of Ithaca and re-establishes the patriarchal structure of power. A radically anti-imperial “Odyssey” would have had to shift the centre of the narrative away from the king and towards those whom heroic epic leaves voiceless — Trojans, slaves, women, peasants, the victims of conquest. Nolan does not go that far. He deconstructs the hero, but he goes on looking at the world through the hero's eyes.

This is why “Oppenheimer” may be the key to “The Odyssey”. There Nolan performs almost the same operation: he shows a man complicit in the creation of a weapon of mass destruction, his guilt, his fear and his moral collapse — but the centre of the story remains the maker of the bomb, not its victims. This defines the limits of Nolan's humanism: what interests him above all is not the structure of power but the moral tragedy of a privileged man inside that structure. In the same way, “The Odyssey” concentrates on the suffering of a king and victor who is beginning to understand the consequences of his own triumph. Empire is criticised here through the psychological catastrophe of its hero rather than through the experience of those it conquered. That is what substantially distinguishes Nolan's deconstruction from a consistent anti-imperial critique.

At the same time, the Bronze Age in the film reads easily as a mirror of the twenty-first century. The world of the Late Bronze Age was a complex, interdependent system of trade routes, resource flows, political cores and peripheries in which a local crisis could set off a cascade of destruction. That is precisely why its catastrophe resonates so readily with the present — with global supply chains, resource dependency, climate instability, the inequality of core and periphery and the military rivalry of the great powers. Troy then becomes not simply an ancient city but the image of a system that considers itself stable right up to the moment when it suddenly discovers that its foundations have already been destroyed. Odysseus, correspondingly, is a man of the old order who has survived its catastrophe and is trying to return to a world that effectively no longer exists.

Nolan's “Odyssey” is therefore more accurately defined not as an anti-imperial film in the strict sense but as a post-imperial melancholy. This is no longer a triumphal epic of conquest: war is stripped of its innocence, victory turns into trauma, and grandeur into ruins. Yet the film does not make a final break with the imperial myth, because Odysseus remains the centre of the story and retains the status of a hero — no longer a victorious one, admittedly, but a tragic one.