What does The Odyssey film tell us about the effects of war on soldiers? Dr Brian Powers from our International Centre for Moral Injury shares his thoughts.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has generated a great deal of debate, with many critics focusing on the differences between the film and Homer’s poem. The incendiary review of the film by the acclaimed classicist Emily Wilson has led much of the scholarly discourse about the film.
Yet The Odyssey is not the Homeric tale, but a meditation on the effects of war on modern combatants, on shared social values and the consequences of breaching them. Discourse around the film to date features few voices from those who have lived experience with modern war and returning from it.
While I do not dare to speak for others, as a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a scholar and researcher of moral injury amongst veterans, I found the film surprisingly emotional and deeply meaningful. It is informed by the concept of moral injury – not post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - and Nolan’s commentary on modern conflict plays closely to the surface of the film’s narrative.
The film’s emotional core is not about Odysseus simply “feeling bad” about war – a patronising description of the complex weight of guilt, grief, anger and loss that combatants carry. We recognise many of these experiences today as moral injury, a phenomenon conceived by US psychiatrist Jonathan Shay which is present when there has been a “betrayal of ‘what’s right’ by a legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation.”
A particularly corrosive effect of moral injury is the destruction of our capacity for social trust – the belief that institutions we rely upon will act in accordance with shared ethical norms.
The Odyssey (2026) explores the betrayal and collapse of ‘what’s right’ and involves the audience as witness to it through experiences of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus.
Through the experiences and reflections of a morally injured Odysseus, Nolan muses about humanity, the cost of lies, xenophobia and the consequences of war. He shifts Homer’s narrative in dark and nightmarish ways that reflect Odysseus’ journey through an uncertain world that is no longer joyous or hopeful.
Odysseus leaves Troy without provisions for his crew, intending to stop and gather them on the way back to Ithaca. The form of xenia, or guest hospitality, that Nolan formulates throughout as “Zeus’ law” is what Odysseus is counting on. At their first port of call, Odysseus and his crew find a village whose inhabitants flee rather than offer them hospitality – they themselves are now perceived as odious and feared.
Odysseus not only suffers from the collapse of his own capacity for social trust but comes to believe that the ‘trick’ he devised and executed with the Trojan horse has destroyed the moral order and the world that relied implicitly upon it.
A critical piece of knowledge that morally injured combatants often carry is the humanity of their enemies and those their own society has ‘othered’. Militaries have often tacitly dehumanised their enemies to train combatants to attack them without hesitation – a bit of moral trickery that often exacerbates moral injury when combatants realise their enemies are just like them.
Nolan shows this unfold slowly over the course of the film through Odysseus’ eyes – most poignantly in the final encounter with Athena in Ithaca.
The psychological and emotional climax of the film is Odysseus’ return – but the moral weight Odysseus has been carrying is demonstrated most fully in his conversation with Penelope. In exploring his own guilt, he invites the audience into his moral injury indirectly, by asking questions like, “What if he saw ten years of rage pour into the city in one night?” The final question is one many morally injured veterans know well: “What if he knew exactly what he’d done?”
I found the dialogue deeply cathartic, as through it I could lament for what I helped unleash, for the identity I lost, for the lies we believed, for all the things we broke and can never repair, for the world we destroyed, for the lives I couldn’t save, for the years my wife spent patiently dealing with my grief and anger...for everything.
What Nolan achieves is rare, creating space for those whose experiences might resonate with Odysseus’ to feel seen and understood. What he puts on screen in Odysseus’ return is a profound meditation on the moral costs of breaching social trust and the heavy weight of returning home. It offers no tidy bow to the difficult moral questions it raises - particularly on the themes of moral absolution, the moral accounting we owe to victims and the world, and to moral repair.
Rather, it tells the tale of someone who sought to be honourable, found himself deeply compromised, and has journeyed home with a significant amount of agony, but also of acquired moral wisdom. In hearing Odysseus’ testimony, the film leaves the audience with the haunting and open questions about how we ourselves receive that ‘moral knowledge’ and how we respond to it.
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