I understood “sailing West to honor the dead” to mean sailing geographically West, as in the only cardinal direction you could sail in starting from the East Mediterranean sea to go into exile. That’s at least what I understood Penelope was proposing when she originally suggested they run away by sailing West to escape Agamemnon.
Depends on your preferences, but I personally really liked it. I enjoyed it as a theatrical experience, and I appreciated that it depicted the ancient world as a whole as brutal & violent (as opposed to the typical fascist propaganda that is sword and sandal movies romanticizing ancient “Western” societies). I found it interesting that Nolan introduced a diegetic anticipation of the bronze age collapse flipping the hero’s journey from the source material on its head into a journey of grand reckoning. It’s got a sharp anti-imperialist message and it pisses off right wingers, so I’d recommend it if any of that sounds cool to you. Second Wind did a review and analysis on their channel that I thought was really good: https://youtu.be/AC4ABA1hbRw
In my view which is similar to the Second Wind reviewer, Nolan applies the homecoming (νοστος) theme of the source material as a metaphor for American imperialism coming home. The big twist that the Greeks are the true cause of the bronze age collapse which is blamed on rumored sea peoples is straightforwardly a mirror of the ongoing collapse of Pax Americana, down to the classic American technique of blaming some migrant outgroup while ignoring that said migrants are fleeing the warzones America creates around the world. Everywhere Odysseus and his men go, they’re treated as the belligerent imperialists that they are. We also see back in Ithaca the same belligerence reflected most directly in the boorish suitors, but there’s a normative belligerence that we see across the Greek socities, whether it abuse of puppies/dogs (aka man’s best friend) or the maintenance of hegemonic patriarchy and slavery (again, a very obvious mirror of the US). While at first we think Odysseus eats the lotus flower because of PTSD, it becomes clear by the time we’re caught up that he’s eating the lotus flower to forget what his monstrous actions and to forget his home so he would not have to return and face the consequences of his actions. I do think Nolan intended that to be a critique of our attribution of victimhood to veterans who have PTSD, where the reality is that they are the perpetrators of trauma at our behest so that the rest of us in the imperial core can benefit from our imperial plunder detached from the traumatic cost of obtaining it. Odysseus is delivered home by the gods not because he has been morally redeemed, but as the deliverer of the fated imperial reckoning which ushers in the bronze age collapse. It ends on the hopeful musing that with collapse there can then be renewal and that in time Odysseus’ mistakes (i.e. America’s mistakes) will be forgotten. I think there’s something subtle about that final line. It’s not that Odysseus’ mistakes will be forgiven, but merely forgotten, implying his mistakes would have so little relevance to the present that they have neither need nor want to remember them.
Andy Weir is very good at using science and problem solving to drive his plots forward. I like to imagine it as what humans could accomplish without class oppression standing in our way.