Until the End of the World: Apocalypse and Christopher Nolan’s 'The Odyssey'

Of all the directors who have climbed through Hollywood’s ranks to combine personal vision with sustained commercial success, none can claim to be as plausibly apocalypse-haunted as Christopher Nolan. In his last three films, Nolan has demanded we imagine worlds where institutions collapse and times change for the worse, providing a stark contrast to popular cinema’s usual diluting of confrontation with comfort. While Spielberg subordinated his flashes of cynicism to grand wonder and James Cameron delighted in the spectacle of destruction before inevitably concluding with a bit of hard-won hope, Nolan’s end of the world is not only imminent but has already occurred and as such is unpreventable. Though in some ways this bleak worldview might seem like an off-putting defect for a director laser-focused on the highest commercial echelons of Hollywood, the success of Nolan’s movies points to the idea that his work is tapping into a similarly death-obsessed part of audiences’ consciousness.

The apocalyptic tendency has always existed in Nolan’s work, even while his anxieties have changed along with those of his public. The Dark Knight, released at the end of the Bush administration, captured the zeitgeist by having its heroes overreach into morally ambiguous grounds to prevent the citizens of Gotham from completely losing faith in their institutions. In 2014, Interstellar was only able to locate a future for humanity past a destroyed Earth and beyond the stars. This loss of faith proceeded even further with 2020’s Tenet, which puts its talk of “faith in the mechanics of the world” in conjunction with a plot that suggests that despite all the derring-do of John David Washington’s Protagonist, a coming collapse is inevitable, and any victories gained by our heroes are small in the face of worldwide catastrophe. Robert Pattinson’s Neil says, “What’s happened happened” to ease our Protagonist’s minds, but just like the closing shot of Elizabeth Debicki holding her son’s hand as they walk away, it can be more easily read as ironic than hopeful.

Things are made more direct in the final scene of 2023’s Oppenheimer, which concludes with a stark close-up of the titular scientist saying to Albert Einstein, “We were worried that we’d start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world…I believe we did.” Where Tenet and Interstellar had catastrophes that were unpreventable but nevertheless occurred at some point in the future, here the path to destruction had already been laid out both in the film and our reality by Cillian Murphy’s tortured scientist, and the price that we would all pay was yet to be seen. That a three-hour historical drama with this bleak of a worldview won a truckload of Academy Awards is not particularly unusual; that it earned its studio just shy of a billion dollars is decidedly more so. Many directors have had sustained commercial or critical success while advancing a personal vision, but what does it represent that Nolan’s vision is the one that wins awards while also standing not with Yorgos Lanthimos but Guardians of the Galaxy in box office take?

The ending of Nolan’s latest smash hit, The Odyssey, returns to Tenet’s ironies, but the editing is so forceful that it is near impossible to misunderstand (unlike Tenet, a film almost gleefully eager to be misunderstood at every turn). At the film’s conclusion, Odysseus sails away with his wife, Penelope, having returned home to slay the suitors vying for her hand and leaving his son, Telemachus, to reign, but even as Tom Holland tries to look regal on the dock, we and Odysseus know that the latter has broken the world beyond repair. Nolan’s largest adaptational gambit is to refashion Odysseus’s scheme of the Trojan Horse as a violation of xenia, the ancient Greek principle of hospitality, a major concern of the original epic and here incessantly referred to as “Zeus’s law.” This act, framed as a war crime of its time, not only redefines Odysseus and his soldiers as the dreaded “Sea People” that Penelope and the people of Ithaca fear at the film’s beginning, but also amounts to a violation of their civilization’s code primal enough to render all void, with one’s only choice afterwards being to start afresh.

This would all be bitter enough, but Nolan makes sure to underline his point by having Odysseus deliver a monologue to Penelope over images of them departing that concludes, “A new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” These ostensibly hopeful final words are immediately undercut by flashing back to Troy, the scene where this great man has started his own chain reaction to end the world and is now staring in horror at the horse, an image immortal enough to put the lie to the idea that anything will ever be forgotten. The tale of the horse and its mastermind will be told repeatedly, and one can’t help but wonder if the telling of the story with Odysseus as hero extends the fall of his Bronze Age civilization. After placing his audience in the ashes of the world that the atomic bomb destroyed, Nolan now locates our doom in an even further-flung place: by continuing to tell the tale of Odysseus, we extend the collapse that broke his civilization to ours. Commentators interpreting Nolan’s adaptation as a reference to such events as the current atrocities in Gaza, the Iraq War, and the war in Ukraine speaks to the timeliness of such a thought.

Formally speaking, the fragility of the world Odysseus has disrupted is rendered starkly. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytma place Odysseus and his men on wide shots in a vast, empty ocean, and the islands they arrive on initially seem uninhabited. When these blank spots on the map inevitably prove to be occupied by hosts who have no notion of “Zeus’s law” and greet the inhabitants of Ithaca with violence, the accumulation grows to create a dizzying feeling that everything has gone horribly wrong with the world and customs have ceased to matter entirely. While it is not until the end that Odysseus reveals that he considers himself to be the root of all this, the fact that a fall has happened is apparent even just by examining the shots that Nolan and van Hoytma conjure of a bleak, blank world. If Oppenheimer has its apocalypse play out against the backdrop of complacent twentieth-century intellectual life, and Tenet stages its war for a future already lost in the storerooms of extreme prosperity, no such distance is allowed in The Odyssey, where the islands are empty, the palaces overrun.

All this concern with doom sounds portentous, especially for a film that is financially competitive with Toy Story 5, but even though Nolan never wastes a chance to have his characters explain his pet themes with a dour expression on their face, his films have been enlivened by the nearly free-associative editing of Jennifer Lame, inducted in Nolan’s posse of collaborators for Tenet. Where the crosscutting necessitated by Nolan’s earlier scripts could often feel fussy and overelaborated, his films with Lame have become more intuitive, each movie becoming a tapestry where a glimpse of a dog or a brooch can trigger webs of association and flashback that suggests the workings of memory more than an overcomplicated rulebook.

As Nolan’s work has grown grimmer, this loose editing has become its greatest gift, guiding the audience along from point to point with a grace that allows the weight of the material to never fully set in until the right moment. Oppenheimer and The Odyssey do not carry apocalyptic portent with them for their entire runtime; instead, each place it inside a mystery box set up in the film’s first moments. The former makes suspense out of Lewis Strauss’s obsession with a conversation between Einstein and Oppenheimer that didn’t concern him, and the latter ties its weight to the significance of Zendaya’s Athena, an occasional companion to Odysseus on his journey. Instead of having to live in a collapsing world for the better part of three hours, we instead ride a roller coaster with a memento mori placed as the final drop at the end.

Cynicism aside, one should not be so suspicious of the taste of the general audience as to assume that Nolan’s concerns are merely being smuggled into films with fancy editing as a distraction, a Trojan horse to force a mindless mass to reckon with ideas that they are otherwise too distracted to think about. We live in gloomy times, and that Nolan makes us reckon with our place in them is no doubt what allows each work to be hailed as a masterpiece not only by critics and his peers but also by those who are only likely to go to the movies somewhere between one and five times a year. Additionally, Nolan is not alone amongst his cohorts in these concerns, even though he might be the most single-minded of them. This year, Spielberg could not escape the hints of World War III and societal upheaval that race through Disclosure Day even while that eternal optimist gently suggests to his audience that a change in the latter might prevent the former. Meanwhile, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, last year's big Oscar winner, presents a society one or two more steps closer to collapse than our own, but the difference is that of degrees.

One Battle is especially worth considering in the light of Nolan’s work, given that it effectively has the same ending as The Odyssey. Telemachus is left in a similar position to Anderson’s Willa, a child who has come into their own by testing their mettle alongside their father and, having succeeded in that task, is left at the reins of the future while the father recedes into the distance. However, while Anderson plays that ending for “the children will save us” optimism, Nolan layers it with irony and, instead of ending with Telemachus, as Anderson might have done, concludes with the image of the burning horse. In the world of Nolan, the children will not save us but instead inherit a world that is not within their power to fix. It is interesting that Anderson’s ending, despite the film’s financial and awards success, was often treated as a flaw even by the film’s admirers, but one would be hard pressed to find devotees of The Odyssey who do not also love its bleak finish.

Given the massive success that has greeted it, one wonders if the key to Nolan’s success with this material is that there might be something a little comforting to his audience in all this doom. As Nolan’s grand-scale epics dazzle us with their imagery and trouble us with their implications, perhaps it is soothing to hear that, yes, our assumptions are correct that the world is ending, but it’s already happened, and there’s nothing you can do. We know the world is ending from the horrors we see both at home and abroad, but we assume that we are at too great a distance to do anything, and so do Nolan’s principal characters. The extent to which we the audience is implicated is measured by the extent to which we identify with Nolan’s great men dooming the world in shadows, be it Odysseus, Oppenheimer, or Tenet’s unnamed protagonist. Certainly, such identification is possible, but it is a vision of the world where mankind is at the mercy of these gods, who have frequently decided our fates before we knew such a decision was even being considered. As the man says, “What’s happened happened,” and maybe to Nolan and his audience, it is soothing to accept the inevitable.

Popular film reassures its audience; indeed, alongside entertainment, that might be one of its most critical functions. Spielberg’s grand but ultimately gentle spectacles swept away New Hollywood’s frustrated ambiguities, which dealt in a human-scaled bleakness worlds away from Nolan’s Jupiterian apocalypticism, and Cameron indulged in end-of-the-world imagery to say to us that grit would carry the day in the end, but perhaps it is useful to understand Nolan as continuous with these men’s work rather than in contrast to them. Maybe the diminishing horizons of the future in the twenty-first century have found the director who is both technically dazzling and doom-haunted enough to meet them, and indeed his outlook has rewarded him handsomely on his road to find the next end of the world.

Therefore, the only question that remains is where Nolan can go from here. After locating original sin in the near future, the 1940s, and the Bronze Age at successively more lavish scales and accompanying box office returns, what worlds are left to end? Facing to varying degrees the loss of the zeitgeist, Spielberg eventually traded in rip-roaring adventure for somber but nevertheless hopeful prestige histories, and Cameron gladly exchanged an Earth even he couldn’t save for the verdant jungles of Pandora, but Nolan’s financial success and prestige show no signs of stopping. His sensibility has proved both internally coherent and adaptable to the moment, running from the neoliberal paranoia of his post-9/11 Batman trilogy to the hard-won hope of the Obama-era Interstellar to the apocalyptic anxieties of the 2020s, so we shall see if the popular consciousness continues to run with this savviest of all auteurs, or whether he or his public swings into new, less explored directions.