The Odyssey Is a Spiritual Sequel to Oppenheimer, Even if They’re Totally Different Movies

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now in theaters and it is proving to be a massive film and we don’t simply mean its scope. The film keeps breaking records and outperforming estimates while also proving to be both a critical and fan favorite with glowing reviews. The film is also carving out its own place in the pop culture landscape as people discuss and debate various details and even what the film means. It’s that latter part of the discourse that is of particular interest because while everyone is trying to find The Odyssey’s place in the realms of myth and history, there’s something that not enough people are talking about. That would be its place in relation to another of Nolan’s films, one that The Odyssey is very much a spiritual sequel to.

It might be a little odd to think of The Odyssey as a sequel to anything, at least in terms of movies. The film is an adaptation of a roughly 3000-year-old myth, making it one of the oldest surviving works of literature in human culture. However, as Nolan’s first film after 2023’s Oppenheimer, the film may not share a story, characters, or placement in time, or even an aesthetic, The Odyssey actually works as a thematic sequel to the sprawling biopic because they share the same message: sometimes an idea doesn’t simply change the world for the moment, but it ends and era as it signals the start of darker times to come.

Both Oppenheimer and The Odyssey Highlights the Hubris of Man as the End of Eras

You might be asking yourself exactly how Oppenheimer and The Odyssey share the idea that you can change the world while also ending eras and being a harbinger of darkness—especially since the end of The Odyssey does have a slightly hopeful feel to it. You’d be right to ask that question. Oppenheimer is a highly stylized courtroom drama that examines in a detailed, non-linear format J. Robert Oppenheimer’s entire career and life, including his personal and political entanglements as well as the development of the first atomic bomb. The Odyssey is a, simply put, an epic, one with a classic Hollywood feel that tells a tried-and-true sword and sandals type story, albeit one based on an iconic piece of folklore. They’re on their face very different.

But when you zoom in, they’re actually very the same. In both Oppenheimer and The Odyssey, the primary characters are responsible for the introduction of a concept that brings the world they knew to a halt and everything that comes after is not only different, but the start of something subjectively worse. Oppenheimer brings the atomic bomb to life, which is a major advancement in human scientific achievement, but it’s a development that doesn’t just unlock the wonders of science; it unlocks devastation on a scale humanity has never seen and becomes the proverbial genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. The world is never able to go back to the way it was once the atom bomb arrives and is even a factor in the Cold War that we still feel effects of even today.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus comes to realize that it was their actions in the Trojan War that is bringing about the end of their own era, the Bronze Age. Specifically, Odysseus notes that the fearsome and devastating “people from the sea” who have caused the decline in Greek civilization with their murderous attacks and violation of Zeus’s law were actually the Greeks themselves who showed up at Troy, violating that all important law when they snuck their way in under the guise of a gift, killed innocent Trojans, and desecrated Athena’s statue as well as killed her priestess. That act may has well have been the atomic bomb for their era as nothing can ever be the same again and the age that is to come after it will be tainted by that act.

It’s an interesting bit of symmetry. Both films show the impact the hubris of man can have on not just the moment but the entire era. Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus were brilliant—Oppenheimer with his bomb, Odysseus with his idea to use the horse to get inside the walls of Troy—but that brilliance ultimately brought with it doom. The ancient Greeks in The Odyssey would soon see their own glittering civilization fade away as a new, dark age took hold while we are still living in the shadow of Oppenheimer’s bomb. It makes the two films much more alike than one would consider—and makes them both so much more than blockbusters.

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