The Odyssey Hid Its Biggest Twist in Plain Sight With One Iconic Image

The Odyssey was very loyal to Homer’s poem, but it had a significantly different ending that made a lot of sense. The ending had Odysseus look back at what he did in Troy and realize that he didn’t deserve the happily-ever-after ending that he received in the Homer poem. Instead of living on and ruling the kingdom with Penelope after killing her suitors, the ending was more of a morality lesson. Odysseus realized he had crossed the line, broken Zeus’s law, and become a feared villain in the world. This all came thanks to his time with the goddess Athena, and this was all set up in plain sight at the start of the film.

The movie showed Odysseus spending much of the run time trying to remember who he was and where he needed to go. As he struggled, Athena sat by him, silently watching him with a look of sadness on her face. The opening of the movie had the head of the Athena statue severed and falling to the ground, and that was what set up this entire conflict of faith.

The Beheading of Athena’s Statue Showed Odysseus’s Betrayal of Zeus’s Law

There was one shot that Christopher Nolan kept coming back to during The Odyssey. This moment saw him on the steps in Troy, as his armies sacked the city. However, he was looking up with blood on his face and pain in his face, and it wasn’t until the end of the movie that it showed what he was looking at. The important thing is that Nolan showed the audience what he saw early in the movie, but never connected the two shots until the end, when it was time for Odysseus to make his ultimate sacrifice.

The movie had an interesting take on the story, but it wasn’t a new one. In Nolan’s The Odyssey, Odysseus had amnesia, and that was the bookend for his story as it was told on the screen. This was not from Homer’s tale, but it was the same tactic that was used in the 1954 movie Ulysses, where Kirk Douglas played Ulysses (Odysseus) and also had amnesia to bookend that story. In both cases, the hero was visited by Athena, and Nolan made Calypso a lot more helpful to Odysseus in his movie than she was in the poem. In the end, it was all to set up the improved ending.

Calypso kept commenting that Odysseus always called out for Athena in his dreams, as well as one other name (later revealed to be his forgotten wife Penelope). However, Athena was with Odysseus throughout his journey, and she had a message she was trying to deliver to him. This is because of the things he saw in Troy, as well as the decisions he made that betrayed his own sense of honor. He came up with the idea to build the Trojan Horse, and he used a “gift to the gods” to lead the assault on Troy in the guise of a gift. He broke Zeus’s main law.

That led to the twist at the end, which viewers saw part of at the start of the film. In the end, the big twist was that Odysseus’s men were slaughtering everyone, including innocents. They even took a young woman, played by Zendaya, and as she begged for her life, they beheaded her. Instead of showing her head falling to the ground, the movie cut to Athena’s head falling from the statue. This is what Odysseus was staring at in his memories. That is when Athena took the form of this young woman, mercilessly murdered after Odysseus used the trick of a gift to sack an entire city.

This Moment Made Odysseus’s Decision at the End the Right One

This moment is what haunted Odysseus as he lived on Calypso’s island. It is what haunted him when he saw the fear and terror in Circe’s face after she turned his men into pigs. He understood it too late to stop himself from taunting the Cyclops, and earning Poseidon’s wrath, but he saw it when his own men insulted the sun god and, as the only survivor from Zeus’s wrath, he carried the story with him, a story that tormented him because he knew that his breaking Zeus’s laws was what doomed his crew, and led to the events that almost doomed his wife and son.

When Odysseus was speaking to Penelope and explaining to her that the “men from the sea” that everyone was scared of were, in fact, him and his own crew, it was like a dagger to his own heart. When Athena looked at him and nodded, it was that moment that he realized the truth and swore to honor his fallen men and try to do right with the rest of his life. This is why the ending had to be changed.

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus killed all his wife’s suitors and then ruled his kingdom with Penelope from that point on. That wasn’t the ending that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey needed. His Odysseus realized that he had become a villain when he crossed lines that never should have been crossed to win the Trojan War. The movie had him accept exile with Penelope, as they left to discover more of the world while his son took over as the king, and this exile was necessary to pay for his sins. It was all set up with the fall of Athena at the start, and it was her guidance that led to this perfect ending in The Odyssey.

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