Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrived in cinemas last week to a pre-sale frenzy that had not been seen since Oppenheimer. The $250 million spectacle delivers cyclopes, sirens and a Trojan Horse rendered in breathtaking analogue IMAX film. But strip away the monsters and the Bronze Age armour, and the film is doing something quieter and more dangerous. It is asking a question that reverberates well beyond the ancient Mediterranean: what happens to civilisation when the law of hospitality is broken, and what does it cost a people to come home?

Nolan’s moral architecture rests on what the film calls “Zeus’ Law.” The concept is drawn from the ancient Greek principle of xenia, the sacred obligation to treat the stranger as you would wish to be treated. Penelope warns her son Telemachus against violating it. Odysseus invokes it before entering the cave of the Cyclops. The faithful servant Eumaeus laments its collapse in his master’s palace. It is, as Nolan himself described it, the Golden Rule with theological teeth. The stranger at your door might be a god in disguise. Even if he is not, your survival depends on a world in which travellers can expect shelter and hosts can expect respect.

The film’s great revelation is that Odysseus himself shattered this covenant. The Trojan Horse was a perversion of xenia, a false gift that exploited sacred trust. And the punishment was not simply a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)