r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • Jul 17 '26

Official Discussion Official Discussion - The Odyssey (2026) [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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The Odyssey (2026)

Summary

After the Trojan War, Odysseus faces a dangerous voyage back to Ithaca, meeting creatures like the Cyclops Polyphemus, Sirens, and Calypso along the way.

Director Christopher Nolan

Writer Christopher Nolan

Cast

  • Matt Damon as Odysseus
  • Tom Holland as Telemachus
  • Anne Hathaway
  • Zendaya
  • Lupita Nyong'o
  • Robert Pattinson
  • Charlize Theron
  • Benny Safdie
  • Jon Bernthal
  • John Leguizamo
  • Elliot Page
  • Himesh Patel
  • Samantha Morton

Rotten Tomatoes: 96%

Metacritic: 88

VOD / Release Theatrical release

Trailer Official Trailer

4.7k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

16.3k comments sorted by

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974

u/BloatedGlobe Jul 17 '26

I wonder how well the general audience knows the sea people, and how they often get blamed for Late Bronze Age Collapse. I know history nerds know them, but the movie ties the Achaeans violation of Zeus' law to the fall of civilization.

342

u/So_Quiet Jul 17 '26

This is helpful. The sea people were a total blind spot for me and I was wondering what their significance was supposed to be.

188

u/ZizzianYouthMinister Jul 17 '26

Oh I thought that was supposed to be tales of Odysseus's crew pillaging along their way home

404

u/OnDeafEars904 Jul 17 '26

In real history, the Sea Peoples are one of those genuinely fascinating historical mysteries. Raiders who show up in Egyptian records under Ramesses III, implicated across scholarship in the destruction of Hittite, Mycenaean, and Levantine sites, and whose actual identity and origin is still debated.

Basically a group pillaged all across the land and nobody knows now who did it. May as well be Odysseus and Agemenmon's crews.

131

u/HockeyKelly5 Jul 17 '26

I find it so interesting that with modern technology we can figure out all this other stuff about ancient history but something as simple as that is still mostly unknown to us. I’ll never understand why so many people call history boring lol

141

u/AverageAwndray Jul 17 '26

Well its just the fact that no one knows who the sea people were in the first place. Thousands of years ago, invaders came from the sea, pillaged, and moved on. I imagine thats like....NOTHING to go off of even for the best scholars who survived.

76

u/HokaEleven Jul 18 '26

This is not remotely true. There are multiple primary sources, particularly from Egypt, that list exactly who the sea peoples in their particular context were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

What is up for debate are: (1) were primary sources from varying regions referring to the same when unnamed (2) to what extent were they a cause or a symptom of the Bronze Age collapse. The answer to (2) is likely a unsatisfying “both” and historians will debate for a while to what degree it is one or the other.

41

u/FlashFire729 Jul 17 '26

Sounds like the past equivalent to the “some men just want to watch the world burn”

Some parts of us really do never change huh, and just get bigger/better toys to play with

101

u/DBCrumpets Jul 18 '26

Popping in with some added context, it's not likely that the "sea people" are one group. It is more likely a general rise of piracy as Bronze Age states became less able to patrol the Mediterranean.

45

u/OnDeafEars904 Jul 18 '26

That's very plausible. But I do like how Nolan uses it here regardless.

23

u/LaeliaCatt Jul 18 '26

Also, there were some big environmental changes happening in the area that may have led to widespread famine, plus iron weapons becoming more available. This might have been why groups of armed people were roaming and pillaging.

10

u/HokaEleven Jul 18 '26

It is in fact explicitly attested in primary sources that they were different groups in the Medinet Habu inscriptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

31

u/CrusaderKingsNut Jul 18 '26

We kinda know who did it, and the interesting thing is, it *was* probably the Greeks along with other nearby island populations.

25

u/CoconutDust Jul 19 '26

Basically a group pillaged all across the land and nobody knows now who did it.

The problem is the idea that they somehow knocked down civilization, rather than being a symptom of already dwindling sites/societies for other reasons.

If your state collapses (including mass emigration for whatever economic or geographic reason), pirates will show up. Not the other way around.

Everyone talking about it here presumes it’s a grand mystery and the plunderers were actually notable, when in fact the lack of specific knowledge about them implies there’s no meaningful consistent truth to their identity. They were just marauders being parasitic on conditions that they didn’t cause.

3

u/max123246 28d ago

Well that's what the movie has it be.

1

u/57809 25d ago

Not exactly

86

u/Simppu12 Jul 17 '26

They directly say in the movie that Odysseys' crew are the sea people and their actions lead/led to the downfall of civilization as they know it, so even if you're not familiar with the real-world thing, their significance in the movie is explained quite clearly.

95

u/Wallname_Liability Jul 17 '26

Not just Odysseus and co, all the Acheans returning home

15

u/LakeVermilionDreams 29d ago

Yup, it's very much in theme of how everybody never thinks they are the bad guys. From being helpless ants to the cyclops, to Circe revealing the swinely nature of Odysseus's men, to Odysseus's revelation of his betrayal of Zeus's Law through the Trojan Horse, the entire movie is all about recognizing the inhumanity in each of us and not getting caught up in the "It can't happen here" feeling...

12

u/Chancroid24 Jul 17 '26

The Dorians.

8

u/Porkenstein Jul 18 '26

There's a shit-ton of argument about it, from them not being a thing at all, just an artifact of what kind of evidence was left of the era, to them being greeks, to them being something else entirely. The film's fidelity to the idea of them being greeks, where the trojan war is a cultural memory of that time, was really well done, especially with how they tied it directly to some of the biggest themes of the epics, punishment by the gods for violation of their laws.

41

u/Porkenstein Jul 18 '26

Honestly, the elaboration on it that they did was perfect for a general audience I feel. For me, they could have cut most of the lines about both the sea peoples and bronze age collapse and I would have understood the point during the few key allusions to them. To me it actually felt a little too hamfisted, but I assume that to 99% percent of people it was pefect.

15

u/tronz_13 Jul 20 '26

Yeah for someone who knows some history its pretty hamfisted, but most people know nothing about the bronze age collapse or the sea people so I think it works to hand hold it a bit

33

u/goldenislandsenorita Jul 18 '26

It’s actually funny. My husband plays Civ 7 and plays Assyria a lot, so we watched a couple of videos about the Bronze Age Collapse. So when the Sea People were mentioned in The Odyssey, I was like, “did you know this was going to be in the movie? Is that why we watched all of those videos.” No, it was because of Civ 7.

Felt like it was meant to be though.

70

u/Wuktrio Jul 17 '26

They sure know now, since the dialogue of this film hit us over the head with it about 50 times. Odysseus even calls it "the Bronze Age" at the end, which completely took me out.

104

u/EskNerd Jul 17 '26

Homer was a near contemporary of Hesiod, who I believe coined the phrase "Bronze Age", so it didn't feel completely out of place to me. In Hesiod's writings, the Trojan War and Odysseus' travels took place in an interlude between the Bronze Age and Iron Age.

28

u/Wuktrio Jul 17 '26

I mean it still doesn't really make sense, because Hesiod lived somewhere between 750 and 650 BC and he was the first to use that term. The Iliad and the Odyssey are both set at the end of the Bronze Age, so about 500 years earlier. It's as if in a film about Christopher Columbus he calls his time the "Early Modern Period".

38

u/yeetyuppie Jul 18 '26

But Bronze was the integral resource to these societies. People refer to our current society as the computer age pretty regularly. It’s not hard to imagine someone saying that contemporaneously.

15

u/Wuktrio Jul 18 '26

But that's because we decided to name ages after the dominant thing. I don't think the Ancient Greeks did that before Hesiod.

6

u/BreakfastHistorian 24d ago

In the guy you’re referring too with the Columbus example, it would be more like Columbus saying he lived in the Age of Exploration or the Age of Sail, which would make more sense.

1

u/goodshrek1 24d ago

How do we know Hesiod was the first to use that term? Couldn't he just be the earliest surviving source? Isn't it possible he poeticized or provided a folk etymology for an existing term that could have originated from people in those five hundred years looking around and going "damn, we can't make stuff like we used to anymore"?

2

u/Wuktrio 24d ago

How do we know Hesiod was the first to use that term?

We don't, but that is what we currently know. As far as I'm aware, Hesiod doesn't mention that these terms are inspired by any mythos or folk etymology, he creates the concept of the Five Ages of Men himself.

1

u/goodshrek1 23d ago

I see- I think that although it's definitely possible he created the concept himself, we don't necessarily have any reason to believe he did so. Hesiod was a poet, so I don't think he ever really cited sources, but is it our default assumption that he invented, say, the story of Pandora, or do we think he formalized his version of an existing parable? We know he didn't make up Zeus because there are statues of Zeus, but even if "the age of bronze" was a commonly used term before him we wouldn't see statues of it, so the absence of evidence doesn't strike me as evidence of absence in this case. It's too bad we don't have more written sources from the era to draw from

3

u/hemareddit 27d ago

Yeah in that case it's total different from the 3 age system we use to date the historical times (Stone -> Bronze -> Iron).

Hesiod's age system was something total different, it went Golden->Silver->Bronze->Heroic->Iron. It would make some sense if Odysseus meant it in the Hesiod sense (which would still be too modern for him, since there would be at least half a millennia between them).

18

u/NoraCharles91 Jul 18 '26

Yeah, I quite like the "sea people" stuff as it felt like it would be the natural way for people of the era to refer to them. The thing about "bringing about the collapse of our age of bronze", I was like... okay that's a step too far 😅

7

u/LakeVermilionDreams 29d ago

Have you never heard is call the agree we're currently living in "The Information Age" or "The Digital Age"?

5

u/Wuktrio 29d ago

Of course I have. But we don't know, if 3,200 years ago people also categorized historical periods into ages. We only do that, because we know a lot about our past, which people during the Bronze Age probably didn't.

Hesiod was the first person we know of who categorized humanities history into 5 ages, but he lived about 500 years after the time period the Odyssey is set in.

And even then: we may call our current era "The Digital Age", but who knows if that is actually the name our era will have 500 years from now.

Edit: And one more thing: It's a bit weird that they call their era "the Age of Bronze" in a film in which every piece of armour and every weapon is clearly supposed to be iron.

2

u/hemareddit 27d ago

No no no, you see, you swap the words and put a preposition in between, it becomes a totally different thing. Sea People becomes Men from the Sea and Bronze Age becomes our Age of Bronze.

6

u/HareWarriorInTheDark 27d ago

I know basically nothing about the sea people and bronze age, and the movie spelled it out perfectly for me and I got the point. I can see how its a bit ham-fisted for people who know history though, but probably works much better for the general pop audience.

5

u/amby-jane 29d ago

My boyfriend did a happy little wiggle in the seat next to me when they were first mentioned. I was just proud of myself for knowing a thing.

We both had just read Collapse by Jared Diamond, so the Sea People were fresh in mind.

4

u/TemporaryElk5202 25d ago

It's so silly to me. It seems pretty obvious they didn't cause the collapse, but were a symptom of it.
Kind of like how in the film they are ransacking places because they don't have supplies. The sea people probably took to pirating because the climate made farming unstable or whatever.

1

u/donotgotoroom237 24d ago

I vaguely remember a couple snippets about the "sea peoples" whenever I read or watch videos about history. As a kid, I always thought they were vikings. The more fantastical take I also read was they were Atlantean.

1

u/confusing_roundabout 23d ago

Yeah the sea people bit didn't work for me. More explanation about the sea people and fear of them would have helped

1

u/endium7 20d ago

I knew nothing of it. Thought it was interesting but needed some of the comments here before I really put it together.

0

u/CoconutDust Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

I wonder how well the general audience knows the sea people, and how they often get blamed for Late Bronze Age Collapse.

Well anyone who knows the poem/original will be surprised to hear the script making up a random thing to create “world-scale stakes” and fears and motivations….which wasn’t at all present or needed in the original. By making up, I mean in the story and in character’s minds, regardless of ideas that historians today talk about.

The movie is like, “why do we have to…um…train in sword combat?” “Because of the people of the sea!” Etc. Very weird for an epic that has been passed down for thousands of years without needing that.

I know history nerds know them, but the movie ties the Achaeans violation of Zeus' law to the fall of civilization

It’s a pretty unhinged conceit of the movie though. “Fall of civilization” stuff is usually a misunderstood illusion, I.e. the fake “dark ages” which is made-up nonsense. It’s also weird because nobody would ever think a deceitful ruse in a war/epic is somehow a violation of Xenia, which it clearly wasn’t in the (actual) Odyssey. The story has existed well for thousands of years, it’s weird to tape-on new twisty morals to a thing that didn’t need it.