Every Soldier an Odysseus

In the second trailer for Christoper Nolan’s Odyssey, we see Antinous—one of the leaders of the suitors attempting to wed Penelope and inherit Odysseus’s household—shouting at the hapless Telemachus: “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard.” These words do not appear in the original text, but they capture something significant from its spirit.

The Odyssey opens twenty years after Odysseus had set off to fight in the Trojan War, and from which he has not yet returned. Telemachus, his son, who was an infant when his father departed, is now a young man who must choose his own future. The suitors—some of them Telemachus’s own contemporaries—represent the new generation: their fathers too went off to war, and they spend their days in wild parties at the household’s expense. Antinous and his companions demand that Telemachus forget the past and join the party. How long can one go on longing for a world that was and is no more?

Rather than yield to the suitors’ demands, Telemachus decides to set out on a journey in search of his father. He does not find him, but he learns about him. It is precisely upon returning from his journey that he encounters his father, who has already reached Ithaca, and together they take up the task of reclaiming their home. Telemachus’s quest yielded not practical results but educational ones; it gave him the opportunity to learn the values his father and his companions lived by, and to choose, with full awareness, to become his father’s son and heir.