On its opening weekend, Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” delivered the highest-grossing global debut of his career, repopularizing a narrative as old as Western storytelling.
More than 2,000 years after Homer shaped the folklore into an epic poem, audiences flocked to a story about a flawed man braving impossible odds to reach home.
The appetite is revealing, but not because Odysseus represents a new kind of hero. In fact, his enduring appeal demonstrates just the opposite. Our culture has not stopped wanting heroes. Across thousands of years, audiences have continued to be captivated by stories of flawed men and women confronting impossible odds, defeating evil and finding their way in the world.
Yet while commercial storytelling increasingly retreats into moral ambiguity, cynical survivalism does not satisfy the human soul. What our stories most deeply crave, and what accidental Gospel narratives continually reveal, is the ultimate hero who overcomes evil not through dominance, but through sacrifice.
Odysseus is hardly a model of moral perfection. Nolan’s adaptation emphasizes his guilt over the violence and deception of the Trojan War, portraying a warrior who returns home haunted by what he has done.
Today’s entertainment landscape is filled with heroes who accomplish their goals at significant ethical cost. Audiences are invited to sympathize with protagonists whose wit, grit, and ruthlessness exist alongside, and sometimes in conflict with, their better qualities.
To understand why, we have to look at the stories our culture has chosen to tell, because stories do not merely reflect what a culture believes. They also teach a culture what to admire.
The Hero Beholden to the Market
Consider the thematic shift over the last two decades.
In the early 2000s, stories of sacrificial saviors permeated popular culture. Harry Potter defeats Voldemort by willingly offering his own life. Katniss Everdeen risks herself for the sake of others, and the Hunger Games trilogy builds toward a rejection of power’s ability to save. Amidst fantasy and dystopia, audiences were presented protagonists whose defining virtue was self-sacrifice.
The same pattern appeared throughout the superhero boom. For all their flaws, many of the most beloved heroes of the era were defined by the question of what they were willing to surrender for the sake of others.
Their powers made them extraordinary, but their willingness to sacrifice made them heroic.
These stories certainly do not preach the Gospel nor are they Christian in any explicit sense. But they tap into a Christian moral imagination. They carried what might be called accidental Gospel narratives: stories in which evil is overcome not merely by superior strength, but through mercy and self-denial.
Then the center of gravity began to shift subtly.
Across contemporary entertainment, protagonists are increasingly allowed, even expected, to compromise morality in pursuit of something they believe is good. The show “The Last of Us,” as one example, builds its central conflict around a father whose love for his adopted daughter ultimately leads him to make a choice that may save her but carries devastating consequences for everyone else. The story does not offer an easy answer. It asks whether love can justify the things we do in its name.
Audiences are increasingly drawn to stories that complicate the relationship between goodness and power.
The old heroic question was: “What are you willing to sacrifice to save someone else?” The newer hero, instead, is now asked: “What are you willing to become to get what you want?”
Hollywood is, of course, a marketplace. Studios follow audiences, and audiences follow stories. Neither one completely determines the other. Cultural desires become entertainment trends, and entertainment trends reinforce cultural desires. What begins as a reflection can become a feedback loop.
But as stories repeatedly explore vengeance, domination, self-preservation, and morally flexible victories, those qualities can begin to look both realistic and admirable. The hero who refuses to compromise can start to seem naïve.
“The decrease [of heroes] in secular films is because they’re deciding for the audience what the audience wants instead of listening to the audience and finding out what they want.” said Ed Grifenhagen, director of the Christian Film Foundation.
But perhaps the question is not simply whether audiences want antiheroes, but why we want them.
The Hero We Long For
Audiences are asking what darkness means. They want to know that evil can actually be defeated. They want broken things made whole, a hero strong enough to confront what is wrong with the world and good enough not to become what he is fighting. They want salvation.
Human beings have always told stories about deliverance, because human beings have always recognized that something is wrong with the world.
The biblical story gives this longing a name. Christianity offers a heroic archetype rooted in reality.
Christ is the ultimate Hero because He willingly lays His power down for the sake of those He came to save. He conquers death by entering death. He defeats sin by bearing it. He is King, but He washes feet. He is the Lion of Judah, but He is also the Lamb.
And that is precisely where our cultural imagination can go wrong. We know the language of salvation, long for a better world, and desire a king who will put things right. But the bent of the human heart is tempted to look for that salvation through worldly power again and again.
We don’t know that we want the backwards kingdom of Christ. We think we want the lion without the lamb. The crown without the cross. The kingdom without the King who told His disciples that greatness meant kneeling as a servant.
Only Christian storytellers know and can replicate the kind of Hero the human heart is really looking for.
C.S. Lewis understood that virtue in fiction is not mere decoration; it is armor for the human soul. And this need for virtuous exemplars extends far past the nursery.
“Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage,” wrote Lewis, author and theologian, in his essay “On Stories.” “Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
“It’s the mama whose kid was murdered and — at the trial of the one who did it — is praying for the guy,” Grifenhagen said. “It’s the height of Christlikeness.”
That kind of heroism is almost incomprehensible to a culture trained to equate strength with domination. But it’s also precisely why it can be so compelling. The mother who forgives the murderer doesn’t pretend that evil did not happen. She does something far more difficult: She refuses to let evil have the final word.
That is the pattern of Christ. Grace does not deny darkness while overcoming it.
Tell Better Stories
This does not mean Christian communicators should manufacture flawless protagonists or turn every story into a sermon. It means we should recover the deeper moral architecture of the heroic story. Our heroes can be wounded, and they can fail. They can wrestle with doubt, temptation, and fear.
But there is a difference between a flawed hero who recognizes his need for redemption and an antihero whose moral compromise is presented as the only realistic form of strength. Christian storytellers have something better to offer.
For pastors, filmmakers, radio broadcasters, podcasters, writers and every other communicator entrusted with telling stories, let’s ask something more than what’s trending. Let’s ask: “What is true, what is worth loving, and what kind of person will this story teach people to become?”
Christian communicators hold a distinct advantage to know the Author of the ultimate story. Rather than obsessing over characters who wallow in the comfort of darkness, Christian communicators must craft stories of heroes who glimpse the darkness, choose the light, and carry others out with them.
“Darkness exposes the need for light,” Grifenhagen said.
But light only pierces if storytellers are bold enough to let it shine.
Markets may elevate the antihero, then tire of him and elevate something else, but the human longing beneath the story remains. Instead of chasing that cycle, Christian storytellers can tell the truest story.
But Christian communicators are called to more than telling stories about that Hero. If Christ is the Hero we long for, then His followers become echoes of His heroism: people who serve when they could dominate, forgive when they could retaliate, sacrifice when they could preserve themselves, and love when it appears unproductive.
“Everything we say, everything we do, either moves people a little closer to Jesus or a little further away,” said Grifenhagen. “If that’s the filter, I don’t know what could be more noble than that.”
The world needs to hear stories about a Servant Hero and encounter people who look like Him. This is the story the human heart has been looking for all along.