#TheOdyssey is truly something to behold, boasting some of Nolan’s most viscerally intense, horrific, and heartfelt work to date. Certainly his most formally daring and risky. A poetic, melancholic meditation on the artifacts we leave behind—the songs turned stories we hand down, noble lies masking complicated truths in service of hope. A spiritual reckoning with the fact that we are our own gods, and with how that hope becomes inverted when faith, myth, becomes a means of abdicating responsibility and justifying cruelty rather than confronting that we are the ones choosing it. Defying the gods is really defying our own humanity—the sacred pact we share with one another. The moment when our own civility is weaponized against us out of hubris. What at first seems brilliant quickly devolves, a Trojan Horse igniting an uncontrollable chain reaction that burns the whole world down. Each generation rises from the ashes of the last, forced to do battle within a strange new world forged by old men filled with regret—men desperate to go back even as they reshape the future in their own image. The existentialism of Nolan's Odyssey picks up the baton from Oppenheimer, rooted in the intense desire to control a reaction that has breached containment, and in the futility of trying to control a narrative that will outlast us. While our guilt, our shame compel us to act, to try and fix what's beyond repair, the noblest thing we can do is recognize when to relinquish control, to recognize when the thing we need to leave behind is ourselves. Hopefully, through these artifacts, posterity learns the truth—the good and the bad—a leap of faith that they might succeed where we failed. Three thousand years later, the bedrock of civilization hasn’t changed: thunder, a smile, pain, bloodshed, compassion, love—our universal language, the language of the gods. And yet...we continue to defy them.
