No One Saw the Major Flaw in Nolan’s Odyssey

by Richard Storey

Jul 31, 2026

*Penelope and the Suitors* (1912) by J. W. Waterhouse

Everyone is watching or hate-watching Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey… and the takes have been facile on either side. Infuriatingly, no one has defended, attacked or even noticed the main thrust of Nolan’s telling, that is, his ironically erroneous view of civilisation’s rise and collapse. Most damning of all, this theme escaped even the most influential critics on the right. What surer sign is there that we live in an intellectual dark age for the right wing? A crash course in the big picture of civilisational life cycles is desperately needed.

From the first trailer, my daughter (a classics student) noted the inaccurate armour and anachronisms, etc. Nolan chose to embrace meaningful inaccuracies, beating ever-ready historians to the punch. Otherwise, the now-milquetoast takes from the chuds, exemplified by Matt Walsh, could be spotted on the horizon: the cast is too diverse for ancient Greece (where Homer wrote rather explicitly about Africans), particularly Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, rapper Travis Scott as Demodocus, and Elliot Page as sacrificial Sinon. In truth, they were better casting choices than Jon Bernthal’s best impression of a coke addict. Such trite complaints were irksome.

Nolan’s films have always been love ‘em or hate ‘em, using a darker palette, snootily nonchalant about whether you can understand or hear the dialogue, setting overarching themes above narrative clarity. At least he had the vision and interest to take on such a grand project; he had the nous to see there was an interest in this subject, considering the immense popularity of Eric Cline and other’s lectures on this topic (here); he had the talent to take it to the screen with a reasonable watchtime and an unfairly maligned cinematography; even his misunderstandings required intelligence.

No, my criticism is not of Nolan, a typically liberal white man drawing attention to the most important subject of our time. My umbrage is with white men who cannot see past Zendaya’s few minutes of screen time to the most pertinent critique.

What grows civilisation and what kills it?

Across academic fields, the independently emerging conclusion is that religion gives rise to civilisation and is probably upstream of language and all human culture. Consider the liturgical scene of an alpha male with a freshly slain kill on a primitive altar. Delaying gratification, a sacrifice to keep the peace, his gestures make an icon or sign of the food and act; the others mimic him, pass on the food like a message or token in one ritual act, sharing not just a meal but meaning. The charity of the alpha, father, priest, and king figure becomes an objective, ritual and mutual sacrifice of the group for their common good, sacrifice being the sincerest demonstration of non-exploitative authenticity. This sign allowed for more abstract shared notions.

The biologist David Sloane Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral went so far as to say that religion is synonymous with the social organism, its very lifeblood. Students of civilisational collapse have long known this; consider two other Englishmen, writing in the twilight of the British Empire, who coincidentally treated this topic in two essays of the same title, The Fate of Empires. Sir John Glubb notably set the life expectancy of empires at 250 years, a figure proven more recently by now-popular Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics computer models. Glubb observed a perennial turn from sacrifice to selfishness, noting that weakening religion was accompanied by ‘defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners’. Likewise, John Hubbard perceived that religion, from the Latin religio, or “that which binds,” allowed civilisation to cohere across space and time, with even race and nation being subordinate to it.

The loss of religion is the cause of collapse — and Nolan’s Odyssey is explicit here. Odysseus states, ‘Our age of bronze is collapsing,’ because he and others had broken Zeus’ Law, depicted therein as the golden rule, that ancient and universal norm of reciprocity; albeit, the ancient Greek Xenia was a specific manifestation of this in ritual hospitality, setting rules between guests and hosts. How do you treat a travelling stranger who enters your feast and when have they overstayed their welcome? Treat guests as gods in disguise, just in case (excluding the disrespectful suitors). St Paul baptises Xenia, reminding us that the angels visiting Lot in Sodom found it void of hospitality. Nolan focuses on those stories which depict the breaking of Zeus’ Xenia, the Trojan Horse being a most deceitful example which, in Dante’s Inferno, lands Odysseus in hell. Nolan only loses the plot when addressing the causes of collapse.

During prosperous periods of summer, the love of money replaces religion. Victims of their own success, victorious empires defeat all outward enemies and make vast realms of peace, which means safety for commerce. Competition turns inward and economic, dynasties squabble over slices of the pie; the merchant spirit of giving as little as possible to your neighbour in return for taking as much as possible from them reigns where the warrior was once enthroned. The genius of Christ framed our spiritual struggle as between God and mammon, between religion and money, that ultimate technology which makes us believe we can do anything. This is the pride which comes before civilisation’s Icarian fall, as Glubb notes:

‘Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men… To justify this departure from ancient tradition, the human mind easily devises its own justification. Military readiness, or aggressiveness, is denounced as primitive and immoral. Civilised peoples are too proud to fight.’

If the martial men of the heroic age are too toxic, who then are the heroes of declining civilisations? Artists.

‘The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. The word “celebrity” today is used to designate a comedian or a football player, not a statesman, a general, or a literary genius.’

Enter Christopher Nolan! He is the celebrated artist repudiating the proverbial strong men who create good times. Worse still, he conflates the foundational, civilisational figure of Odysseus with the later piratical sea people blamed by Bronze Age sources for the collapse. Thus, Nolan depicts Odysseus’ ship as a Viking longboat, not a trireme; in truth, the sea people probably have more in common with the “boat people” (illegal migrants) arriving on UK shores from Calais. Rather, Nolan is his own Trojan Horse, dramatising the cause of collapse whilst being the very vehicle of it.

Obviously, Nolan’s liberalism views xenia or hospitality through the lens of universal individualism, but this is the mindset of decline. ‘The individual was accordingly in a sense constituted by money,’ as Richard Seaford concludes on the introduction of coinage in ancient Greece (here). Unfettered, money isolates man ‘because it can in principle fulfil most or all of his needs,’ leading to egoism. The Mycenaeans’ bronze ingots were a precursor to later Greek coinage, just as their collapse prefigured Greek disunity and collapse. So, the love of money is not only the root of collapse, but also the seedbed of Nolan’s individualist worldview.

Unsurprisingly, this and the attendant misandry, noted above, are nothing new; they always lead to feminism and a suicidal drop in birthrates, the nail in civilisation’s coffin.

Of course, others have attacked Nolan’s Odyssey for its feminism (see Keith Woods here). Circe the witch is robbed of her femme fatale and is rather an abuse victim; she turns the men into pigs but is revealing the true nature of a warrior. Penelope’s histrionic tirade too: ‘Empty throne? I’ve been sitting on that empty throne for 20 years! My knowledge, my years of experience? That’s all nothing compared with the bristles on your chin!’ An uncharacteristic rant from the meek, pious, ideal wife who cannot and could not physically defend said throne. Nolan removed the execution of the treacherous maidservants as being too grim and misogynistic. It was even too feminist for Emily Wilson, the feminist classicist whose progressive translation partly inspired Nolan.

But the issue is not that the film is feminist; it is that feminism is part and parcel of the collapse Nolan bemoans.