Further thoughts on The Odyssey
I know I'm not the first person to address this theme, but it's Tumblr, so I'm throwing in (or out?) my two cents.
Nolan is very much concerned in this movie with what he calls "Zeus's law", by which means what the ancient Greeks called xenia. Xenia means hospitality, giving help to the stranger. There is a famous myth which illustrates the importance of this virtue, the tale of Baucis and Philemon, which comes to us from Ovid's Metamorphoses. (Which means he probably invented it, but it's still a good illustration.)
Zeus and Hermes get bored, so they decide to test the virtue of human beings. Taking the form of beggars, they visit a wealthy city and beg from door to door, but everyone turns them away with contempt. At last, venturing out into the countryside, they come upon the small house of an elderly couple, Philemon and his wife Baucis. They ask for shelter for the night, and the elders welcome them in, offer them a meal, and treat them with all courtesy. They only have bread and milk to share, but the gods see that they share it without reservation.
When Baucis noticed the milk was not running out, no matter how many times she refilled the cups, she twigged that their visitors were gods. The couple fell on their knees and asked the gods to forgive them for having so little to offer. Zeus, however, said they would be rewarded for their virtue; he destroyed the city, changed the little house into a handsome temple, and granted their wish that one would not outlive the other. Upon their death, they became an oak and a linden tree, growing side by side and entwined together.
Nolan is not making it up that hospitality was a key virtue in the ancient world. (So was prowess in war, but both are true.) Penelope's suitors are abusing the obligations of xenia by showing up every night to eat and drink at her expense. They're not poor people, they're not travelers passing by, they're not really owed lavish meals at someone else's expense. (Robert Pattinson, in particular, is costumed like a man who can afford to throw down his Amex and cover everybody's tab.)
Odysseus and his men frequently use xenia as an excuse for raiding other people's stores of food. "Zeus's law says you owe us this, so if you don't give it, we have a right to take it." Which goes badly from the start, when they don't try to negotiate with the Cyclops but assume that a deep dark cave with bags of curing cheese means free cheese for everybody!
Then they make the same mistake several more times, notably with Circe. But what really weighs on Odysseus' conscience by the end of the film, besides the loss of all his men, is a personal betrayal that I won't spoil because I don't think it's in the original text. Odysseus is famous for his wit, his cleverness, his resourcefulness, the qualities that enabled him to contrive the Trojan horse (which should be called the Achaian horse, really), but by the end of the film, he regrets the deed and the betrayal that went with it.
I think Nolan has responded in this film to a very real moral crisis going on right now; call it xenophobia, fear of the stranger, the opposite of xenia. Whether the stranger is an immigrant, a homeless person, a trans person, a person of color, whatever the excuse, it is fear of the stranger, the other; it is a transgression of Zeus's law. And I don't think this theme has been forced upon the text; the issue of what and how much we owe to the stranger, the passer-by, is embedded in this story of a man on a small ship trying to get home.
