Editorial Note: this post contains spoilers. 

Christopher Nolan is one of the most important working American movie directors. He is one of the few directors in the Hollywood system who consistently delivers non-franchise blockbusters. Many of his films, including Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, are as successful with critics as they are at the box office. The same is true of his most recent film, The Odyssey, which has surpassed $1 billion in global ticket sales and received generally high marks from critics.

But The Odyssey does have its detractors. The film has generated a fair amount  online controversy for its casting decisions, its historical accuracy, and for Nolan’s interpretation of the ancient epic poem.

As many commentators point out, argument concerning the “historical accuracy” of The Odyssey‘s design, setting, and casting run into some very thorny problems. The poem itself is ostensibly set during the late Mediterranean Bronze Age, but was likely composed during the Greek “Dark Ages” or early “Archaic Period” — centuries after the palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns, and other Bronze Age sites burned to the ground. 

As classicist Brett Devereux wrote in Foreign Policy:

“Historical accuracy” is a difficult framework for Homer. Homer’s poem itself is a mélange of historical elements scattered over the nearly four and a half centuries from when its events were to have taken place to its final composition. Homer freely mixes elements of the late Bronze Age with elements of his own time in the early Archaic and purely fantastical elements, creating a kind of free-floating timelessness.

The Odyssey is also something of a frontier epic: it chronicles journeys to the misty end of the world and its narrative is woven with exotic imagery. The poem was always supposed to be about distant times and places, and its audiences always reimagined it in ways that fit their own sensibilities. Nolan continues in that tradition. His choices —  including his use of a Nordic color palette and a cast reflecting American conceptions of diversity — make clear that his Odyssey is oriented toward contemporary Western concerns. 

In this spirit, many have read The Odyssey as an intervention into recent debates about the fate of ‘western civilization.’ While I echo much of their analysis, I want to emphasize a more “international relations” take: that the film serves as an interesting allegory for the collapse of the American-led “liberal international order.”

Civilizational Collapse

Nolan’s Odyssey is a civilization-scale suspense story about who destroyed Bronze Age civilization. 

Let us consider the main setting of the film. Many years after playing a pivotal role in the destruction of Troy, Odysseus struggles to find his way back to Ithaca. His family members back home brood about a vague threat associated with “people from the sea,” who, according to reports, are bringing destruction and chaos everywhere that they visit. In case you missed the point, one of the characters in the film tells us that “It feels as if our age of bronze is collapsing.”

In the end the film reveals that the ‘people from the sea’ are none other than the veterans of the Trojan war returning from their journeys. The victory over Troy, enabled by Odysseus’ trickery and concluding with genocide, was an act that destabilized the order of things Odysseus left behind — an order which he is struggling to remember and regain. When the guilt-ridden Odysseus finally reaches home, he admits to his wife that he and his fellow Greeks violated much that was sacred and destroyed the bonds that hold peoples together. (The movie then ends with a journey to the unknown west, where Odysseus looks forward to the possibility of a more just future… or at least redemption).

This interpretation has some basis in the broader historical context of the Homeric epics. The actual Bronze Age collapse of the 12th century BCE refers to the disintegration of a complex web of trade relations between Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, Crete and mainland Greece, and the disappearance of sophisticated bureaucratic societies in these places. The collapse coincides with archeological evidence of major battles in the Anatolian city of Troy, and with sketchy reports elsewhere (especially in Egypt) about warlike “sea peoples” bringing havoc. 

Admittedly, beyond these rudimentary facts, everything about this period is subject of debate among historians. It is not clear whether pillaging by people from the sea was more of a cause or a consequence of the trade system collapse; climate change may have also played an important role in this process.

It is also not clear where Mycenaean Greeks — the protagonists of Homeric epics — stand in all this. Modern historians once thought that Mycenaeans were the warlike sea people. This hypothesis receives less support nowadays, and ‘Mycenaean civilization’ itself was a part of the whole that collapsed. But actors may destabilize a system that they were a part of, with selfish actions that little by little eat away the foundation, until one day it no longer holds and they are none the better for it.

The End of the Liberal Order

Now, we too live in an age of disruption. Perhaps future historians will dub this period as one of collapse. There is no doubt that the liberal international order that was built under American leadership after WWII, and which acquired a more self-confident posture after the end of the Cold War, is giving way to something else. The Trump presidency has been the spearhead of attempts to dismantle this order, through its open disdain of liberal institutions, its unilateral mercantilist attitude towards international trade, and its Iran war that it barely tried to explain to anyone. But the souring of American hegemony of course goes back further. If we look for actions by the USA that undermined the aspiration for a rule-based order, we would have to include not only Bush’s war on Iraq but also Obama’s cavalier approach to justifying targeted drone assassinations and the longstanding, bipartisan US support for any Israeli action. There is a good case to be made for the argument that the hegemon of the global system has long been acting like a predatory actor, eating away the foundations of the system, rather than serving as a provider of order and public goods. 

The unraveling occurs in two primary ways. First, as Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann explain, a hegemon can destabilize its own system through overreach and structural erosion. They note that “[s]ometimes, the pre-eminent power expands beyond its ‘loss of strength gradient’ and thus expends more blood and treasure in further domination than it gains from extracting new resources,” a dynamic which ultimately “degrades its hegemonic position”. Second, the United States’ own frequent disdain for the established rules of the game signals to rival actors like Russia and China that they, too, can act with assertive impunity. Simultaneously, US allies lose trust, and the rest of the international community starts hedging its bets more widely. The combined result of this internal exhaustion and external defiance is the rapid disappearance of international obeisance—the very deference required to make a hegemonic order function. Predatory hegemony, warns Stephen Waltz, “will weaken the United States and its allies alike, generate growing global resentment, create tempting opportunities for Washington’s main rivals, and leave Americans less secure, less prosperous, and less influential.”

Rather than acknowledging its role in this systemic decay, the American political establishment, and the Trump administration in particular, currently singles out China as the great boogeyman. Yet, America’s own unilateral choices—most notably the initiation of sweeping tariff wars that actively dismantled established trade norms—bear a substantial share of the blame for this systemic fracturing. Much like the dreaded “sea peoples,” the pervasive fear of China is often rooted in an understudied, largely imagined “Other.” This distant adversary functions as a convenient screen, allowing a declining power to externalize the consequences of its own self-inflicted damage rather than confronting its reflection.

I think that Nolan’s Odyssey purposefully invites comparisons with the decline of the American hegemony and puts forward a political argument. King Agamemnon of the Mycenaeans uses Helen’s abduction as an excuse to wrest trade away from the city of Troy through war. Victory is achieved through a trick that abuses the guest-host relationship, and the guest code becomes an excuse for Mycenaeans to plunder anywhere they visit for provisions on their way back. Folks back home feel the coming of disorder, but they imagine it to be a result of foreign, barely known adversaries across the sea. In revealing that the tales of such adversaries are an echo of Mycenaean actions, the movie invites the audience to look at themselves for signs of actual danger and moral decay. 

By revealing that the feared “sea peoples” are merely the conquerors coming home to roost, the film delivers an uncomfortable thesis for our time: when a hegemonic power falls, the monsters at the gates are often just the reflections of its own choices.

The plot also features an island full of giant Robocops trying to kill Odysseus’s crew. I don’t know what that’s about.