
Not only do I feel inside the film watching it on a big IMAX screen, but also inside the character's mind (and my own, though). I see men who went to war and forgot that they had homes. For them, coming home feels uncomfortable and condemning. The war changes people, and they know what they have committed. Now the horrendous People of the Sea are them, and it's incriminating. Did they kill, rob and rape because the war made them such, or because they had already been like that inside? I feel the answer when Circe says "Back to your disguises," turning Odysseus's companions from pigs back to men.
One of my favourite dialogues in the movie is when Odysseus admits his part of responsibility talking to Penelope.
Curiously, he manages to come back home right when he is ready to admit that he doesn't want to. I am looking at him on the raft and thinking that I should probably stop struggling with what I am trying to repress and give in to the waves which will bring me to my Ithaca.
Generally speaking, the trope of "coming home" often shows the character struggling to adapt to the new reality on return, and so is Odysseus. But more than that, I see how he will never get rid of the shadows from the past. They horde around him, risen from Hades, a lot like something we consider dead lights up some whimsical wiring in our brain, bringing up images from our personal realm of the dead. Interestingly, how much can a whole life resemble a coming home journey?