The 1993 thriller Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas, is being reappraised as a bleak counterpoint to traditional hero's journey narratives such as Christopher Nolan's recently released The Odyssey. Rather than triumphing over adversity like Homer's Odysseus, Douglas's character William Foster begins with the same simple goal of getting home but descends into escalating violence and cruelty as his day unfolds, offering what the article calls the "saddest" inversion of the classic epic structure.

The film opens with Foster abandoning his car in gridlocked Los Angeles traffic, declaring he is "going home" before setting off on foot. What follows is a spiral of increasingly disturbing confrontations, including an assault on a convenience store owner, brandishing a gun in a fast-food restaurant, and firing a weapon near construction workers, marking him as a morally ambiguous anti-hero rather than a conventional protagonist.