A lot of the discussion I'm seeing around The Odyssey is saying, it's a good movie, but it's not a good adaptation. That Nolan changed Odysseus as a character, or Penelope, etc. Or that he left out this or that event, he left out the "nobody scene", or that Zeus or Possidon didn't make an appearance, that Athena was more like Odysseus' conscience than like a god. These are all criticisms I've seen. Which conclude that, therefore, it's not a good adaptation. Most importantly, I've seen people criticizing the fact that Nolan's The Odyssey is thematically different from Homer's.
I saw very similar criticisms of GDT's Frankenstein, saying that he completely changed Victor, that the Creature was too innocent. I saw a YouTube essay arguing that DT didn't understand Frankenstein because he didn't focus on the same themes as the original novel.
And I think all of this is very wrong-headed.
So much of storytelling is based around re-telling.
In oral story-telling, you can be sure that people weren't trying to recreate the exact same story again and again.
Looking at the western literary canon. How many of Shakespear's plays were retellings of older stories. How many works are based on the Bible. Even in the Bible itself, there's four different gospels, there's four accounts of the same events, each putting a different spin on it.
So much of art is about revisiting the same stories, and giving them new meaning. That's what art is.
But art is not saying the same thing over and over again. I think the best art is made when the artist has something definite that THEY want to express. The beauty of re-telling a classic story, in my opinion, is precisely in using it as a medium for a new expression, in subverting certain elements, in playing with them, in finding new meaning. In making new things out of the old. Retelling stories in a way that embodies themes that are relevant to different eras and different audiences. And I do think that one has to have a good understanding of the source material in order to do that effectively.
The compelling thing about Nolan's The Odyssey, in my opinion, is that it is very much of our era. We do not have the same understanding of fate that the Ancient Greeks did. We don't have the same relationship with the gods that the Ancient Greeks did. Even if modern audiences might appreciate the Homer version, retelling the exact same story would not connect with modern audiences the same way.
What we do have is that we're living in a civilization in decline. We're living through the decay of capitalism. And ultimately, Nolan's The Odyssey is about the decline of a civilization being brought about by the breakdown of social norms, the breakdown of the bonds between people.
(to be clear, I think Nolan got the causality backwards; the breakdown of social norms is a consequence of the decline of the system, not the other way around). That said, the film is a very honest response to the times we're living in.
And that would not have been acheived by a faithful adaptation of the Odyssey.
