We Are The Sea People: 'The Odyssey' Is About Us

Throughout The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s latest film adapting Homer’s epic, characters warn each other about “the sea people,” mysterious forces that wash over cities like storms. Everyone prepares for the damage they’ll cause when they arrive. It’s not until the film’s third act, when Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is reunited with her husband Odysseus (Matt Damon), that she learns the truth: her husband and his men are the sea people.

Odysseus, full of guilt and remorse, admits that what he and his men did in Troy was barbaric—and that it led to the collapse of their society.

“We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it,” he tells her.

“You are the people from the sea,” she realizes in agony.

“Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus’s law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing.”

Zeus’s law, or xenia, is a sacred code dictating that you must welcome travelers with food and shelter before even asking their name. It is what we now call the Golden Rule: treat others as you would want to be treated. In The Odyssey, disobeying this rule doesn’t just earn divine anger; it unravels the social order completely. That collapse feels familiar. It reflects the values and principles the United States has abandoned to arrive at this moment.

The United States once proudly identified as a “nation of immigrants,” a “melting pot.” In school, we were taught about Ellis Island—ships carrying families in search of a new life, arriving to be welcomed. The Statue of Liberty stood as a symbol of hope and opportunity. That story, even with all its omissions, sustained the idea that welcoming the stranger was part of being an American.

Just as the Greeks violated Zeus’s law when they attacked Troy, the United States abandoned its own moral code when Donald Trump was re-elected and allowed to wage a war on immigrants.

Under President Trump, thousands of people are detained each week. Nearly 70,000 men, women, and children are held in ICE detention centers across the country, in inhumane conditions, facing hunger and medical neglect. Since his return to office, more than 50 people have died in these facilities. The violence doesn’t stop there. Trump’s masked federal agents have shot and killed civilians across the country — two people just this past week.

In The Odyssey, Zendaya’s Athena appears as a spirit haunting Odysseus—a reminder of the carnage he and his men caused. Her face is a constant memory of the innocent lives lost because of their actions. She is the embodiment of his conscience.

She makes me think of Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, all killed by ICE. Their names and faces are now reminders of the state-sanctioned violence that has been normalized.

Athena is inescapable. So are they. They are not just names on a list; their faces are what haunt us—printed on posters, carried through protests, refusing to disappear. A society’s moral boundaries depend on its willingness to remember the people harmed in its name. When that memory is ignored, cruelty becomes ordinary.

But it was not always like this.

Like Odysseus at the end of The Odyssey, many Americans now long for a life that feels lost—before this moral collapse. He admits he took that world for granted, that he did not understand its value until it was gone.

“The most we want is what we most can’t have, and what we most can’t have is what we already had and lost.”

That loss feels familiar. America has always been complicated—racism has always run deep—but there was a sense, at times, that progress was possible. Now cruelty and violence are not just present; they are becoming accepted. Not by accident, but by allowance.

Just like the Greeks in their story, we are the sea people.

We are not watching the collapse. We are the ones who carried it to shore.