‘The Odyssey’s ending makes it a stealth ‘Oppenheimer’ sequel

When Christopher Nolan announced that he’d be following up Oppenheimer with The Odyssey, I viewed it as him doing a full 180.

On the surface, the works couldn’t be more different. The former: a biographical film examining the most devastating technological development of the 20th century. The latter: an adaptation of Homer’s seminal poem, teeming with monsters, gods, and adventure. The Odyssey represented something new for Nolan, an opportunity to explore epic fantasy and wind the clock back thousands of years before any of his other films are set.

Yet despite these drastic shifts in genre and setting, Nolan has managed to craft the perfect companion piece to Oppenheimer. In his hands, and especially in the film’s conclusion, Odysseus (Matt Damon) comes to occupy a similar space to Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, both ingenious men reckoning with the horror of what they’ve wrought on the world.

Christopher Nolan puts Odysseus and Oppenheimer in conversation.

Even though the character of Odysseus is thousands of years old, he’s right in the mix with Nolan’s lineup of male leads, including Oppenheimer. Like any Prototypical Christopher Nolan Man, both are brilliant and highly competent. Odysseus, more so than Oppenheimer, also joins Inception‘s Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Interstellar‘s Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) in the Nolan club of men fighting through impossible odds to get to their families.

For Oppenheimer and Odysseus alike, the most famed example of their intelligence is a scheme that ends a war. Oppenheimer’s invention of the atomic bomb marks a key step on the road to the conclusion of World War II. Odysseus puts a definite stop to the Trojan War with his ruse of the Trojan Horse.

But another hallmark of the Nolan Man is that his brilliance is bound to become a burden. Such is the case with both Odysseus and Oppenheimer. Yes, they manage to stop a large-scale conflict. Yet in doing so, both have broken the world.

With The Odyssey and Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan looks to the apocalypse.

Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures

Throughout The Odyssey, Nolan emphasizes the importance of Zeus’ Law, which demands that hosts treat all guests with respect, as any of them could be a god in disguise. At the same time, he also highlights a new threat sweeping across the Mediterranean: the mysterious Sea Peoples, who have been terrorizing coasts since the Trojan War ended, and who were real-life groups of Bronze Age seafarers whose role in the collapse of the Bronze Age is a source of debate among historians.

Nolan brings these two ideas together in The Odyssey‘s revelatory conclusion, in which Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, tells his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) the truth of the Sack of Troy. It is no heroic legend, like the bard’s (Travis Scott) speech that opens the film. Nor is it a war hero’s rousing tale, like Menelaus’ (Jon Bernthal) description of the events to Telemachus (Tom Holland). Instead, it is a pained recollection of brutal destruction, which has weighed on Odysseus for 10 years. His visions of Athena (Zendaya) are not of the goddess counseling him, but rather, memories of a slaughtered Trojan woman made manifest.

Entering Troy as a gift and then killing its inhabitants represents the absolute violation of Zeus’ law, Odysseus tells Penelope. In turn, that has broken civilization’s social order. The men from the sea aren’t unknown enemies. They’re Odysseus, his men, and the rest of the Greek army, burning villages and terrorizing their inhabitants in their desperate journey home. For Odysseus, this wave of violence signals the beginning of the end of the Bronze Age, and it all comes down to him and his trick.

Odysseus’ penitence eerily echoes Oppenheimer‘s conclusion, in which Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) discuss the construction of the atomic bomb, years after its devastating impacts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world,” Oppenheimer tells him.

“I remember it well,” Einstein says. “What of it?”

“I believe we did,” Oppenheimer says.

Cue the film’s haunting final sequence: a montage of missiles and explosions devouring the whole world, while Oppenheimer watches. Compare it to the last shot of The Odyssey, in which the Trojan Horse goes up in flames, signaling the destruction of Zeus’ Law and the burning of the world as we know it.

With each ending, Nolan considers the apocalypse. Not what comes after, but rather its slow, unavoidable arrival. Not by natural forces either, but by human hands: dangerous technology that’s used for the greatest harm, or a trick that fractures every code humanity holds dear.

The common thread of humanity’s penchant for self-destruction turns The Odyssey into a sequel of sorts for Oppenheimer. In turn, that same thread likewise binds Oppenheimer to its own Nolan predecessor, Tenet.

In that film, the Protagonist (John David Washington) works with the secret organization Tenet to prevent a future apocalyptic attack. Tenet agents use code phrases to identify one another, opening with the line, “We live in a twilight world.”

The phrase suggests the sun is setting on the world as the agents know it. They live in constant anticipation of the oncoming night brought on by the future attack. The same can be said for Oppenheimer, staring into a future of nuclear destruction he helped bring on. Or Odysseus, leaving a world he tricked into crumbling, chasing the sun west into a literal twilit world.

The three-film run of Tenet, Oppenheimer, and The Odyssey serve as Nolan’s unofficial apocalyptic trilogy, especially the last two. (You can also throw in Interstellar and its tales of climate crisis for good measure.) In each movie, he asks, how does humanity live knowing we are the architects of our own demise?

There is no easy answer — not for Oppenheimer, not for Odysseus, and not for Nolan. Yet as he considers these questions in film after film, one thing becomes clear: It is better to acknowledge the problem, painful as it may be, than to push it down. One cannot be Oppenheimer, compartmentalizing his role in an atrocity. One cannot be Odysseus, eating lotus flowers and forgetting. One has to face the future, dark though it may be, head on.

The Odyssey is now in theaters.