Looking for Gods Among Men

This post contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey.

Much of the discourse that arose around The Odyssey in the run-up to its release—that wasn't the vitriolic online bubble of twitter screeching about the presence of Black and trans actors in the film—was about Chris Nolan's approach to the mythical elements of Homer's text, from Polyphemus the Cyclops to Circe's sorcery, from divine interventions from across the Greek Pantheon to trips to Hades and islands of the Laestrygonians.

While you can definitely say The Odyssey is a film that tries to ground its interpretation of events, I think it's near impossible to say that it erases much of the mythos from Homer's story in the way some have said after it lit up the box office this week. The creature-feature aspect of it all is certainly kept; the gods themselves are repeatedly invoked, but their actions are left to the subtle hand of nature, rather than many of the gods themselves appearing directly.

But that's emphasis on many, rather than all of them. One god in particular, perhaps the most important of all to the story, is omnipresent: Zendaya's Athena. She too gets plenty of invocations, as many characters come to note the look in someone's eyes being that of wise Athena (a sign in the original text that such a person was indeed Athena in disguise), but she also casts this haunting figure over much of Nolan's Odyssey, a proverbial ethereal figure on Odyssey's shoulder as the hubris of his journey home enacts one great consequence crashing down on him and his men after another.

But she's also the source of the movie's most brilliant sequence—and another of Nolan's blurrings between the tragically human and the mythically divine.