The Critics Choice Association has awarded Nolan’s film its Seal of Distinction, placing it squarely in the awards conversation—and at the center of a widening backlash among dissatisfied viewers. Beneath the spectacle, however, lies a stark moral drama about deception, guilt and the price of victory—one that many viewers appear to have missed, even though most are familiar with Homer’s story.
The entire dramatic structure of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey rests on the relationship between two men: Odysseus and Sinon.
For Operation Trojan Horse to succeed, Odysseus needs someone to remain beside the wooden horse and convince the Trojans that the Greeks have sailed away, leaving behind a sacred offering to Athena that must be brought inside the city. Whoever accepts the assignment will have to face the enemy alone. It is not difficult to imagine how that encounter will end.
Will anyone in the Greek army volunteer for what amounts to a suicide mission? Or will Odysseus have to order someone to do it?
Neither.
Sinon, barely more than a boy, bravely steps forward. In his innocence, he does not understand that he is effectively signing his own death warrant. Odysseus and the other adult warriors do understand—and say nothing. The noble, magnificent Odysseus, a man who once saved a puppy from drowning, commits an act of breathtaking treachery: He exploits the trust of a young man who does not know he is being deceived.
The audience does not grasp the full enormity of that betrayal immediately.
Sinon’s arc extends across the entire film. At the beginning, we see the Trojans stab him to death. Later, his spirit appears to Odysseus and accuses him—not of sending him to his death, but of dishonesty. Sinon would have sacrificed himself anyway. He would have given his life willingly to defeat the enemy. Why, then, did Odysseus deny him the right to choose his own fate knowingly?
Odysseus admits the ugliness of what he did. He says he has suffered over it and is deeply sorry. Sinon’s ghost answers with impeccable logic: Odysseus’s remorse does not make his deed any less reprehensible.
The sorrowful ghost then asks Odysseus to return Antinous’s lot—the metal rod that signified conscription into the war.
Who is Antinous, played in the film by Robert Pattinson? He is more than the most aggressive of Penelope’s suitors. He is more than the man who tries to kill Odysseus’s son so that the young heir cannot obstruct his seizure of power in Ithaca.
The men of Ithaca were sent to Troy by lot. During the drawing, the metal rod fell to Antinous, the son of a wealthy family. He did not want to go to war. He and his father persuaded Sinon, the impoverished son of a servant in their household, to take Antinous’s place. In return, they promised to support Sinon’s father for the rest of his life. Antinous broke that promise, and Sinon’s father died in poverty.
The kindhearted Sinon is therefore the victim of two deceptions. Antinous sends him to war in his place by lying to him, and Odysseus sends him to certain death beside the Trojan Horse by concealing the true danger of the mission.
Odysseus carries the image of the young man he deceived and destroyed through all the years that follow. The question that torments him is whether an innocent person may be sacrificed for a great cause—or merely for a cause that has been declared great. This is the moral territory of Dostoevsky’s famous declaration in The Brothers Karamazov that even the highest harmony is “not worth the tears of that one tortured child.” It is precisely where Nolan chooses to engage his audience.
Odysseus is so consumed by guilt that when he finally returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, he calls himself Sinon. When he kills Antinous, he is avenging more than the abuse of his wife and son. He is avenging Sinon. He forces the same metal rod—the conscription lot—down Antinous’s throat.
That is the dramatic arc Nolan constructs for Sinon. It is formidable.
Ancient Greek literature contains several references to Sinon, but the Greeks do not present him as an innocent victim of the cunning Odysseus. He is a willing participant in the operation. The Trojans do not kill him. After Troy falls, he leaves with the others and may later die during the journey home, along with the rest of Odysseus’s surviving companions.
Nolan completely reimagines the character. It is a magnificent authorial invention.
For that reason, viewers’ objections to the casting of Elliot Page make little sense. Page perfectly embodies the sacrificial innocent: not yet fully a man, but already a fearless fighter; no longer a child, yet still pure; not a mighty warrior, but unquestionably brave. Here, the actor’s androgyny does not weaken the character—it creates him. In traditional theater, this would have been a classic breeches role, the kind historically entrusted to an actress playing a boy or young man.
Complaints that Nolan’s version violates historical fact are equally unpersuasive. There are no reliable “facts” about Odysseus’s journey. There is a legend assembled and transformed over centuries, and every author who inherited it used it for a different purpose. Why deny Nolan—and his wife, who happens to be formally trained in ancient history—the same freedom?
Elon Musk’s announcement that he intends to release his own “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey by the end of 2026 should not be taken too seriously. A “historically accurate” adaptation of a tale featuring a one-eyed giant, an enchantress and deadly sirens? It sounds like another flight plan for Mars. The celebrated futurist appears to understand literature, history and cinematic art far less well than he imagines.
Some viewers have also identified an antiwar message in The Odyssey. But war is not the film’s central subject.
Its true subject is crime and punishment.
In Nolan’s telling, Odysseus’s crime begins with his invention of the Trojan Horse. The stratagem destroys an entire city, including its elderly people, women and children. To make it work, he must also sacrifice Sinon.
Is Odysseus truly guilty? Probably. Had he never devised the horse, the exhausting Trojan War might have ended with a Greek retreat, sparing an enormous number of lives. But he did devise it, and an entire city was reduced to ashes.
Throughout the film, Odysseus relives that event again and again and fails to find an excuse for himself. Worse, the gods make his return home possible only by forcing him, with increasing awareness, to lead his remaining companions to their deaths. For a man already ravaged by guilt, it is the cruelest imaginable punishment.
This is the central question of Nolan’s Odyssey: Can an immoral act become justified when it is committed under coercion and in morally ambiguous circumstances? Put more simply, is an act still a crime if it brings victory but requires betrayal and the death of innocents?
Once that question comes into focus, the film moves with extraordinary force along a path first mapped by Dostoevsky but greatly expanded and deepened by Nolan, who—not entirely incidentally—wrote his undergraduate thesis at University College London on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
There was a time when opera audiences brought piano-vocal scores to the theater and followed the action note by note. The words could be difficult to understand, the plot might defy logic, and sometimes one simply wanted to know what was being sung and why the tenor had spent 15 minutes dying while still sustaining a high A.
Nolan’s Odyssey demands something similar. To understand it fully, those of us who do not hold degrees in literature—and that means most of us—must seemingly consult the original texts, annotations on classical mythology and a short history of Bronze Age trade routes, all at once. Only then does the film begin to reveal its internal logic. I hope these clues will make my readers’ first encounter with this difficult, beautiful film a little easier—and help them understand why it will be a formidable presence in the Oscar race.