As many reviewers with a taste for the classics have remarked, Nolan doesn’t tell this story within its own framework of ancient Greek values. This is a point made by the brilliant translator Daniel Mendelsohn and by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I don’t think Nolan should be blamed too much for this. It would have been much harder for modern audiences to admire and like Odysseus as a husband coming home if they saw him enjoying his romps with Calypso. Modern audiences also would have trouble with a filmic portrayal of war and conquest as unambiguously glorious rather than tragic. And some of the final comeuppance in The Odyssey would have repulsed today’s viewers. In Homer’s epic, after the slaughter of the suitors, Telemachus is commanded to round up the maids who have sided with the suitors. He makes them clean up the gore from the slaughter and then swiftly and brutally has them hanged for their disloyalty. In Nolan’s movie, one treacherous maid is merely exposed to the violent danger of the suitors battling the home’s true master, rather than outright killed by it.

As many........

© National Review