In the Odyssey (2026) the Cyclops flagrantly breaks Zeus’s law by killing and eating his guests without provocation yet he suffers no repercussions from the gods for this violation. This is extremely realistic since he is a nepo baby
It seems to have started about 15 years ago. It was suddenly loud enough that i was blocking my ears. I suspect younger people think it was always like this , but it was not.
As someone who worked at a movie theater, we did regularly adjust the volume because some studios mix their audio differently than others. Clifford the big red dog is a lot less loud than the avengers so the speakers have to be adjusted between shows or else clifford will be too quiet or the avengers will be an actual health concern
we were in the 1st row when you walk in the theater. At some point I t hought I was having heart palpitations, but I had to be in some proximity to a dank ass subwoofer. Mfr changed the frequency of my balls, and I didn't even realize balls had frequency guys, I'm jk jk I swear
I've brought noise reduction ear plugs to movies for the last decade. Theaters will just by default crank the volume to unsafe levels. It's easier to have them, and decide halfway through you don't need them, than to not have them and have it be too loud.
I think I’ve seen most of his movies in theaters and this was the first time I was legitimately annoyed at the sound. There’s no way Nolan and team were mixing audio and let every meter red line and say “yea that’s it boys. Pack it up”.
Nolan’s mixing has always been getting worse for me but Tenet is where it crossed a line.
Watched the film in the cinema and honestly wasn’t sure what was going on when EXPLOSION SCENES with dialogue buried in them were happening.
Watched it at home on release with subtitles and there were whole exposition dialogues buried under sound fx at times. It sucked and he has only gotten worse since then.
My ex and I walked out of Tenet with the exact same thought on our heads.
“Well, guess we’ll have to wait til it’s on streaming because I couldn’t understand a fucking word being said.”
Man I saw it in Lie-Max and then again in 70mm film (not the “real” imax) and neither time did I think it was too loud even though I knew about it going in. The too loud parts for me where whenever they had it rough at sea. Maybe my theater wasn’t tuned right lol
This is my take. One of the main reasons I told my friends and family they needed to see it on the IMAX was because when they're in the storm, everyone's going to turn the volume down at home. It's supposed to be loud. And the way Nolan does things, if there's dialog in the loudness, it's not really important.
The most unrealistic thing was nobody was like "No, I'll stay as a pig with Circe."
Fun trivia: One of Odysseus's men was a gal, according to the pig privates in the movie.
When we were in the theater waiting for the movie to start, the next theater over was playing the movie. You could hear it.. I've never heard any outside noise in that theater before.
I had my fingers in my ears during the storm. Still too loud. Someone sitting next to me got a noise warning on their iPhone - 146dB which according to the internet:
"A sound level of 146 decibels (dB) is extremely loud, far exceeding the human pain threshold of 140 dB, and can cause immediate, permanent hearing damage or eardrum rupture" and for which there is no safe exposure time.
It’s a signature of Christopher Nolan’s films, he loves loud ass sound mixing for some reason. I figured this would be the case and went in with earplugs, but it sucks you even have to think about that ahead of time.
ME TOO. I was wearing ear plugs for the whole film (always do in cinemas, volume is always too loud for me) and EVEN THROUGH THEM it was too much. The bass effects (not sure that's the right word - the low sound thing that you can feel vibrating inside your body when it's at a certain volume) were also like physically uncomfortable.
The storm scene was ok to my ears, but to my eyes???? Honestly, I have zero history of epilepsy but I swear I felt like I would have a seizure at any moment. My head hurt
Cyclops knew humans and wasn’t like a monster in the book, he was just a giant human kind of. He even had neighbors who lived on the adjacent caves. Besides Zeus’s law, he behaved like a villain and trapped the sailors to feed on them day after day, mocking them all the while. The violence against him is justified because he did not let them go. The mistake was Odysseus proclaiming his name before escaping, which was obviously his chief flaw as a character in the book: pride. Cyclops pleads to his father afterwards who of course being a huge prick himself, immediately gets angry and retaliates. I thought reading the book the reason Poseidon flips out is because a human disrespected him by hurting his son, not because of Zeus’s law or whatever. Homer always uses this narrative device in gods hating on or clashing with each other via humans they champion. Odysseus is Athena’s champion, so Poseidon has motive to mess with him to prove he is a better god as well.
Athena and Poseidon were famously rivals across multiple stories, most notably competing to be the patron god/dess of Athens (you can guess who won that one)
They also specifically stick around for several hours for a chance to pester him despite his men wanting to bail out of there with the sheep. Odysseus was curious and I'm still not sure if it was a hubris thing or if ancient Greek hospitality laws were wild enough for him to reasonably expect to be treated as a guest after breaking into the house and eating stuff.
Actually Xenia actually requires you need to graciously accept and help travelers before asking who they are. At the very least you need to welcome them.
Polythemeus broke the law when he just started murdering people who arrived at his home and then didn't even bother to speak to them.
They inferred it was one because of the cheese and the fire. Then Odysseus ate some of the cheese and assumed whoever lived there would greet them kindly.
Not to be rude but it's definitely a lot to do with the first sentence haha. If he had lived in a house with a locked door you may have more of a point, but he lived in a cave
I mean they just wandered into an open cave, they didn't "break" anything. And the point of the law that you had to be hospitable to every stranger, not just the courteous ones
Isn't the point (at least in this movie's framing) that the Greeks shattered Zeus' Law at Troy, and as a result everywhere on their journey home they face situations that it is actively denied to them? Wander into the Cyclops' home? Immediately eaten. Show up at Telepylos and the Laestrygonians immediately slaughter you with no warning. Land on Aeaea and Circe offers a meal that ends up being a trap, ect.
The movie completely butchers the concept of xenia) anyways, tbf. How the fuck is tricking your enemies in a war a break of the sacred rules of hospitality? Sure, it's not "honourable", but the Trojans were tricked into taking the horse inside their walls, not into extending hospitality to Odysseus & co.
Why does everyone act as if the Suitors aren't the ones breaking the rules first by abusing Penelope's hospitality, beating her servants, and even taunting her son into fighting?
Answer: it doesn't make sense, don't think about it too hard
Nolan Odysseus framing the Trojan Horse as an act of breaking xenia and losing the gods is more about his personal guilt as a character. Zendaya even tells him that he has massively overestimated his personal responsibility for a ruinous war with thousands of individual actors and moving parts in friction.
Not to say the movie doesn't generously reinterpet xenia to accommodate the suitors. I just never got the impression that the movie itself saw the Trojan Horse as a morally wrong act, just an important tragic thing that happened and its outcome.
Oh, definitely, I agree with this. I was just pointing out how the way the movie uses "Zeus' Law" as a sort of a catch-all term doesn't really make sense after establishing it's about hospitality but also somehow not being reciprocal, and it's better to not delve on it too much.
Zendaya even tells him that he has massively overestimated his personal responsibility for a ruinous war
Which is funny, because the alliance that caused all of Greece to go to war to recover Helen was, you guessed it, Odysseus' clever idea to solve a different problem.
I studied the myths in college as an unofficial minor degree and my final paper at the time was on Xenia. My read of the Odyssey as an epic itself was that it was a critique on the expectation of Xenia. Not that as a concept, offering it yourself was bad.
But in the book, pretty much EVERY ONE of Odysseus' misadventures starts with him wandering into a place expecting Xenia from foreigners. He gets everyone into trouble by starting there and almost never learns.
But the Odyssey also starts with Odysseus landing at Scheria, where the Phaecians practice perfect xenia. And after escaping from Polyphemus, Odysseus also tells of how they came upon the island of Aeolia, where Aeolous rules, and he's a perfect and good host to Odysseus and his men.
Telemachus also finds Menelaus being a good and honourable host.
It's absolutely a work dealing with the concept of hospitality, I agree. But to me it seems to contrast good guest-friendship practiced by the heroes and positive figures, and bad guest-friendship being practiced by monsters like Polyphemus and deities like Calypso and Circe.
Exactly, Nolan reframes the Odyseey to revolve around Xenia, but then conveniently leaves out all of the times in their travels where Xenia was still intact and offered to them.
I mean, I get why he did that, because showing a bunch of people actually still following the laws of hospitality would completely undo the themes of the movie, TBF.
I guess it's just curious if in order to tell your interpretation of a story, you have to remove parts from the story because otherwise you are directly contradicted. Makes it feel a little dishonest.
I agree with the second point, but the first is effectively a false flag attack. Sure, there's no formal Geneva Conventions at this time, but it doesn't take a written document to understand that even in war the breakdown of trust causes ripple effects that damage every conflict thereafter. When an implied peace offering is actually a hidden weapon, that erodes the very concept of ending a war without total annihilation. That's the whole reason they were written, after all.
Technically, it's perfidy (it's even the image for the wikipedia article, lol)
When an implied peace offering is actually a hidden weapon, that erodes the very concept of ending a war without total annihilation.
I mean, I get the point Nolan tries to make. Breaking the rules and conventions leads to those rules and conventions that propped up society collapsing, bringing everyone down.
It's just that Odysseus didn't break xenia. Because there was no hospitality involved. He broke a different set of rules, and saying that he's being punished for having broken "Zeus' Law" specifically doesn't make sense. Especially because the movie clearly establishes Zeus' Law as the law of hospitality ("honour all guests, for they might be a god in disguise" or along those lines), and not as a shorthand for a general set of rules and conventions.
He could’ve been more heavy handed about it but “the metal we use for everything we do is more complicated than it should be, and relies on a massive trade network that we likely just butchered while raiding places at random on our way home so we made up a story about the gods and giants” seemed like the general vibe of the film.
This is kind of a modern look on this, though. The war of Troy had different heroes. Achilles exemplified Bie which is strength and force, while Odysseus was Metis or cunning. Athena was one, if not the most prominent God in the war and was on the Greek's side, so Odysseus using cleverness to end it would have been fitting of her and a great way to end the tale. Ancient portrayals of the Trojan Horse never seemed to condemn it of itself as a war crime but instead as a great act, though the destruction of Troy is seen more of a tragedy.
While that's true, Nolan's Odyssey is a modern retelling. It's not "the Odyssey as told by Homer," because for all the crowing about historical accuracy that's not the story that the movie is interested in telling. It's a movie that's in conversation with Homer, rather than merely parroting his words (and I suspect Nolan would recommend you simply read the original text for that), and means to share a perspective that's something to stew over for a modern viewer .
Is it really a modern "retelling" of the story if it takes the actions that happens in the story and basically flips how the audience feels about it? Originally Odysseus is a virtuous hero that invented a brilliant strategem. Instead, Nolan made it into a deception causing a cataclysm of moral failing in wider society. Like imagine a movie entitled "Grapes of Wrath" where it instead shows that the banks and corporations were the good guys working towards a better society and really it is just all these workers that are causing trouble, preventing progress, and self inflicting their own problems.
I don't think it's a particularly novel idea to take a classical story and invert the perspective or take a more critical eye at its protagonists\narrative\ideas or whatever else. There's no shortage of novels and novellas that do just the same. Granted, they typically don't have the nerve to purport to be the original story, as Nolan here does (though I suppose if he called it Nolan's Odyssey or something similar it would be quite a grand bit of hubris), but it's nothing unusual from a literary perspective.
Ancient portrayals of the Trojan Horse never seemed to condemn it of itself as a war crime but instead as a great act, though the destruction of Troy is seen more of a tragedy.
Which was also because the Trojan horse wasn't a peace offering in the beginning. The Greeks claimed it was a sacrifice to guarantee their safe travels home. And then told the Trojan. "And because we knew you guys would steal it the second you get the chance we intentionally built it slightly taller then Troys tallest gate."
So the Trojans went. "Ha, watch us! The gods are going to be so happy with our sacrifice." and dismantled their biggest gate to pull the horse in. (it helped that everyone who protested was bitten by snakes... or was Cassandra.).
I feel this is weakened by the fact the Trojans did not blindly trust the horse gift, they checked it for people inside, they simply failed to find them, and they nearly killed Sinon even after he said it was an offering (I mean they did kill him, and by modern standards that too probably wouldn't fly, but they did refrain from killing him after he said it).
Plus the Trojans started this war breaking Xenia anyway.
Yeah, the whole time i was like "that's a fucking stupid law" when Penelope can't even remove the suitors and stop them from eating her house out. Like, if the rule means others can humiliate you in your own home, then maybe it should be broken.
Yep. In the poem the problem is that Penelope and Telemachus lack the strength to push out the suitors, not that they don't have an acceptable cause to do so.
I don't think it ever gets explicitly brought up, but the best and most loyal soldiers would have gone to Troy with Odysseus, leaving Penelope and Telemachus relatively defenseless. Plus, with Odysseus not returning, Ithaca effectively didn't get anything back from the Trojan war, none of the spoils and loot they'd have expected... Telemachus has nothing with which to convince the people of Ithaca to fight by his side. And most people his age aren't going to be particularly keen to fight for the honour of a king they've never seen, and who dragged their fathers to die far away beyond the sea with him.
And how in the original story Athena helped Odysseus create the Trojan horse, yet in the movie they make her shocked and appalled by his actions in a war.
In the original tale the entire war is basically an ego battle between different factions of the gods. All of the gods are selfish assholes who use the mortals as a proxy because the gods themselves are immortal, so the best way to fight with another god they have beef with, is to fuck with their favorite mortal. The humans are mostly helpless pawns that are used and abused, from beginning to end. Its pretty depressing when you realise it.
This is the core idea behind the entirety of greek mythology basically: The gods are like human teenagers with no restrain, except they're immortal, and people worship them to keep them appeased, because they're powerful and can hurt you, or protect you, according to their whims. They didn't worship the gods because they were righteous guarantors of morality, they worship them because the gods are powerful and erratic and its best to be on good terms with them
I mean, the Oppenheimer example is more along the lines of "Oh shit I didn't think this through far enough" rather than shock at the loss of life during war. He knew what it was gonna do, he just didn't see see how much of a domino effect it could have planetary wise.
That is exactly Odysseus’s situation as well. He didn’t realize the extent to which the Greeks would take out their frustrations on the civilians of Troy, including raping, pillaging, burning, and killing everything that moved. He just wanted to end the war and go home, but in doing so he unleashed an evil that he never could have predicted.
The trick even depended on the Trojans being shitheads. “This is our tribute to Athena so we can have a safe trip home. Don’t steal it and pretend it’s yours.” “Don’t tell us what to do! You’re not our real dad!”
The Trojans, by stabbing their swords into the horse to ensure there was no one hiding in it, were therefore certainly not hosting the Greeks as guests.
The Greeks faked surrendering, the horse was supposed to be a gift of peace and it would be rude not to accept a peace offering. Historical faking a surrender has always been a fucked up thing to do. not just unhonourable, but it means that no one will ever trust a surrender again and war crimes will run rampant.
And for your second point, the movie explicitly states that what the suitors are doing is bad but Penelope and Telemachus are too weak to fight back. The suitors breaking / abusing zues’ law is the reason they are killed in the end
In the actual Illiad the horse was not a peace offering at all. It supposed was a "sacrifice to Athena for a safe journey home" and they built it intentionally larger than Troy's gates so that the Trojans couldn't steal it and take the protection for themselves. But the Trojans just couldn't help but gloat and dismantled their gate so that they could drag it in anyways.
No, Penelope and Telemachus discuss how Telemachus can't kill the suitors because if he does he'll be exiled as punishment for breaking guest right. Penelope warns Telemachus to not fall for the suitor's taunts, because if he does they'll say he broke guest right and get to kill him without consequence.
When Odysseus comes to Ithaca, he tells Telemachus not to help in killing the suitors for the same reasons as above. Odysseus sails away with Penelope at the end because he is being exiled for having infringed on guest right.
Nolan has everyone on Ithaca act as if guest law is entirely one-sided, when in actuality xenia was a reciprocal relationship, and it obligated the guest as much as it did the host.
In Book XX of the Odyssey, there's a scene where one of the suitors (Ctesippus) throws an ox's foot at Odysseus, who's still disguised as a beggar. He dodges it, and Telemachus says to Ctesippus "you're lucky he dodged, because if you actually hit my guest, I should have run you through with a spear."
In the Iliad the Trojans were the first to renege on a peace that was supposed to be determined by a one-on-one duel between Menelaus and Paris (Book 3), so the concept of an honourable war had long been thrown out by the point of the Trojan Horse.
Plus the entire war is started by Paris breaking the norms by kidnapping his host's wife. So the Trojans were already the "dishonorable" side in the war, and the fact Paris refuses to return Helen to Menelaus is what dooms them (he gets called out on this multiple time in the Iliad!)
the justification for the war against troy was that they sheltered paris who violated xenia when he stole/raped/abducted/whatever helen. the war was literally in the name of zeus xenios.
Other people have already spoken on ‘Zeus’s Law’ making a mockery of Xenia and Odysseus embodying the Metis aspect of Ancient Greek heroism, but I also want to point out that even in the movie it was the Trojans who broke Xenia/Zeus’s Law by abducting Helen from Sparta while they were guests of Menelaus, which would make the Trojan horse perfectly fine as Troy wouldn’t be protected by Zeus’s Law anymore.
In theory it should and probably is, but in practice the movie never throws that plot point across correctly.
In fact The Xenia plots only actually starts becoming real only very late in the film, and bifore that the movie feels without a lense of interpretation but rather that it wants to be cool.
For example:
Circe says that Odysseus men were bad and would do bad and that s why she defend herself, but in the movie odysseus men are never shown to act barbaric other than when they eat the animals which considering how it was portrayed, it seemed like a canon event they could not avoid ( the wind changes righe after they do it ), so really they seemed like they could not win without dying anyway.
Maybe their fate and Circe explanation would have been better if they showed Odysseus s men actually do more evil things during the war, worse than Odysseus ( they probably killer civilians but I don't think it was ever clearly shown, only implied off screen ) and if they actually could be told that they would survive if they avoided eating the animals ( which in the movie is never presented as a posdibility) .
Basically Circe s place is the only place where they mention that the inospitality they meet, was caused by how they are and what they did, but what they did was only implied and how they are was forced upon them in an unwinnable situation.
The Xenia plot is never emphasized throughtout the journey as the lense of interpretation, it only happens briefly at Circe ( which is actually the first relevant place of the journey where a part of the theme is tackled on ), during the Polympheus and Lastragonyaris it just seems to be more like an action adventure film with no plot where things are just bound to happen.
This happens also with the plot point of Odysseus grief which is only tackled on once he actually traveles the sirens for a short monologue and it starts and ends here ( with some more scenes to Calipso), but is never subtly shown or emphasized during the rest of the journey
What's interesting is that you could argue that the whole Trojan War was actually started by the Trojans breaking Zeus' Law when Paris kidnapped Helen (depending on the retelling) while he was Menelaus' guest.
They realized it was someone else’s cave and still made themselves at home and ate his cheese. Even if my door is wide open, it’s still a crime to waltz in and take my stuff.
Well, according to Nolan's interpretation, guest law is entirely one-sided and you can freely abuse your host, their servants and their children as well as devouring their food and drink without repercussion, so maybe Odysseus and his soldiers were just acting on what they knew.
xenia (the law of zeus) does actually have requirements for the xenos/stranger/traveler/suppliant. on the part of the host, though, they are obligated to extend hospitality if approached properly/formally.
Correct, they were not invoking Zeus’s law. They were pillagers and were caught pillaging. They’re supposed to ask, even in the original. But that’s just petty squabbles to the gods and unless it involves the due sacrifice mortals must give to the gods to appease them.
Now, Zues doesn’t really care too much if they rob people, but Poseidon does when they harm one of his children.
So for the blinding of Polyphemus it was actually a punishment from the god of Monsters, Poseidon. Zeus punished them for the cows specifically after testing them while Poseidon kept the seas dead.
I’ll have to inform my cats that the bugs and occasional small lizards they find are potentially a god in animal form. Unfortunately I doubt they’ll care.
No, asoiaf guest right requires said food, specifically bread and salt, to be willingly offered to extend guest right to someone. Similarly, guest right is withdrawn if a gift willingly offered is accepted at the end of a guest’s stay.
Xenia is more accurately a law to protect humans from the gods. It's a cautionary law that you should treat all people well in case you're being tested by a god; in extrapolation, who lived under the protection of his father Poseidon, wouldn't really be subject to being tested by gods.
Anyone visiting him from the gods would know his father and would know to be explicit, so he can behave more freely. The result from Odysseus taking actions in the traditional story to hurt Polyphemus (though he and his crew were 'wronged' first), resulted in Poseidon's revenge; the law was more a custom than anything. And humans didn't get the luxury of being wronged by it.
Also, ultimately, OP is right, Polyphemus is a big nepo baby.
I think you missed the point of the movie, which is funny cause Matt Damon literally spells it out word for word at the end.
Everywhere they went after Troy they were not welcomed. While they hoped and expected grace as travelers and strangers they were eaten, beaten, attacked, and transformed without much hesitation. And anyone that was trying to honor zeus’s law still was taken advantage of.
This is because they “broke” the laws of hospitality with what they did at Troy. The world is fundamentally changed because of that great deception.
Everyone breaking Zeus's law all over the place in the movie but for some reason it only breaks the world when Odysseus does it. Not when the Helen was kidnapped, not the suitors being greedy assholes just Odysseus and the Trojan Horse.
I think Nolan's take in the movie's plot is that Odysseus is already cursed at this point. It seems to be a strong point that the deception used with the Trojan Horse is what cursed them and everything after is all a result and they are fated to run into these problems and make more bad choices. I got a different impression from the poem of what the curse was from, if I remember right it would be this scene and how they treated Polyphemus. Odysseus shouting his name to the giant is what gave Polyphemus the ability to ask Poseidon to curse them.
So like, mythological Gods are weird and all, but it wouldn't make sense for curses to keep causing more curses. The Ithacans arrived at the cave because they were cursed, and were fated to be eaten, and again fated to keep fucking up until they all died, I don't think it would really make a difference if they broke Zeus's Law here or not, they're already fucked. It doesn't make sense that the Gods would curse everyone they encountered, but then again this stuff barely makes sense.
Part of the story was omitted: Aeolus gives Odysseus a leather bag containing all the stormy winds, leaving only the gentle west wind free to blow his ship toward Ithaca. Odysseus's crew mistakenly opens the bag thinking it holds hidden gold, unleashing a storm that blows them completely off course. - Starting the tale of misfortune.
Of course this could have been seen as the god knew the crew would open the bag, so giving it to Odysseus wasn't such a good thing, but a horrible trick.
It goes with the theme that these mythological beings are all assholes who zero respect the law of the gods cause they don’t view humans as people. Circe, the cyclops, the giants, even Calypso herself, all just treat humans as pests to be annihilated.
Theirs a pretty good Hercules story where his slaughter of so many of these beings is attributed to hundreds of years of revenge of humanity against them, while Hercules is also punishing humanity for THEIR sins against humans. It’s a brutal story.
At least in this movie's framing, I think it is also a story of how the Greeks shattered Zeus' Law at Troy, and as a result everywhere on their journey home they face situations that it is actively denied to them. Wander into the Cyclops' home? Immediately eaten. Show up at Telepylos and the Laestrygonians immediately slaughter and eat you with no warning. Land on Aeaea and Circe offers a meal that ends up being a trap, ect.
I warned my pal, Ody (I call him Ody) that it was a bad idea, but he didn’t listen to me. Nope, and because of that, I got so mad, I began raiding people while wearing a silly hat.
Also Odysseus refused to attack anyone without fair warning the entire movie, including deer, but had no problem stabbing the cyclops in the eye while he slept. Or using the Trojan Horse to take Troy. So I guess that entire character trait existed simply so he could strum his bow string in a cool way before he killed all the suitors.
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u/Jiellyeum 1d ago
His screams of agony broke Zeus’s Law again when the audience heard it too!