Sorry, haters, Christopher Nolans Odysseus is no wimp but a hero for our times

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. So, Nolan had to soften him.But he went too far in this direction, giving us an Odysseus who is wracked by war guilt and suffering from PTSD. In the Homeric version, his long stay with the beautiful nymph Calypso underlines how desperate he is to get home — she offers him a life of endless pleasure, and still he pines for Ithaca.In the Nolan version, Calypso serves as the hero’s therapist, and it emerges that he truly doesn’t want to go home until he works through all his dark memories. If this is a bit much, there’s no doubt that Nolan is drawing on elements of the original.Homer has Odysseus weeping when he hears songs of the Trojan war, a wrenching depiction of his sense of grief and loss. This isn’t all: Nolan leaves it out of the movie, but in Homer’s telling Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior, meets Odysseus in Hades and tells him he regrets having chosen a short life full of glory.After all the obsession with military fame, it would have been better to sell insurance!T...