Let’s All Learn From Odysseus’ Many, Many Questionable Choices

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the plot of The Odyssey.

Gotta hand it to Odysseus — having a bunch of soldiers hide inside a giant horse to infiltrate Troy worked out beautifully. But as writer-director Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey makes a point of emphasizing, the legendary Greek general from Homer’s ancient epic (portrayed in the film by Matt Damon) also made a lot of extremely avoidable mistakes. So many, in fact, that at a certain point his own soldiers stop trusting him and start doing the opposite of what he instructs them to do — only for that to turn out to be exactly what Odysseus wanted, a reverse-psychology fake-out. The man is a chaos monster of a protagonist.

To his credit, even Odysseus eventually gets sick of himself — it’s why he ends up time-outing on a beach and getting high on lotus flowers for a few years. While he does that, in the interest of learning from his mistakes, let’s go over the most avoidable errors we witnessed during this nearly three-hour saga. 

Taking the Scenic Route Home
After their successful sneak-attack pillaging of Troy, Odysseus’ comrade Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and his men pack up and head back to Sparta. Odysseus could have (should have) done the same with his Ithacan soldiers. Instead, he takes the long route home, for no reason apart from wanting to “see the world.” This decision alone costs him every single one of his men and ten years of his own life.

Assuming Everyone Plays By Zeus’ Rules
This is a recurring problem for Odysseus; he presumes that everyone he meets will welcome his soldiers into their homes and offer free food and shelter because you never know if someone’s a god in disguise. Hence the reason this brilliant military strategist leads his men into a dark cave with only one way out and settles in, confident they will soon be accommodated. Admittedly, the cave is filled with cheese — who among us? But even if its main inhabitant didn’t turn out to be a giant Cyclops, Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), this should all scream “Trap!”

Pokes the Bear
So Odysseus gets upset that Polyphemus has a different interpretation of the phrase “have you for dinner.” Fair. But then he and his crew trash the place, take out the Cyclops’ one good (and only) eye, and leave the poor creature crying in a corner and calling for Dad, who happens to be the sea god, Poseidon. Does Odysseus really need to turn around and fire one more arrow into the giant’s wound just as he and some of his soldiers are on the verge of escape? Ask the men who are killed running back to their boat.

Tries the Zeus Card Again
Having learned nothing from this experience, Odysseus and his wary, hungry, scary men next surprise a child in the woods, expecting to be taken to whatever adults live nearby and treated to some hospitality. Instead, the child’s obvious reaction is to scream, causing an army of giant Laestrygonians in full armor and weaponry to just demolish the crew. Two-thirds of Odysseus’ ships and crew are lost on this aborted mission.

Not Knowing When to Say ‘No’
Odysseus does rescue his men from Circe (Samantha Morton) after she turns them into pigs. And he saves as many as he can when he’s warned there will be inevitable sacrifices to the beautiful singing Sirens and the six-armed sea monster Scylla. The remaining sailors want to dock on the sun god’s cattle island, but Odysseus knows his soldiers (who, again, are starving) will be cursed to die if they eat those cows. Rather than taking charge of the situation, he essentially makes them pinky swear not to eat the animals. They get stuck on the island thanks to the same wind currents that made it suspiciously easy for them to dock there in the first place. Inevitably, Odysseus comes across his men roasting a cow on a spit and chowing down. He doesn’t even look surprised.

And You Know What? That Whole Horse Thing Could Have Been Workshopped.
Again, all due credit to Odysseus for winning the Trojan War with his horse idea. But given the plan involved parking the thing on a beach perilously close to the tide and waiting who knows how long for Trojan soldiers to stumble across it, maybe we should have thought to stuff the bottom of this giant structure with something other than people. We don’t talk enough about wooden-equine-related drowning deaths.