Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of The Odyssey isn’t out in theaters til Friday, but it’s already the film that launched a thousand tweets. For months, conservatives like Elon Musk have been having racist tantrums about Nolan’s decision to cast Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. They’re also in a transphobic tizzy about Nolan casting Inception star Elliot Page as a Greek soldier. But angry as they were about a rumor that Page would play Achilles, the mythic hero with a bum heel, they’re going to be furious about his actual role in the film—assuming they see it at all. They’re not going to like the greater message of Nolan’s Odyssey, either.
That’s because the first person we see in The Odyssey isn’t Matt Damon’s Odysseus, the epic poem’s titular sojourner—a brilliant strategist and king whose 10-year trip home from the Trojan War forms the spine of the story. It’s not Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, his long-suffering queen, or Tom Holland’s Telemachus, his long-fatherless son. It’s not misandrist enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton), sexy enchantress Calypso (Charlize Theron), or gray-eyed Athena (Zendaya), goddess of wisdom and Odysseus’s celestial champion.
The film opens, instead, on Page’s character: an infantryman named Sinon, a figure based in mythology who doesn’t actually appear in Homer’s Odyssey. (Musk and co. are going to love that.) Sinon is the poor bastard responsible for telling the Trojans about the giant wooden horse that the Greeks have left behind: a horse the Greeks would simply love Troy to have as a gift, Sinon says. The Trojans kill the messenger, then haul the horse past their walled city’s impenetrable gates. You can guess what will happen next.
Yet Nolan, a filmmaker who never met a complicated timeline he didn’t love, doesn’t actually show us the resulting carnage right away. After this prologue, he moves the action instead to Ithaca: Odysseus’s seaside homeland, which has devolved into a hive of scum and villainy in the 20 years since its king first set sail for Troy.
The polytheistic Greeks abide by a strict code of hospitality, which The Odyssey calls Zeus’s Law. As the film rather didactically explains, they’re obligated to treat strangers well because for all they know, those strangers could be gods in disguise. Ithaca’s extraordinary circumstances have turned this religious duty into an albatross: Because she can’t break Zeus’s Law, Odysseus’s wife Penelope must indefinitely host the ill-mannered suitors who have flooded her home, each of whom hopes to marry her now that Odysseus seems to be gone for good. (The standout of the group is Antinous, a smarmy SOB played to villainous perfection by Robert Pattinson.)
Penelope can’t rule the kingdom alone, due to the ancient laws of misogyny. Telemachus can’t officially take over as long as Odysseus may still be alive out there somewhere. And Ithaca isn’t the only chiefdom that’s gone to seed following the war.
Telemachus learns from another king, Trojan War–vet Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), that there’s unrest among his subjects as well. In the wake of the conflict, Sparta’s citizens have become consumed with fear about unspecified “people from the sea” invading their country and destroying their way of life. The people of Ithaca, too, have heard that the “people from the sea” are coming.
