Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead for ‘The Odyssey,’ in theaters now.
Christopher Nolan spent his career building toward this. After Oppenheimer won him his first Best Director Oscar, the filmmaker turned to the oldest story in Western literature and shot it entirely on 70mm IMAX film, a first for any movie based on Homer’s poem. Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena. and pretty much every other actor you can think of in a supporting role. Critics have called it the best-reviewed film of Nolan’s career, and the audience response has matched it.
But strip away the IMAX spectacle and the three-hour runtime, and The Odyssey is still what it’s always been: a story about a man trying to get home, and everything that gets in his way, including himself. That’s fertile ground for a faith conversation, and there’s a lot here worth sitting with once the credits roll.
Fate sets the terms. Character decides the response
The gods in The Odyssey throw storms, curses and detours at Odysseus that he never chose and can’t control. That’s the fate half of the equation, and the film doesn’t let its hero pretend otherwise. But everything Odysseus actually is — his cunningness, his pride, his refusal to quit — gets revealed in how he answers what’s thrown at him.
It’s a tension the Bible sits inside too, without ever fully resolving it into a formula. Proverbs 16:9 puts it simply, that a person plans their course while the Lord establishes their steps. Circumstance and sovereignty are real. So is the daily choice of how to respond to both. Odysseus doesn’t get to pick the sea he sails; he does get to pick who he becomes by the time he reaches shore, and that’s the part of the myth that still has something to say thousands of years later.
Temptation always costs more than it promises
Odysseus can’t help himself. After his crew narrowly escapes the Cyclops’s cave, blinded and furious, Odysseus turns back to taunt the monster, shooting an arrow into it’s already wounded eye. After witnessing nearly a dozen crewmen lose their life, you can see Odysseus feel as if he’s earned some vengeance. But giving in to that split-second temptation not only causes the Cyclops to chase the crew down a mountain — resulting in more deaths — but also to the curse placed on the crew by the Cyclops’ father, Poseidon.
Telemachus makes a version of the same mistake. Told by his mother to stay in Ithaca and hold the household together, he leaves anyway, chasing word of his father instead. Every time a character in this film reaches for the thing that feels good right now, the story gets longer and the cost gets steeper. Nolan doesn’t moralize about it. He just lets the consequences play out, one bad decision compounding into the next.
Scripture makes a similar case, over and over, that the impulse worth following isn’t always the one screaming loudest. Paul’s language in Galatians about the flesh warring against the Spirit isn’t abstract theology in a film like this. It’s Odysseus, arrow aimed high, unable to resist one more word.
Perseverance isn’t the same as certainty
Ten years at sea. Ten years of suitors crowding Penelope’s hall. Nobody in The Odyssey gets a quick timeline. Odysseus has no idea if this is the year he makes it home, or the decade. His men don’t know if the next island is the one that kills them. Penelope has no proof her husband is even alive, only a choice to keep believing he is.
That’s a harder kind of faith than the version that gets preached from a stage with a clear finish line in view. The Ithacans in this story hold on without evidence but the decision to keep going one more day. Hebrews 11 describes faith as confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see, and Penelope’s decade at the loom is as close to a visual translation of that verse as a modern blockbuster is likely to give us.
What we do doesn’t stay contained
The film’s real weight isn’t the monsters. It’s what Odysseus did at Troy. The trick with the horse on one hand ended the war; on the other hand, it led to the slaughter of an entire city. Nolan keeps circling back to it, and Zendaya’s Athena becomes less a helpful goddess and more a walking reminder of what that single act of deception set in motion.
By the time Odysseus is close enough to see Ithaca, his real obstacle isn’t Poseidon. It’s the guilt of a man who isn’t sure he can look his own family in the eye. He knows what he did to get here, and he knows it will never fully wash off.
The Bible doesn’t pretend our actions live in isolation either. Galatians 6:7 tells us a person reaps what they sow. Odysseus spends a decade proving how literally that works, and the film is at its best when it treats his war record as an unhealed wound rather than a glorious victory.
