Hollywood loves an apocalypse: The end of the world is barreling toward us, and our hero must ward it off. But apocalypse as destroyer of humankind, while useful as drama to screenwriters, isn’t a strictly accurate definition.

The word is derived from “apokalypsis, a Greek word that means “revelation,” a moment in which the curtain flutters back and we get a glimpse into reality. Illusions are stripped away, and something hidden emerges. Another way of saying it might be this: An apocalypse isn’t the end of the world, but the end of a world and the beginning of something new.

Some of Christopher Nolan’s films, like “Interstellar” and “Tenet,” fit the Hollywood apocalypse idea: Humankind is on the brink of destruction, because of blight or a mysterious doomsday device. But it’s the more revelatory conception of apocalypse that is Nolan’s true passion, in nearly all of his films. It’s why “The Odyssey” was such an obvious choice for him to adapt, and why the film feels like a companion piece to his previous movie, “Oppenheimer.”

In both films, Nolan’s ambitions extend far beyond the individual stories he is telling, or even the eras in which they’re set. He seems to mean for us to consider humanity as a whole, how we are connected across epochs and civilizations. In both of these movies, the apocalypse does actually arrive. But the characters’ worlds spin on after the credits roll, and they’re irrevocably altered. A new age has begun.

The Odysseus of Nolan’s film is in many ways a proto-modern hero, a complicated but virtuous man. He lives by Zeus’ law of hospitality — to accept all strangers, for they might be gods — and expects others to do likewise. Whereas in ancient times a hero was defined by his feats of strength rather than his moral character, this Odysseus believes in honor, to the point of making sure that the animal he is about to hunt has fair warning. He openly disdains his men’s fixation on “omens and sacrifices” as ways to manipulate the world; the deity he worships is Athena, the goddess of practical wisdom and the intellectual side of warcraft.

A great deal of “The Odyssey” involves the passage of time, one of Nolan’s fixations. Everyone is well aware of the many years Odysseus has been absent from Ithaca, and Odysseus’ need to forget his trauma leads to him losing track of years on the goddess Calypso’s island. But more important, the characters in “The Odyssey” are aware that they’re living in a particular era — the Age of Bronze — in which civilization is sustained by rituals like honoring the dead and human accomplishments like literacy. The characters become cognizant that their age is crumbling.

This echoes the characters’ experience in “Oppenheimer.” Like Odysseus, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the smartest men on the planet, and he knows that the rules guiding his civilization seem to be on the brink of crumbling. New technologies and discoveries are making the unthinkable thinkable, and he gets caught up in it, creating the atomic bomb without fully understanding, or perhaps being able to accept, that he cannot control what happens next.

Similarly, Nolan’s Odysseus considers the moment the Trojan Horse rolled into the city of Troy — which was his idea, and led to the end of the siege and the fall of the city — to have been, quite literally, a moment of era-ending apocalypse. He tells his wife, Penelope, that he knew exactly what he’d done with this “gift” to the Trojans: “One man’s idea, one man’s trick to break Zeus’s law forever.” In that act, he says, “we violated all that’s ever sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt” lacking the honor he believes in. And he thinks this act inspired others to ignore Zeus’ law, a break that will lead directly to the collapse of the Age of Bronze, plunging the world into darkness.

Like the atomic bomb, Odysseus’ twisting of Zeus’ law leads to mass death. It’s timeline altering, civilization crushing, epoch-ending. And for Nolan, this isn’t something that happened once in history.

His films are full of explorations of time repeating, folding, slipping and reversing. In “The Odyssey,” characters repeatedly quote lines that will show up later in the Bible: Zeus’ law is echoed by Hebrews 13:2: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” In so doing, Nolan is reminding us — the contemporary audience — that the rules these characters follow aren’t just invented by them; they recur throughout civilization.

In the film, Odysseus and Penelope talk of the future, of how their stories will be told and what humanity will lose and regain. In other words, to Nolan, these characters know they’re part of a long chain of civilizations in which many of their own patterns will be repeated — perhaps, for instance, in the creation of an atomic bomb that could both end a war and obliterate humanity. Never again would humans live in a world without that possibility.

Nolan’s other movies also explore a kind of cosmic social contract. In “The Dark Knight,” the Joker forces boat passengers to decide whether to preserve their ethics and die, or to give up their morals to save their own skins — a version of two philosophical conundrums, the trolley problem and the prisoner’s dilemma. In “Tenet,” Nolan considers what we owe to the future by telling a story about people trying to reverse an apocalypse that hasn’t happened yet. In “Interstellar,” he uses the concept of looping time to imagine a father and daughter’s connection across dimensions that could save humanity from a crippling blight.

Here’s another way to put it: Nolan makes apocalyptic movies in which the revelation is that we humans are all connected. We’re linked to one another in what we owe each other — those bonds that are sacred, and that once broken are hard to mend. And we’re linked to those in the past and future as well: What we do now echoes our ancestors and has consequences for our descendants.

In these aspirations, “The Odyssey” may be Nolan’s grandest film. Like “Oppenheimer,” it tells a story of the smartest man on earth realizing that he has won his battle but lost the war, and inalterably changed the course of humanity: a monumental burden almost too great to bear. But the more majestic and epic Nolan’s films become, the more humanist he seems, too.

Odysseus and Penelope discuss the end of their world. But the sun, they decide, will dawn again. Perhaps each new era gives us a chance to try again and save ourselves.