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Sorry, haters, Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus is no wimp — but a hero for our times

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Was Odysseus, the legendary Greek warrior, actually a wimp?

The most trenchant criticisms of Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster movie “The Odyssey” involve how he portrays the hero of the tale.  

In the original, Odysseus is a clever, multifaceted hero who comes up with the idea for the Trojan horse and then, after the Greeks win the decade-long war with Troy, embarks on his arduous journey home to Ithaca and his waiting wife Penelope. 

Now, it’s true that Nolan modernizes Odysseus for a contemporary audience, but what was he supposed to do?

If he’d given us the 100% Homeric Odysseus — abducting women, slaughtering unarmed people, sleeping around with nymphs, ordering the execution of housemaids — there’d be little chance that movie-goers would be interested in shelling out to see a 3-hour movie about his adventures and travails.

The values of Bronze Age Greece, when Odysseus was supposedly fighting and maneuvering his way home, were emphatically not our own. 

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