Thoughts on Nolan's The Odyssey

Watching The Odyssey, I kept finding myself flooded with questions.

Why do ancient wars so often feel like the Olympics? The two sides line up their troops, heroes step out for single combat, and sometimes they even wait for both sides to get ready, as though they were about to start a contest. But do wars really work that way? If ambushes, deception, and surprise attacks are all “dishonorable,” then Zhuge Liang was the grand master of dirty tricks, and modern special forces have taken “dishonor” to a technological extreme.

Why is someone who rebels against a god called “arrogant”? If a god can retaliate against, kill, and bring disasters upon mortals simply because they offended it, is the person who refuses to bow really arrogant—or merely resisting an entity vastly more powerful than themselves?

If a so-called god is merely ten thousand times more powerful than a human, yet still jealous, vain, quick-tempered, vengeful, hungry for praise, demanding worship, and unable to tolerate insult, why should we respect it morally? Enormous power can certainly make people afraid; but why should fear turn into respect? Why should obedience turn into legitimacy?

War and Moral Limits?

I used to read ancient war narratives and think, this is ridiculous. Why would the two sides agree to choose the strongest general, then have everyone else watch them duel in public? Or line up all their troops, shout “one, two, three,” and start fighting? It sounds like children playing a game, or one of our sports—like runners shouting “one, two, three” before setting off. War shouldn’t work like that.

Of course war was never really like this. I don’t think the Trojan War marked a turning point for warfare as a whole. But surely these kinds of stratagems have always existed. Isn’t it going too far to treat them as moral corruption? By that standard, modern special forces would be the pinnacle of moral corruption. Zhuge Liang would be the grand master of it.

So I even wonder whether ancient regimes were simply too good at rewriting history. Perhaps they wrote every war as: “I beat you in a fair fight.” And if that wasn’t true, they at least polished the story. Looking back, that may account for only a small part of the explanation.

I had overlooked one important reason: people in the ancient world did not have such advanced technology. No radios, no GPS, no night-vision equipment. It wasn’t that they couldn’t launch surprise attacks or outflank an enemy; it was that sending several units hundreds of kilometers through the night, having each one circle around to the rear, and then converging for a coordinated strike would probably mean losing contact halfway there. I certainly couldn’t have pulled that off!

Are the Moral Limits Rising or Falling?

Nolan’s Odysseus is a hypocrite. Before shooting an animal, he plucks the bowstring once, which at least gives it a certain measure of respect (though it is still very much a double standard). But the Trojan Horse is unquestionably a deception. For someone who does not share this value system, it might simply be called clever; but for Odysseus, it is a double standard. The Trojan Horse ultimately leads to the slaughter of an entire city-state, leaving him lost and remorseful. Nolan uses this very double standard to drive the character’s transformation.

The original epic both celebrates the Trojan Horse as one of Odysseus’s great deeds and describes the sacking of Troy, along with Odysseus weeping after hearing about it. Nolan takes this a step further, recasting that pain as guilt and, in the process, elevating Odysseus as a character. If you weaponize something a civilization trusts—an offering or a truce—to win a war, does trust still exist? If a war won through the slaughter of civilians can still be celebrated, is there still any sense of right and wrong? If none of these things exist, then the answer to whether civilization is advancing or regressing is obvious.

This brings up a question.

Does the development of civilization make war increasingly lawless, or does it keep adding limits to war? What about humanity’s moral limits?

At first glance, modern warfare seems more “sneaky” than ancient warfare: satellite reconnaissance, submarines, stealth aircraft, snipers, special forces, electronic warfare, cyberattacks, drones… By the standard that the sides must meet openly and fight fair:

Modern warfare is basically a grand compilation of dirty tricks.

Modern warfare permits camouflage, decoys, feints, and ambushes, but not every form of deception. Pretending to surrender, to be under a truce, or to have protected status before launching an attack is prohibited as an act of perfidy. As for who may not be killed, what happens after surrender, what to do with the wounded, and what to do with civilians—the moral line on these questions seems to have been raised a little?

But I don’t think this is necessarily a sign of civilizational or moral progress—or decline. Many moral norms remain sustainable because we have higher productivity, more stable institutions, and less survival pressure. But this improvement is neither permanent nor an evolutionary product; it is a gradual change made possible by the increase in resources available to each person. Conversely, if the more than eight billion people alive today were returned to a world with enough resources to support only tens of millions, whatever we call civilization and morality—even if a tiny minority managed to hold on—would probably vanish very quickly on the whole.

Hubris or Self-Confidence?

Some people say Odysseus is arrogant, especially toward the gods. If that is the standard, then Sun Wukong is arrogant too—and the gods even more so. If a god punishes you for being “arrogant” toward it, and you still speak arrogantly to it, is that really arrogance? Why is bullying different from a fight? Almost no one calls it bullying when two people fight, especially when one of them is fighting back. If someone in a position of power—or someone who sees themselves as being in one—refuses to respect those beneath them, and therefore insults or kills them, or even simply ignores them, that can be called arrogance, because that is basically the definition of arrogance. But if an arrogant person or god disrespects you and your companions or family to the point of killing your family or invading your country, and you fight back and berate them, that isn’t arrogance, is it?

Nolan removed this part of the story:

In the original, once Odysseus was safely aboard his ship, he turned back to tell the Cyclops: “I’m Odysseus, you bastard! Remember who blinded you!”

Whether this counts as hubris is debatable, because once you have already won, insisting that the other person know it was you who beat them serves no necessary purpose.

Gods Are Merely Projections of Human Desire and Foolish Fantasy

If a being is merely ten thousand times more powerful than I am, yet has the same jealousy, vanity, anger, and arrogance as a human, why should we respect it morally?

The gods described in ancient Western and Eastern mythology do not even seem to me to stand above humans morally in the way humans stand above animals… If a dog barks at you a couple of times, would you think, “How dare it disrespect me—I’ll punish it, make it suffer whenever I feel like it, and keep going until it licks my feet every day”? If a person behaved that way toward a dog, would you think that person deserved to be respected or worshiped?

Conversely: if a god exists, why should it show “mercy” simply because humans show it “respect”?

If someone believes a god is cruel, jealous, and intensely vengeful, yet still calls it “great” and “worthy of worship” simply because it is powerful, is that respect—or submission to power?

Does God Really Exist?

I don’t know whether there is some kind of existence behind the universe that we cannot understand. Maybe there is.

For things that have not been confirmed by empirical evidence, one can remain open to the possibility, but there is no need to believe them unquestioningly. At this point someone may say: “What do you mean it hasn’t been proven? So-and-so already proved it through some authoritative institution!” Well… if this god is so “vivid” and so specific, how exactly do you know what it is like? What was the authority’s method of proof? Where are the experiments and data? The more false a claim is, the sooner it dies when you trace it back to its source. But it only needs to outlast the believer’s ability to understand it.

But “whether there is a higher-order existence in the universe” and “whether the character in some ancient story who gets jealous, angry, competes for affection, demands sacrifices, and sends disasters when mortals fail to respect it actually exists” are two entirely different questions.

Gods as Projections of Desire

• Kings demand that their subjects kneel, so gods demand that everyone kneel. Why must it be that way? Merely humanity’s obsession with power.
• People pray to gods for children and get children; pray for wealth and get wealth; pray for safety and get safety. Whatever people want, there is conveniently a god in charge of it. Ha.

Did the universe happen to set up an entire divine bureaucracy according to human needs? If so, humans are the ones who should be worshiped. Humans are the chosen ones; gods are merely heaven-appointed workers serving human needs.

Gods as Foolish Fantasies

• Humans get jealous, so gods get jealous too—only their jealousy can summon thunder, bring rain, and raise winds, because those things affect farming.
• Humans seek revenge, so gods seek revenge too—only they can punish a family for generations.
• Human society cares about bloodlines, so gods have fathers and sons, brothers, marriages, and family struggles too.

That imagination is absurdly narrow. Why do they demand kneeling like kings, need praise like children, refuse to tolerate insult like tyrants, and get jealous, angry, and vengeful like ordinary people?

Could it be that humans never actually saw gods and then described them? That what they really saw was their own desires, which they projected into the sky? More ironically, humans claim to have limitless imagination, but in the end we often just infinitely magnify our own desires, fears, power structures, and personality flaws. It isn’t that the gods are too much like humans; it is that humans invented them in their own image.