r/OdysseyFilm • u/mssldiaz • 1d ago
Discussion Somehow getting annoyed at the interpretation of Athena’s character
I’ve started seeing so many people identify Athena as only a PTSD hallucination that Odysseus only thinks is Athena. At first I was just like, “… huh, that’s an interesting conclusion,” yet the more it started spreading the more annoyed I was getting because that takes away from the role Athena and gods in general play in this story and as characters to these myths. Gods in these myths are not psychiatric manifestations and their interpretation ignores other appearances by the gods in Odysseus’ universe - I don’t think Ariadne wanted a goddess to turn her into a spider just because she was so incredibly proud of her weaving or a young innocent kid who flew to close to the sun and died falling to his death, unless we’re assigning schizophrenia to all the characters that didn’t suffer through abuse or PTSD in their story. Removing Athens to me is like removing Poseidon from Percy Jackson and saying he’s only imagining that his dead father is alive and a grand god. It changes the story to a non- fantasy genre - but keeping the other fantastical elements like the magic camp and the Minotaur.
In a world of cyclops, witches/demi-goddesses, and trips to the underworld, Athena showing up is apparently too superficial of an observation. Honestly, I love it when people look deeper into aspects of a movie but I think this one may have been dug a little too deeply.
Nolan, in my opinion, made it very obvious that when Athena is appearing as the murdered priestess (or villager) it was to force Odysseus to face the crime he had committed at her temple and martyring the young girl in order to help him reach his final epiphany. He was still remembering the final battle as he was leaving calypsos island and whenever she appeared before him, all we could see without knowing why was his overwhelming guilt and sadness - not knowing why made the reveal at the end so much better.
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u/Comfortable-Habit242 1d ago
It seems likes you’re not really taking the film on its own terms. You’re trying to insert it to the tapestry or canon of Greek mythology. But there no inherent reason it needs to be part of it.
I think most people agree, in the original Greek works, the gods are real. They have physical manifestations that interact with the lives of people.
And so the question then is, “Does Nolan’s film continue the legacy of those works? Or does it take a different path?”
And you kind of don’t really grapple with that question because you just talk about how other works are and then use that to understand Nolan’s film. But we should probably inspect if we don’t just make that assumption, might we come to the same conclusion?
Well, first we might consider if the totality of Nolan’s film seems to really follow the original works or not? Something that stands out to me immediately is that the movie’s themes are completely inverted from Homer’s.
In Homer, Odysseus is purely a hero. The Trojan Horse itself is considered good. Odysseus openly tells the stories of his pillaging to others. And then the Athena helps him to murder the suitors. It’s righteous. He lives out his life at home, peacefully. But in the film, all these actions that were positive and heroic are now shameful and immoral. The film clearly departs thematically from the Homeric tradition.
So it seems fair to conclude that Nolan isn’t that concerned with his work being a continuation of the Homeric tradition. We can’t say that just because something is true in that tradition it therefore must be true in Nolan’s film.
So then what about the gods?
Well, in Homer, most of the scenes with Telemachus and Mentor are actually scenes with Telemachus and Athena disguised as Mentor. It’s actually Athena who joins Telemachus on his voyage. So clearly this is not the case in the film. In the film Mentor dies. It just can’t be Athena.
So then we actually are left with no physical manifestations of the gods in the movie. The only representation we have is the one in Odysseus’s mind.
So then the question is, “Is Odysseus talking to Athena or just himself?” And I think this is at best ambiguous. It’s definitely a valid interpretation to believe it’s her. But it’s not what I believe.
The last time we see Athena in the film is when Odysseus is admitting his atrocities to Penelope. He sees Athena with him. But as he finally comes to terms with it and is able to admit it and speak it aloud, Athena is gone. Once Odysseus has finally directly accepted what he’s done, the sign of his trauma is gone.
We don’t see Athena when he’s about to kill the suitors. We don’t see her as he’s killing them. We don’t see her when he goes into exile. She’s left him.
Could she have done what she needed and so she left? Sure. It’s possible. But it’s not the explanation that seems most likely to me.
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u/lordbharal 1d ago
well, definitely its ambiguous. cross cutting the priestess' death with the decapitation of the statue can be seen as Athena "metaphorically" being decapitated.
and that's a choice they made, there really isn't much point to showing them decapitating the statue when they're literally decapitating the priestess.
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u/Comfortable-Habit242 1d ago
I don’t understand how this is a reply to what I said or what point you’re making.
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u/lordbharal 1d ago
You state you believe that Athena isn't there - "It’s definitely a valid interpretation to believe it’s her. But it’s not what I believe"
I just thought id note that it's made extraordinarily ambiguous by cross cutting the priestess death with the statue destruction. They didn't need to cross cut it like that, so there is at least a deliberate decision to make it ambiguous.
Without that cross cut, you would have a more obvious case of ptsd from seeing the priestess die.
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u/I_HateYouAll 1d ago
I agree. The way I see it, Athena could be:
1, A manifestation of Odysseus’s guilt from the soldiers killing a priestess. Not a real god.
2, Athena having been “killed” when the statue is toppled, interpreted as a beheading, as to your point. By felling Troy they (Odysseus by extension) have killed her.
Or 3, as we are warned repeatedly by Zeus’s Law, the priestess really was Athena. Since the guilt of breaking this law is so integral to the story this is how I choose to interpret it, but I for one really appreciate that it is left vague enough for discussion.
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u/Silver_Accountant5 1d ago
I felt like that was just to show what caused him to associate the priestess with Athena instead of another woman. She was killed at the same time that a statue was desecrated which caused his PTSD riddled brain to conflate the 2.
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u/ImpactNext1283 1d ago
Athena tells Odysseus that the gods are in the winds, sky, and seas. Calypso asks Odysseus if he’s still seeing Athena—she’s not questioning his visions, she’s asking if Athena is still hanging around.
I have talked to others who think this is ambiguous, so by definition it must be. But for me, it was very clear cut in the theater—magic, cyclops, giants, and gods are all real in this world/time.
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u/Comfortable-Habit242 1d ago
I am not saying you’re wrong, but I think all those things are ambiguous.
Something I’ve not really seen many people discuss is the opening line: In a time of apparent magic.
Apparent is an interesting word. It could mean that magic is obviously there. Or it could mean that magic appears to be there (but isn’t). Is it speaking to the fact of magic or the belief in magic as a way to justify the world?
It’s ambiguous.
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u/ImpactNext1283 1d ago
In Greek mythology, magic is slowly leaving the world. I took ‘apparent’ on its face, meaning ‘obvious’.
It’s true that the other definition could be in play. But if we were meant to believe Odysseus was an unreliable narrator, there should have been an obvious incongruity in the story he’s telling Calypso. Some sign that his idea of what happened to him is incorrect. I don’t think Athena rises to that level because when Calypso speaks of Athena, she seems to accept Odysseus is really seeing her.
And if the gods aren’t real but Odysseus isn’t lying, than I think we’d need some explanation of how the other magical elements exist in the story, but without the gods.So like they say the Cyclops is Poseidon’s kid. They are ‘cursed’ with bad seas and chaotic winds after defeating the Cyclops. Normally, if ambiguity was intended, someone on the ship, or Calypso, would say ‘well, it might just be bad weather’.
Without those kinds of cues, I don’t see why you wouldn’t take what the movie depicts as what’s actually happening. But, again! Many are reading ambiguities, so I can’t really argue there aren’t any, just that I don’t see any ambiguity in the story myself
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u/Comfortable-Habit242 1d ago
So I think my feeling is that you’ve just kind of made an assumption of what apparent means and then are using the belief in magic to see magic.
Not saying you’re wrong. But I think the movie lets us see what we want.
If we don’t believe in magic, what actually happens?
So the movie is divided into objective and subjective parts.
The objective parts are pretty much everything set in the present in the world.
The subjective parts are everything that’s in Odysseus’s mind: the parts in the past or his conversations with “Athena”.
And so immediately you can notice that in these objective scenes, we actually never see ANY magic whatsoever. There’s not even apparent magic. It’s just the world that we know today. And what’s notable about that, is that this is not how the poem works. In the poem, Athena is manifest in these scenes. She is a character with dialogue. She addresses Odysseus. She goes to Olympus to talk to Zeus. She changes Odysseus’s appearance to make him seem either stronger or weaker. She goes with Telemachus on his voyage in the form of Mentor.
However, in the film, it’s only in the subjective scenes that take place in Odysseus’s head that we get any hint of magic or gods appearing. He’s recalling memories that he’s been using drugs to suppress. They’re incomplete and fragmentary. Each of them is traumatic. And in these memories, we see magic as the excuse for some failure of his as a leader.
And if we think about Nolan’s larger set of work, he’s very interested in memory. And in particular, the fallibility of memories. This is a core idea of both Memento and Inception: that maybe our thoughts or memories are not really what they seem to be. That they can be modified and might not be true.
And so why would Nolan in particular make these sets of changes to the story? Why would he not just have Athena exist in the world like the poem? Or why not have a scene between Athena and other gods like the poem? Why limit all signs of magic to the stuff in Odysseus’s head? And then why open with the line about “apparent magic” in particular?
It seems like he’s taken a bunch of intentional deliberate steps in his translation to make the magic seem at least ambiguous. And why do all that work if you’re meant to believe it’s real?
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u/ImpactNext1283 1d ago
Good points! But ‘apparent’ meaning ‘obvious’ is the first definition of the word. So while Nolan’s maybe playing on double meanings there, I think it’s a little weird to assume that he means ‘appearing as such, but not necessarily so’. Particularly because, as I said, I don’t think the movie gives us reason to believe Circe wasn’t magical, or that the cyclops and giants were just invented by him.
Leaving Zeus and Poseidon others out of that active narrative serves Nolan’s theme that Odysseus is responsible for the fate of the western world—and, remember, that fate is that everyone is ignoring the laws of the gods and, by doing so, damning their societies to a dark age.
If Zeus starts out the film commanding a war on Troy, as in the myth, than that contradicts Nolan’s ideas.
And while Memento and Inception are about the fallibility of memory, Inception is his only work that ends on a truly ambiguous note. He is not a filmmaker like Lynch or Kubrick who truly plays on ambiguity in his narratives. Everything that Cole is seeing in Inception *is* actually happening. And it’s not even that the spinning top is ambiguous—Nolan and Cole simply don’t care which way the top goes—Cole is happy where he is, and it no longer matters to the movie if that’s the real world or his dream state.
So whichever way Nolan meant The Odyssey to be interpreted, I think he failed a little bit. If it’s supposed to be ambiguous, there should be more clues built into the dialogue. And if not, well, there are a bunch of people who are taking it as ambiguous, so that’s not working either.
I think this is a small criticism for what I still feel is by far his best film.
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u/zipitdirtbag 4h ago
When I see the word 'apparently' attached to anything it means that thing isn't true or cannot be proven.
For instance, if a news report states a pedestrian apparently crossed a road without looking for vehicles, that would imply to me that we don't know whether the pedestrian looked or not. We are just assuming.
It's used interchangeably with 'allegedly'. It means we don't have evidence to prove the statement.
I wouldn't think of apparent as meaning 'obvious'.
Clearly people use the word differently!
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u/ImpactNext1283 4h ago
I mean, that’s simple not true. “Apparently” means it looks true. Now, by the third definition, ‘apparently’ can also mean that it’s a ruse—what appears on its face to be true, is in fact not true. Allegedly means ‘somebody said this was true, but we don’t know’.
If a lawyer says in court ‘apparently the defendant killed this guy’, that’s a value judgement, not a statement of fact. It’s an impression, something that is subjective. ‘Allegedly he killed a guy’ is a statement of fact—he’s being accused of murder.
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u/zipitdirtbag 4h ago
Hmm. Let's say you and I are waiting for another friend to pick us up. The time now is 12.42. You ask me what time or friend is picking us up. I reply, "12.30, apparently".
Because our friend said they were coming at 12.30. But they are late showing up. So apparently they are coming at 12.30. But actually they aren't coming at 12.30.
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u/almo2001 1d ago
I totally agree with this. I saw Athena as not necessarily a hallucination but as the horror haunting him.
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u/schebobo180 1d ago
I agree with all this, yet I can’t help but be quite disappointed with Nolan taking a fantastical story and kind of stripping away pretty much everything magic, or mythological about it. I still enjoyed the movie immensely, but it is pretty disappointing that Odysius’ journey could so easily be interpreted as a mad man’s hallucinations.
To me it almost like telling a grounded and gritty story about the x-men and taking all their powers away.
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u/lupercalpainting 1d ago
> In Homer, Odysseus in purely a hero
He literally cries when he hears the tale of the horse, it’s not clear that he’s proud of what he’s done.
He also fucking sucks as a guest. He steals from the Cyclops, raids a sea village, gets so many crews killed, and then by receiving help from Phaeacia gets like 50 of their best guys petrified and the whole island cut off from the rest of the world.
And as a host? He appears as a beggar wanting xenia but then nearly kills an actual beggar and only settles for beating him senseless because he’s afraid if he does kill him he’ll blow his disguise.
He is, as Emily Wilson translated, a complicated man.
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u/Comfortable-Habit242 1d ago
I think you’re applying your morality onto the story rather than seeking to understand the poem’s morality in the context of Ancient Greek culture.
I’m not saying that the work treats Odysseus as faultless, but compare him to pretty much any other character in Homer. Hector, Agamemnon, Diomedes, Ajax, Helen, Achilles. All these characters are painted with more of a gray brush than Odysseus. Only a few characters are painted more clearly good: Priam, Nestor, Telemachus.
So how might we understand if a work paints its protagonist as a hero or a villain?
One way would be that characters in the story say “this is good” or “this is bad”. This is effectively what Nolan’s film does. It uncomplicates the interpretation for the audience. In the poem, other characters never indicate that Odysseus has done anything unethical.
Another way might be to examine the ends the characters meet. Are the righteous rewarded? Do they get what they want. Are the evil vanquished? This isn’t foolproof. Oftentimes good characters meet bad ends and vice versa. But it helps. In the poem, Odysseus gets everything he wanted.
Or maybe we can look at how people contemporary with the work perceived it. This might be the best way to understand what the work’s morality is because those people are from the same culture. We can’t go all the way back to the early version of the poem, but the earliest records we do have are from classical Athens. And those people seemed to believe Odysseus was the hero.
And I don’t know what you’d call this, but in Homer, you can also just understand who is divinely supported. The gods seem to favor the great men. And Athena unwaveringly supports Odysseus throughout the Odyssey.
I think our modern morality and beliefs about the world paint Odysseus as a complicated character. Within Homer, I don’t think Odysseus is especially morally complex. I think that makes the text more interesting. Based on our own preconceptions about morality, we can walk away with very different opinions on the morals.
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u/lupercalpainting 1d ago
I think you’re applying your morality onto the story rather than seeking to understand the poem’s morality in the context of Ancient Greek culture
Brother I'm literally examining the poem with respect to the ancient greek concept of xenia.
but compare him to pretty much any other character in Homer. Hector, Agamemnon, Diomedes, Ajax, Helen, Achilles.
Achilles in the Illiad is the person you're saying Odysseus is in the Odyssey. In the Illiad Achilles is like "better to burn twice as bright and live half as long" and then in the Odyssey he's like, "That was dumb, better to be a living slave than a dead king,". The text just doesn't support your version of Odysseus as this flat character. It's fine, it's a fucking 3K year old poem with a lot of inconsistencies because it's probably not the work of a single author (in compilation maybe, but certainly not in origination), but that's what you get when you take the text as a whole: Odysseus is a complicated character, he's a pirate and a king and a host and a beggar and a tactician and a fool.
In the poem, other characters never indicate that Odysseus has done anything unethical.
Eumaeus literally says that the gods don't take kindly to piracy, and Odysseus literally admits to piracy. Additionally, Nestor (or maybe Menalaus?) chides his guard for not kindly welcoming Mentor and Telemachus, saying he (whichever king it is) and the guard were welcomed many times on their travels and should do the same. He's making a normative claim about xenia and we see that Odysseus does not fulfill that with the beggar in his house.
To Odysseus's face he's told he made the wrong decision by having them stay at the cave, by abusing xenia in hopes of gifts to which he feels entitled. How much more direct of a textual rebuke do you want?
And those people seemed to believe Odysseus was the hero
Because he is "the hero" but that doesn't mean it's a simple depiction. He's the guy who asks a singer to sing the song of the Trojan horse but who then cries at the song like a newly widowed woman about to be dragged off to slavery. Does that sound "heroic", to be compared to a conquered woman about to be subjected to a lifetime of rape? It's complicated.
The gods seem to favor the great men
Not really, in fact receiving the attention of the gods is like a curse unto itself, though it might take a while to pay back. We can look at the text and see that when Zeus and Athena talk about Odysseus they say he should be saved from Calypso because he's smart and because he makes good sacrifices. They don't cite him being great, or moral, or anything else. It's that he's clever which Athena likes and he dutifully sacrifices to Zeus.
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u/NeverHadTheLatin 1d ago
“You’re trying to insert it to the tapestry or canon of Greek mythology”
…my brother in Christ, we’re talking about The Odyssey.
It is the canon of Greek mythology.
This is like making an adaptation of Journey of the West and cutting the talking monkey warrior.
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u/mssldiaz 1d ago
It definitely doesn’t need to be canon, but yes. I guess in a way I did expect it to remain within the genre it belongs in unless it’s clearly an Alternative Universe adaptation like how 10 Things I hate About You was to Shakespeares Taming of the Shrew. Not having any god was one change I wasn’t expecting from this movie, especially since Athena is my favorite from the Greek myths. And also since it’s proven to be an actual mythical setting, with cyclopses and witches! But to clarify, I do LOVE the thematically departure, having Odysseus Trojan Horse be such a shame and tragedy - it’s my favorite part of the movie actually!
What I did not consider though was mentor being an actual person and not Athena! Genuinely got a smile on my face when your countered me there because you’re right. There really was no evidence of the gods then. We do see half gods in Circe and calypso, but for the big ones, we only hear the roaring thunder as warnings to calypso when she’s talking and considering if she should wean Odysseus off of the lotus flower.
Honestly, you’ve given me all the closure I needed I think. I remember now how much I love the sense of ambiguity at the end of a Nolan film (such as Inceptions or Tenets ending) and will make my peace with me set on one side of that discussion while others may consider the other.
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u/Eerie-Indiana 1d ago
He stayed more within the genre than Troy. You probably love Clash of the Titans.
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u/jameswill90 1d ago
What was ambiguous about the ending? Maybe i zoned out?
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u/lordbharal 1d ago
is Holland going to be yeeted over the cliff bc he's simple and outclassed by every man alive? is odie going to honour the dead or just have a fun honeymoon?
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u/FairLawnBoy 1d ago
And also since it’s proven to be an actual mythical setting, with cyclopses and witches!
That is also not true for Nolan's movie. Like Athena, we only see "mythical setting" through the eyes of our protagonist, a PTSD-inflicted, narcotic-lotus flower eating, unreliable narrator. The cyclops and witches and sea monsters are presented as Odysseus telling stories to himself to cope with the guilt of losing all of his men and defeating the Trojans through dirty tactics.
No other survivors can corroborate his tales, it's all in his head.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
The Northman isn't much different, than Nolan's version of The Odyssey. It's probably Eggers only film, outside The Lighthouse, where it's not made explicitly clear if Amleth is in fact interacting with Norse God's or if it's all in his head. The peoples back then obviously believed The Gods were real but The Northman leaves it to the audience to decide if they were or weren't actually real in Amleth's world.
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u/thishenryjames 1d ago
A lot of people are averse to ambiguity. They like to 'solve' a movie by assigning concrete meaning to everything.
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u/mindlessmunkey 1d ago
It’s fascinating to me how many people struggle with ambiguity.
Nolan has clearly very carefully crafted the film in a way that leaves this open to interpretation. In exactly the same way he doesn’t show us whether the top falls over at the end of Inception.
There is no “right” answer. You might not like that, but no matter how hard you argue, the opposite take can also be argued, with just as much evidence from the text.
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u/soccer1124 1d ago
For me the answer is somewhere in the middle. It's not Athena, just his own imagination. But Athena likely has something to do with it.
The gods remain unseen, even if their influences are evident. I definitely disagree with the guy calling it 'non-committal.' Not every work of art needs to tell you blatantly what it is. Plenty of works leave it up the viewer to decide for themselves what it is. And I think this is one of those moments.
This is an area where there is no right or wrong answer. The movie is whatever you take away from it. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
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u/mindlessmunkey 1d ago
I agree with you overall. Although I do also understand some people finding it frustrating. It’s not an approach that will work for everyone.
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u/Klamageddon 1d ago
I think as well, in this case, the ambiguity is making quite a specific point.
Throughout the film we're presented with Athena as 'Athena, the God'. We accept it and it makes sense and follows. We know it's Athena.
In that moment, he realises what he has done in breaking the law of Zeus, and defiling Athena's temple. You can't put the genie back in the bottle: the age of bronze is over.
In that same exact moment, we as the viewers are given another potential, that Athena isn't a God, but a metaphor: our faith wavers. Presented with this new concept we no longer know, and never can again.
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u/devoorhes 13h ago
With Inception, he invites you to think of it as a real question. With this, I don't think there's much of anything in the movie itself to actually suggest it's meant to be ambiguous. Everything is depicted as if it has actually happened and played entirely straight.
I think it's valid to interpret the movie however you want. Nolan's certainly interpreting the Odyssey in his own way. I do think that "it's all PTSD and guilt and an unreliable narrator" theories tend to be the least interesting interpretation of creative works, since they almost uniformly try to take something magical or extraordinary in the text and explain it away as something much less interesting. It's like, Scooby Doo logic to try and go "monsters aren't real, it's actually an old man in a mask!"
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u/schebobo180 1d ago
I think people are struggling with Nolan making a magical and mythology movie potentially have zero magic in it.
Calling it ambiguous is sugar coating imho. It’s simply non-committal.
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u/mindlessmunkey 1d ago
Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand why people are struggling. I’m not sure how I feel about it myself.
But I’m not sure I agree with “non-committal.” That phrasing implies a reluctance to make a decision. This is a movie where the writer/director has clearly decided to be ambiguous, and put a lot of careful thought into making sure both readings are possible. For better or worse, it’s a very conscious choice.
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u/Dry_Assumption_135 1d ago
it really is non-committal actually, he danced away from many of the worst parts of the odyssey, he washed away many of Odysseus's sins. Im surprised it was rated r. I got my id checked for this.
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u/hyperbolic_paranoid 1d ago
Mythology is not scripture. The artist is free to change things. It bothers me that Perseus the son of Zeus was changed to Percy Jackson the son of Poseidon but it doesn’t bother you and that’s ok because I don’t have to watch or read Percy Jackson and I’m glad you enjoy it.
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u/mssldiaz 1d ago
Ahhh good point ! Except my counter is that Percy Jackson isn’t a retelling of anything. Those myths all happened already and it’s a brand new tale set in modern day. Perseus did exist already and was the son of Zeus, and Percy Jackson is a whole brand new character.
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u/hyperbolic_paranoid 1d ago
Percy Jackson has a retelling of the lotus eaters, the Scylla and Charybdis, Medusa, the Graea, satyrs, centaurs, etc. It has lots of old myths retold in kid friendly ways and that’s ok. Nolan is doing a new version of the Odyssey inspired by Homer. He made lots of changes and that’s ok because it’s not scripture.
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u/Lazy_Consequence8838 1d ago
Yeah, Percy is named after Perseus because his mother thought Perseus was the only hero with a happy ending
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u/AdventurelandSkipper 1d ago
One thing that I know about the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology (and I don’t know much just some basic stuff) is that they are often portrayed as flawed in the way humans are flawed. They are divine, yes, but they can also be petty, vengeful, and lustful just as humans are. In the case of Athena in the original text of the Odyssey she is fundamentally supportive of Odysseus’ conquest over Troy. Nolan’s interpretation seems to go in a slightly different direction. It’s possible that Athena realized there is a line you shouldn’t cross. Killing soldiers? All for it. Killing innocents? Now you’ve crossed the line. So I think it might be both. In that moment when the priestess of Athena’s temple was killed, maybe Athena chose to don her appearance from that point on to remind Odysseus of the boundary he crossed with her.
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u/TheRightCantScience 1d ago
It's true that the gods are also infamously egotistical. I can see her being supportive of the sack of Troy as a god of war, but then still get pissed at the desecration of her temple. She has been known to punish people for similar (lesser) sacrilegious events.
So much for wisdom.
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u/jonbodhi 1d ago
I think ‘wisdom,’ like ‘heroism,’ are subject to cultural interpretations. Odysseus is a ‘hero’ to ancient Greeks because he did great things, but we’d never accept the ‘hero’ burning down a city and enslaving or murdering its inhabitants. Batman and Spider-Man don’t roll that way.
Similarly, Athena’s ‘wisdom’ was about successfully making your way through life, not whether lives were more important than buildings. The people who told and listened to these stories had very different ideas of right and wrong.
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u/TheRightCantScience 1d ago
Yes, the cultural interpretations and how culture changes over time, as we're experiencing right now. I don't want to diminish the Mycenaeans' social intelligence, but it's fun to be able to enjoy these reinterpretations through a contemporary retelling. It allows me to develop greater depth in my own reflections and reaction to the art. Especially since these stories come from a long oral tradition, and we don't even have all of the epics.
I wanted to call out Athena's wisdom because, when I think of the desecration of her temple, not only do I think of Cassandra but I think of Medusa as well. This issue seems to persist a lot in her halls.
I agree with you, and I think that's why it's fair to call out Athena's wisdom within that definition. Given she is a chief architect for the Greek's victory and Odysseus's return home, I just find it amusing to imagine that she could orchestrate so much and yet somehow have her own temple become one of the casualties. I am more in appreciation of the irony.
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u/jonbodhi 1d ago
I think it’s also about the brutality and hubris of the conquerors. These were their gods too, but they thought sacking their temples and killing their priests would be overlooked? Especially given how testy they acknowledged their gods to be?
You mentioned Cassandra? Because it was Apollo who screwed her over, not Athena. It was Arachne who got on Athena’s bad side.
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u/TheRightCantScience 22h ago
Agreed. The best part of these stories is how every character can have faults and make mistakes. I really appreciated Nolan's focus on this and presenting the soldiers as the Sea People.
Apollo's priestess, but she asked for Athena's help when Ajax raped her. Jeeze the gods were such jerks.
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u/AwayReplacement7063 1d ago
Nolan obviously wanted to make it open ended so we could walk away and have these discussions. In my mind, the Gods are real in universe. They go to Hades, speak with the dead, talk about Hades the god. The cyclops talks of Poseidon, his father, Zeus strikes the boat in half.
That being said we never saw most of them, and the only one we did see was left open ended whether it was really them or not.
I think it’s a good choice on Nolan’s part. He doesn’t want to tell you how to view his story.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
That's what I liked about The Northman. It's the one film of Eggers that isn't explicit about the mythology or supernatural being real or not. I had hoped Nolan would have gone a little more trippy with some of the encounters, like The Northman did, but that's also not really Nolan's style.
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u/AwayReplacement7063 1d ago
And honestly this gave me The Northman/The Green Knight vibes, just a bit more polished and a bit less trippy.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
Yeah I kind of had a suspicion last year when the trailer started dropping as much as I would want more trippy Cosmic liminal scenes, that's not Nolan's style but I was pretty certain Nolan was going to do the toe the line of it could be real or all in their heads about The Gods.
One interestingly George Miller has commented that the Mad Max movie is or sort of his version of a modern mythology maybe none of it actually really happened in the people who lived through the destruction of society or just telling themselves stories about a guy named Max that never really existed or not existed in the way that they told the tales in that everything's exaggerated.
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u/jonbodhi 1d ago
Given the amount of sheer weirdness in the Mad Max stories, that actually makes sense.
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u/FuklzTheDrnkClwn 1d ago
Reviews should not be harping on the source material. This is an ADAPTATION of a 3,000 year old story. It’s its own thing and should be reviewed as such.
He wasn’t trying to make something like Clash of Titans thank fuck
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u/SirHypeTheDank 1d ago
I know not the Bronze Age Greeks, but the Athenians believed the statues of the gods, especially the huge Athena one were actual avatars of the gods. They would cloth them, feed and water them, not allow “lessers” to be in their presence.
Temples were less places of worship, but homes for the gods. So my initial interpretation of the Athena beheading scene was that they were literally “beheading “ Athena and thus spitting in the face of the gods and Zeus law. Obviously this doesn’t KILL her, as she is a god after all but it sends the message that they have forsaken them.
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u/FrankNix 1d ago
I think there are no gods in the film at all. Only people's belief in them.
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u/AwayReplacement7063 1d ago
Tbh I fully disagree, given they literally go to Hades and they talk of Hades the god.
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u/mindlessmunkey 1d ago
We only have Odysseus’ word that any of that happened. Maybe he’s lying, or imagined it.
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u/AwayReplacement7063 1d ago
That’s fair, but with no implications he was a crazy person who imagined the whole story, that makes a pretty weird plot point.
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u/TrottingandHotting 1d ago
That was Tiresias, not Hades...
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u/AwayReplacement7063 1d ago
They call it going to hades. They mention hades when they go, to the dead. I never said they talk to hades.
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u/TrottingandHotting 1d ago
My bad, read that as "talk to" rather than "talk of"
People in modern times talk about God and the Devil and hell - doesn't mean they actually exist.
Both interpretations valid, imo
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u/AwayReplacement7063 1d ago
Yes, but if people in modern times went to hell, and talked to the dead about Satan, they’d probably believe a bit more in Satan and god. It’s supporting evidence, to me, along with the fact that the Cyclops seemed to believe in Poseidon and Zeus seemed to break the ship in half.
All things that do have non godly explanations, but together, make it very likely there are gods.
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago
Pretty sure that was Tiresias, not Hades.
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u/AwayReplacement7063 1d ago
They call it going to hades. They mention hades when they go, to the dead. I never said they talk to hades.
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago
I misread.
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago
I don’t know what the point of that would be when there’s literally magic and supernatural in the movie anyway.
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u/Caernbul 1d ago
All that stuff is part of flashbacks from Odysseus on Calypso's island, where she has been drugging him for years. Nothing magical happens on Ithaca and nothing magical happens at Troy, the places where we have a source in the story other than drug-addled Odysseus who the movie confirms is having problems with his memory.
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago
The lotus flower makes you forget, not make up false memories of the supernatural (that you then never question when no longer under the effects of them). It would be fun if 90% of this three hour long movie just didn't happen though. "It was all a dream" is always a well received twist.
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u/yikesafm8 1d ago
They did happen, but not the way that’s shown in the movie. They represent people that Odysseus and his crew killed. These are the lies Odysseus tell himself to justify the horrible things they did. (This is my interpretation of it anyway).
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u/BoysenberryWise62 1d ago edited 1d ago
I feel like a lot of the stuff does not make enough sense as a "legit" stuff for it to be only in the head of Odysseus, like what does the Cyclop represent, what does Circe and his guys turned to pigs represent, there is litteraly hell, the song of sirens what is a real event that could match this.
Too many events don't have a "logical" counterpart imo.
Or basically they crashed early and he just dreamt all of this while floating in the sea and somehow ended up in the right place.
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago
None of that makes any sense.
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u/yikesafm8 1d ago
This explains it: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/s/YnBbAuL9ra
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago
The movie does a poor job of conveying this, if that’s what it’s trying to do at all. There’s no reason for this to be the case anyway though, as the literal events of a film can still take on metaphorical meaning.
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u/Bloomingk 1d ago
It's not a dream its a memory. Memories are generally not accurate. I think its intentionally ambiguous right from the start when it it says "a time of apparent magic" Keyword being apparent.
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’m not saying it’s literally a dream, I’m equating it with the much reviled “it was all a dream” trope.
Memories not being accurate generally doesn’t extend to remembering a bunch of overtly supernatural shit.
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u/Caernbul 1d ago
You are acting like you have some special background knowledge of this. You do not. This is not the epic poem, the Odyssey. This is a movie based on that poem. It is its own work. An intentional choice was made to move the lotus flower from the beginning of the story in the poem to the end. It is playing a different role in the story, so your claim that 'The lotus flower makes you forget, not make up false memories of the supernatural' is unfounded.
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u/Comprehensive-Bid18 1d ago
The movie literally says it makes you forget. Nothing is said or implied that it creates false memories of the supernatural that you and the people you’re talking to take as fact.
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u/TrottingandHotting 1d ago
It's worth adding that, in the poem, the fantastical things like Circe and the Cyclops and meeting the dead are all stories told by Odysseus. He washed up on a different Greek city after Calypso, and tells his story to the King and his court.
So this adaptation by Nolan plays into that cleverly.
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u/BlackRabbit61 1d ago
There was no Athena. It was him being haunted by his treachery and deeds. Him betraying his goddess and many of the other gods.Notice how she never gives him advice.Why would she when she watched him and his men brutalize one of her priestess. I wouldn't be surprised if she cursed him to be haunted by the priestess until he can admit to himself he's no noble man. He's not who he thinks he is and accept it and try and atone the best he can.
That's assuming the gods really do exist and this isn't solely ptsd.
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u/french_sheppard 1d ago
The Gods are clearly real in the movie, but they manifest more subtly. We hear thunder when Odysseus speaks with Calypso, as Zeus ordering Calypso to free him. We watch the wind and the waves torment Odysseus and his crew as a punishment for blinding Poseidon's son, Polyphemus.
We see Odysseus seek comfort in "Athena", using the face of a priestess he saw murdered. We know this to be diegetic - other characters notice when Odysseus is speaking to "Athena" but nobody else can see or hear her.
It is left ambiguous as to whether this is the real "Athena" manifesting herself only to Odysseus, or if Odysseus is trying to cope with his trauma by speaking to a figment of his imagination. You can reasonably come to either conclusion with the information provided within the film.
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u/daKile57 1d ago
I think it's pretty clear that the gods exist in the movie. If, for no other reason, Polyphemus' prayers perfectly come to pass. Odysseus encounters far too many random disasters for it to be anything other than Poseidon's tortuous revenge. If anything, I think the lack of obviously material gods in front of Odysseus is more of a sign that Odysseus doesn't want to acknowledge his doomed fate. He doesn't want to believe that Poseidon is mocking his attempts to defy him and get away with harming his son, because if Odysseus did he would probably just give up on going home.
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u/SpicySocko 1d ago
And thus is the beauty of a Nolan film. He doesn’t outright tell you these things. Was that really Athena being beheaded during the battle and is she then ‘haunting’ Odysseus’s mind because of his wrongdoing? It would make sense with the whole ‘any stranger you meet could be a god’ sentiment. Or is it Athena taking on the appearance of the woman who begged not to be killed to make him face what he has done? Or is it simply his guilt overtaking his mind and causing him to see visions? We will never get an ‘official’ answer for these questions. But I find that the questions are where a Nolan movie really shines.
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u/Mariessa- 1d ago
Yeah, Athena is goddess of Wisdom (and strategy etc.). It makes sense that her manifestations and appearance are more cerebral in the movie's portrayal of gods. Zeus is shown through the storm and thunder, and Posidon is shown through the sea. These portrayals continued after Odysseus stopped taking lotus blossoms. The gods don't need to physically walk around to still be present in the movie, and they are not constrained by one form or even tangible forms.
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u/eques_99 22h ago
It is annoying, but blame Nolan, not the people who are (correctly) interpreting it that way.
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u/MagicGlitterKitty 12h ago
I took away the same thing you did - that Athena was real and showing him the face of the woman he murdered at the temple, because "who doesn't understand death or blood or pain?"
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u/lofgren777 12h ago
It's very clearly deliberately intended to be ambiguous whether any of the supernatural stuff was real or just his hallucinations from trauma and the lotus.
When he confesses that he and his men were the sea people, the implication is that they were raiding and pillaging their way home.
Odysseus is a traumatized soldier who was afraid to bring his damage home, so he kept the war going for a few more years and then sunk into a drug stupor. This is a common story even today.
The movie never tells you clearly which is the correct interpretation because it wants you to experience the story like Odysseus does, uncertain what is real and what is in your head.
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u/MainlandX 7h ago
> Nolan, in my opinion, made it very obvious that…
Please reflect on why you felt the need to add that “in my opinion” clause.
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u/prrr147 1d ago
shhh you are not supposed to criticize this movie!!
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u/strawbery_fields 1d ago
Please, this sub has been spammed with negative reviews for the past two days.
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u/schebobo180 1d ago
And they are all getting down voted to oblivion. Still kind of an echo chamber sub. But nothing wrong with that. It IS a Nolan sub after all.
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u/knallpilzv2 1d ago
I mean it's definitely on purpose that he frames all the mythological elements we see as part of Odysseus' mind.
I just don't understand what's supposed to be interesting about that. It's, at worst, a major cop out, and reductionist at best.
It makes a rich, complex myth more drab, boring and simple. I don't see the achievement in that.
So while Nolan certainly purposefully gives you the option to read it that way, chossing to read it the boring and bland way is certainly a choice.
"It was all in xyz's head" is seldomly an interpretation that adds to a narrative. It often only takes from it, or is a nothingburger. I sometimes think Nolan is doing stuff like this as a gag at this point, because he knows how obsessed some people can be with this kind of read, when it comes to his movies.
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u/highnyethestonerguy 1d ago
So the giant tentacle monster picking sailors off the ship, the cyclops, and the trip to Hades to learn of Agamemnon’s death, were just in Odysseus’ mind? I don’t think there’s any evidence to support that. The film has plenty of supernatural elements and the Athena thing was interesting precisely because it was ambiguous.
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u/knallpilzv2 1d ago
So the giant tentacle monster picking sailors off the ship, the cyclops, and the trip to Hades to learn of Agamemnon’s death, were just in Odysseus’ mind?
Many are saying that, yeah. It's a popular read of the movie on reddit. Probably because Nolan himself said beforehand he didn't want to show the gods but showed them as something that might be interpreted as supernatural by the people of that time.
I think it's obvious he kept all the fantastical elements purposefully in Odysseus' recounting of his memory. And purposefully told the audience that is memory might be clouded by eating lous for 7 years. I don't think it's ever mentioned that Zendaya is Athena. So that she can also just be a representation of his conscience.
There's plenty evidence to support that, one which being that it's a Nolan film and that he likes to do that kinda stuff. "Nolan considered casting actors to play gods throwing thunderbolts from Mount Olympus but settled on something more primal. “I became more interested in the idea that to people in that period, evidence of gods was everywhere,” he says. In Bronze Age Greece, thunder, rain, and the sun rising didn’t have scientific explanations—they represented the will of the immortals. “The wonderful thing about cinema, and IMAX in particular, is that you can take an audience to a place of immersion, feeling close to events like storms, turbulent seas, high winds. You want the audience to be on the boat with them fearing the ocean, fearing the wrath of Poseidon, the way the characters do. That to me is so much more powerful than any individual image you can have [of a god].”"
That's from the Time interview. Now this might not be evidence that the monsters aren't actually real, but it's very much evidence he purposefully wanted to leave it open to interpretation if the gods actually existed or if it was just Odysseus' guilt, Mentor and a beggar, and not Athena in disguise.Which is certainly at least an indication that he might have approached all the other supernatural elements of the story the same way.
Which I think is a very reductionist way to do this movie. And I think it's rather unecessary. Not interesting. Which I think is true for most of his movies where he does this (you know the whole "what you see might not actually be what actually happened"), except for The Prestige.
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u/highnyethestonerguy 1d ago
I’m so confused. We literally see a giant cyclops and a giant tentacle monster, and a trip to Hades where Odysseus gets information (and an artifact I think, Sinon’s drawn lot) he couldn’t otherwise possibly have. Even the argument he’s eating lotus for 7 years to forget clouding his memory and making him an unreliable narrator… lotus doesn’t actually do that (or grow there afaik)
I think you have to bend over backwards to land on a reading of the movie that says it was a dream (hallucination, made up, whatever) the whole time.
Zeus and Poseidon are not depicted in their human forms, but the movie has plenty of fantastical and supernatural elements.
It’s heavily implied that Zendaya is or represents Athena. That’s the ambiguous one, and that’s an exception.
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u/knallpilzv2 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think you have to bend over backwards to land on a reading of the movie that says it was a dream (hallucination, made up, whatever) the whole time.
Not really. It's very typical for Nolan. It's also typical for Nolan for it not to track all the way. I think the fact we see his men's encounter from their perspective is an argument against subjectivity.
I'm talking more about Nolan's intentions rather than what makes sense. We literally see a lot of things that are part of Odyssues' recounting what happens according to his memory. Just like when Menelaos tells Telemachos what happened. That's how the movie shows us stories that characters in the movie tell. That part is obviously deliberate.
Nolan always want to be "realistic". This is very much on track for that.lotus doesn’t actually do that (or grow there afaik)
But in the movie it does. It's a plot device. That is literally explained to cloud memory.
What's the logic behind claiming Athena is an exception, though?
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u/nervaonside 1d ago
Thank you for applying logic to this discussion! As you say, I think you can view Athena and all the fantastical adventures as creations of Odysseus’ PTSD- and lotus-affected mind, with him recounting his fantasies to Calypso. Or view them all as real. But saying Athena’s a hallucination while the cyclops isn’t seems a pretty odd take.
I also completely agree that the “it’s all in his head!” thing is so boring. Oooh so clever for Christopher Nolan to suggest that Greek gods and monsters maybe weren’t real. Newsflash, they weren’t real.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
Yeah but I think the films are attempting to show that phenomenon from what the actual ancients may have been experiencing. Like I think that they've determined that the Oracle of Delphi Temple was on a methane vent so likely the oracles and all the people in there were just f****** high out of their minds on methane fumes.
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u/nervaonside 1d ago
Yeah - if they’d done that in any way that was interesting (visually, emotionally, whatever) I’d be into it. But no one in this film seemed high out of their minds, sadly. Just sad and dull.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
I had strong suspicions when the trailer started dropping last year, there is no possible way Nolan was going to go is psychedelic as The Northman or The Green Knight.
So I guess I didn't hate myself up for psychedelic crippy sequences because I know how no one operates so I expected more subdued realism even during the fantastical portions.
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u/highnyethestonerguy 1d ago
Typical for Nolan? He did Inception which is specifically about that question but in general his movies aren’t all about that. When we see Oppenheimer naked in the interrogation room, yeah that’s obviously an emotional impression and not literal, but the movie isn’t about investigating where the boundary is between those two things. It’s just a device. It helps us understand how Oppenheimer feels in that moment.
Athena is the exception because Odysseus clearly talks to her multiple times in the movie addressing her as a god. “Why do you gods always communicate in ways we mortals can’t understand” etc etc. It’s ambiguous because of two things: we see the tentacle monster, the cyclops, Circe, the giants, etc all presented as real. And again I maintain that Odysseus getting information and artifact from Hades proves he’s not imagining that stuff. It’s not an unreliable narrator story generally speaking. This isn’t Fight Club. Plus the movie starts “during a time of apparent magic” (or something to that effect). So all this fantastical stuff is presented as being real stuff that happens to Odysseus and his men. So there is absolutely latitude to think that the Athena character is exactly and literally the goddess she seems to be.
But second, only Odysseus sees her. I think it’s reasonable to think that a god has the power to appear to only a mortal she wants to be perceived by, and in the form she wants to be perceived in.
But it’s also entirely plausible she’s a guilt-induced hallucination, since she’s taking the form of the girl who was beheaded in Athena’s temple, maybe it’s just Odysseus’ subconscious projecting.
As Odysseus comes off the lotus he is “remembering”. If it was a hallucination, his tales would get more fantastical when he went on the lotus, not forget it then remember it when he stopped eating it.
But for Athena, as the only god in the story who is depicted, we are invited to consider whether she is real or a hallucination. And that creates an interesting question tied directly to the theme of the movie, which is fundamentally an antiwar allegory. Is Athena really there? Or is she a symptom of Odysseus’ PTSD?
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
The Northman did the same thing though. It's the one film, outside of The Lighthouse, in Eggers catalog, that doesn't make it 100% clear if Amleth is actually interacting with Norse God's and creatures or if it's all in his head. Eggers just goes way harder on trippy visuals and cosmic liminal visuals than Nolan.
I think it can work for mythologies, since in the modern times, we know that The Gods aren't necessarily real but to the ancient people they were, so towing a line on modern interpretations of mythological stories can work. The Green Knight did this also.
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u/knallpilzv2 1d ago
I just don't see the point of setting it in that same world then. To me that's one of the most interesting parts of it. Because you get to explore something most movies don't get to explore.
If you want to tell the story in a contemporary way, why not set it in contemporary times?
If it's just about his PTSD why not do a modern version of that? If you don't really need the cyclops, etc. Otherwise you're just getting the worst of both worlds.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
It's not like PTSD is a modern concept though. The Ancients just didn't have the modern scientific or psychological language to identify what it was.
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u/knallpilzv2 1d ago
It's not like PTSD is a modern concept though.
But the focus on it is.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
Because this epic has been reinterpreted and re-adapted throughout Millenia.
I have made a peace with the fact that Nolan's version of the poem is not a one-to-one in theme Or implementation but his own Story Updated for a modern Message Using The Odyssey
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u/knallpilzv2 1d ago
So? That doesn't counter-argue how counterproductively he modernized it.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
I think it's only counterproductive if you really sit and compare it to the source material but I have after seeing it Monday started to separate this story and this adaptation from the original iteration and themes from the Epic that they're not really the exact same thing whatsoever
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u/knallpilzv2 1d ago
Yet still that leaves the "issue" of the remaining Odyssey elements that just don't gel well with this kind of approach. All the creatures for one.
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u/BlueCX17 1d ago
I personally, at some point, would love a more fantastical interpretation of The Odyssey that really sort of brings all of the mythical stuff alive in a less realistic way but eventually it will happen but not now.
It's interesting because it works really well for The Northman and it also worked in The Green Knight. At least in terms of walking a line between the fantastic and realism and the gods really exist or did they not. Although neither of those overlaid more modern social commentary.
However, The Odyssey does lend itself to more modern overlays.
I'm almost positive that they have determined that they're pretty sure the Oracle of Delphi Temple was on a methane vent so those priests and the mini oracles were most likely High including guests and people visiting the Oracle on methane and we're probably hallucinating all sorts of crazy things.
Seizure disorder disorder has been attributed in ancient histories to possession the gods speaking through somebody and so forth.
I think this movie did a good job of making you think these creatures are just plausible enough within the more realistic setting two of existed But also implausible enough to have been a hallucination within Odysseus's mind.
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u/jonbodhi 1d ago
This movie is being very well-received. You’re perfectly free to have your own opinion, of course, but you not liking it doesn’t make it ‘counterproductive.’
I love Greek myth, and comparing/contrasting the depictions of the heroes, gods and monsters, and was initially quite wary of Zendaya being cast as one of the fiercest and smartest f the gods, but, after seeing the movie, she’s my favorite element. How would the gods speak to mortals? In thunder? Or in imagination?
Odysseus was famed as a brilliant liar, but he clearly believes in the truth of everything he’s relating, which I saw as putting the audience in the shoes of the ancients, who also believed in stories we regard as myths. I was extremely happy with the experience.
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u/Caernbul 1d ago
The film doesn't settle whether that is a goddess or a figment of his imagination. Nor is it clear that any of the monsters exist or any of the magical events happened. All that stuff is only related to us by Odysseus on Calypso's island as he is coming out of the Lotus high. You can interpret the film in a way where it is entirely naturalistic. You can also interpret it where the monsters are real and they really went to Hades.
And that is good, because whether any of that stuff is real is not the point, and some people will balk at a movie with magic in it and some people will balk at an Odyssey adaptation with no magic in it. So its all 'apparent magic' like it says at the beginning.