It's a cool Odyssey, but it missed some very cool things in Homer's Odyssey

We went to see Christopher Nolan's Odyssey last night. It's a big movie, with big storms, big giants, and big emotions. It's a sad movie about Odysseus's guilt over the rape of Troy. We enjoyed it. It has some really cool ideas, like exactly how Circe turns his men into pigs, and what a cyclops might look like. It has a few things to say about the horrors of war. 

It's missing some things I particularly like about The Odyssey.

The first one is Odysseus, the character. Odysseus is the first modern hero. The first one you could invite to dinner. He wouldn't show up on time, but boy would he have a story. ("I know I'm late, but hear me out, okay?") He is not a classical hero, all force and bravery. He is "that man skilled in all ways of contending." He's a trickster.

Odysseus shows up on his island, Ithaca, and the first person he meets is a shepherd boy. Knowing that truth is dangerous, he immediately concocts an outlandish story involving being an Egyptian merchant, or something, who was kidnapped by pirates, but escaped. 

The shepherd boy is the goddess Athena in disguise. She loves that he's a canny, outrageous liar. "If I were a mortal," she tells him, "I would want to be you."

Odysseus is the guy who gets himself thrashed by his own troops so he can go over to the Trojan side pretending to be a Greek deserter, so he can see the citadel from the inside.

Odysseus is the guy who really, really doesn't want to go on the Trojan War. It's not only a bad idea militarily, but a war for a stupid reason – to get Menelaus's wife back, after she ran off with her lover, Paris. So when the Greek generals show up to draft him, he's pretending to be crazy, plowing up his own vineyards. Only when the Greeks throw his infant son in front of the plow does he stop the oxen and go, yeah, okay, you got me, I'll go.

Odysseus is also the guy who spends seven years on Kalypso's island, schtupping the gorgeous immortal nymph, but also begging her and any god who will listen to let him sail home.

He is also the guy who is so arrogant that he just has to tell the cyclops Polyphemus who it was put his eye out, condemning his crew to death and himself to ten years of wandering.

He's probably not Matt Damon. He's more Brad Pitt. 

How about Penelope? She is worthy of him. She fends off the suitors for ten years, claiming she'll marry when she finishes Odysseus's father's funeral shroud, which she has to weave herself. Only she's unweaving it at night. (That's in the movie, at least.) And then one day an old man shows up, and tells her, Oh, yeah, your husband is alive, I saw him a little while back. And what does she do with this information? She immediately tells the suitors she'll marry any man who can string Odysseus's bow and do his arrow stunt.

That seems a bit odd, huh? Until you realize that she knows perfectly well who the old man is. But they can't talk freely because they are surrounded by traitorous handmaidens. And she knows that putting a bow in her husband's hands is the only way to give him an advantage over the dozens of suitors who would kill him if they could.

And then, after he has duly slaughtered his enemies, does she fall into his arms? Nope. She says, "so great to see you back, my love, but would you please move my bed?" And he says, "I can't, because one of the bedposts is the stump of a tree." And only then does she fall into his arms.

Which means that she was totally prepared for the possibility that she just helped some total rando slaughter all the suitors. And would have been happy to take the win, if that's all it was. 

She is a woman "skilled in all ways of contending."

Athena, meanwhile, is not a goddess of compassion. (None of the Greek gods are really big into compassion. They are mostly terrible, selfish, spoiled people.) She runs interference for him. Warns him about Circe and gives him magic to prevent Circe from turning him into a pig. Disguises him as an old man so the suitors won't recognize and murder him. And once he really gets the suitor-slaughtering going, she joins the fun.

These are the characters I love in The Odyssey. 

It's a lovely movie, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. It is less an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, and more Christopher Nolan hijackingThe Odyssey to tell a story about guilt and trauma. 

Which is totally legit. That's how culture works. You're allowed to bend the old stories to your purposes. Nothing is preventing folks from going back and reading Homer's original story.

(You're also allowed to cast a black woman as Helen. The people in the movie are not the actual people in the story. They are actors playing the people in the story.)

There is one last thing I missed. Having blinded Poseidon's son, Polyphemus, Odysseus has to make amends with the god of the sea. You can't be a Greek and have the sea-god hating you, now, can you? So what does he have to do? Not "sail off into the West." Nope.

What he has to do is take an oar and walk inland so far that someone asks him what the hell is that thing he's carrying? Someone who has never seen a boat, in other words. And there he must sacrifice to the sea god.

It's a great story. Someone could make a really cool movie about that.