MBD writes:

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.

I think this is correct. I’d just add — not to contradict MBD, but to supplement his point — that, far from being the product of some recent or pernicious change in society, reinterpreting The Odyssey to make it more palatable to “modern audiences” has been customary for a long time. I wrote earlier today that, in many ways, Nolan’s Odyssey is Dante’s Odyssey. But, of course, Dante is not the only figure who has altered the story and its characters for his audience.

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare effectively demythologizes the myth. Certainly, Shakespeare depicts Ulysses’s cunning in a way that Nolan does not. But he does not portray him — or anyone else, really — as heroic. Achilles is vain, self-absorbed, and sulky; Ajax is a moron; Agamemnon is weak; and Helen is the cause of a pointless war. Ulysses, too, is transformed. He is no longer Homer’s resourceful wanderer, but a cool-eyed political operator whose most memorable contribution is not a feat of arms but a disquisition on the necessity of hierarchy: “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark, what discord follows!” If there is a line in that play that captures Shakespeare’s view of the Trojan War, it is this, as spoken by Thersites:

Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion.

Not exactly Henry V!

Before Shakespeare, Virgil made Homer Roman. After Shakespeare, Tennyson made Homer Victorian. One can like, or dislike, some or all of these choices. What one cannot do, however, is to contend that they are “woke.” Christopher Nolan looked at nearly three millennia of interpretation and chose one that has occupied a central place in the Western canon for seven centuries. In what other circumstance, I wonder, would hewing to such well-established presumptions be condemned? Typically, the sort of people who are now wailing about Nolan’s supposed “softness” are among the most enthusiastic defenders of the Christian civilization that produced Dante. Faced with a Christian reading of Homer, however, they have suddenly adopted the Gibbonian lament that Christianity corrupted the virtues of the ancient world. I’m sorry, but I simply don’t believe them.