Just Deserts

In Homer, Odysseus does not suffer because he did wrong at Troy. He suffers because he blinded a Cyclops who happened to be a god's son, and because his men ate the wrong cows. The poem is quite clear about the causal chain and it has nothing to do with the sack of the city. The gods in it are not administering justice; they are pursuing grievances, and the grievances are personal, and the punishment falls on people who had nothing to do with them. The crew die because their commander offended someone's father. That is the theology, and it is not a theology of desert.

A world in which suffering is caused by guilt is, for all its grimness, an orderly world. It is a world in which you can in principle work out why things are happening to you, and in which the correct response is remorse, and in which remorse is a kind of currency. The world of the poem is not orderly in that way at all. Things happen to Odysseus because a god is annoyed. When he asks why, nobody explains. The nearest the poem comes to a moral about the whole affair is that the gods gave men suffering so that there would be songs about it for people not yet born — an idea so bleak and so aesthetic that no film could ever put it on screen without an audience walking out.

Nolan's version replaces that with a story we know how to hear: the veteran who cannot come home because of what he did there. It is a beautiful, coherent and humane story. It is also the story we tell about every war now, and it has the effect of making a very strange poem feel like a film we have already seen.

from Watching Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026)