Christopher Nolan has created an Odyssey for our time – by sacrificing the sweet epic darkness of Homer | Charlotte Higgins

Eeveryone knows how dumb it is to be this person: the one who cries about their favorite dubbing movie because they miss these events, or misread the favorite character, or have a little “fake” in the details. Of course I’m talking about Christopher Nolan’s film Odyssey, a poem I’ve loved since I was a teenager. I enjoyed this movie, as did many people. It seems strange, even puzzling, to copy a poem that is almost 3,000 years old. took $264m (£196m) at the box office in its opening weekend, they will send a translation of Odyssey expanding the best-selling chartsand is on sale (for example) at London’s BFI Imax screens until September. We live in a A time odysseyamid the chaos of the Odyssey.

No need to try to be a purist on a beloved old text. Anyone who reads the Odyssey, including Nolan, does so inevitably out of their own biases, informed by their place and time. Since the Odyssey is the result of decades, perhaps centuries, of uneducated poets working from memory and refinement, there is no real place or time to return to. But what I can’t do is look at the decisions Nolan has made and think about the consequences – because there are always divisions in the road, paths that are not taken by every adapter.

Nolan is brilliant in repeating one aspect of the original poem: its complex structure. The poem tells the story of the ten-year return journey from the siege of Troy of its hero, Odysseus: the adventures he has on the way and how he establishes himself as the head of his family as soon as he arrives home. There are monsters and witches and magic and storms on the sea. He then has to sneak into his house disguised as a beggar, before a Tarantino-esque bloodbath. It is a story told not in sequence, but through parallel time and visuals. Nolan, as I expected the creator of Introduction, Mementos and The Prestigehe follows the ideas of the original poem with its twists and turns and complex constructions.

But his Odysseus, as filtered through Matt Damon’s performance, is a tragic and sad man, not the false, false, false, beautiful that I see in poetry. Cinema is a way of seeing – not a form of audio – but, Nolan’s hero is a very good looking person. He’s also flawed and full of conscience in a way that speaks more to his Judeo-Christian heritage and Nolan’s worldview at war than anything about Homer. Where the poem has Odysseus ushering his son Telemachus into the life of a warrior, the two fighting their domestic enemies together, the film finds a way to free the boy from the burdens of a murderous life.

However, the Odyssey is not an anti-war poem, although it is a post-war poem. Homer’s Odysseus is placed in the generation of warriors stretching back to the old great warrior Nestor and beyond (Nestor is not in the film, so the legacy layer was lost) and ahead of the next generation. War is, for Odyssey, a fact of life – albeit one that is painful and destructive. But the idea that Odysseus is responsible for the destruction of Troy is perfect Nolan. He has filled the poem with his worries and anxieties, as all readers do in the end, and he has created a change that is changed and improved by modern ideas. If they had stuck to the source material, I’m not sure the movie reviewers would be happy with the money now. Would today’s cinematographers really stand in line to see a line of slave women hanged, like pigeons caught in a trap (says the poem) their feet trembling as they are killed?

Nolan has added, but of course he has also taken away. He did not remove the dark and terrible moments such as the hanging of slaves, and, on the contrary, the lightness of the epic and wisdom. This is especially evident in his actions towards women. Nolan’s fierce Helen, played by the excellent Lupita Nyong’o, is scarred both literally and figuratively, rather than calm and radiant and beautiful. Her Circe is good and strange (and she’s done very well by Samantha Morton), but not funny or charming. Because he has removed the Olympian gods from every meaningful part of the film, we miss the wonderful moment in which the divine Calypso (played by Charlize Theron) goes to the god Hermes against bisexuality (it is good for gods to sleep with mortal women, they complain, but not for goddesses to sleep with men). The relationship between Zendaya’s Athena and Damon’s Odysseus doesn’t have the romantic appeal that it does in poetry.

No nervous young Nausicaa finds Odysseus flogged on the beach (sweet spot), because Nolan has eliminated Nausicaa, and her mysterious mother, Arete, too. Odysseus’s mother is also mutilated – and I would argue, his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is also deficient in a number of critical areas, her unusual carelessness gone. Eliminating or eliminating the gods is a logical choice, if you want to focus on human motives and choices. It is easier to imagine the gods in poetry than to wave them safely on a cloud in a movie. I was reminded of a writer named Colm Tóibín tell me therefore there were no gods in his story The House of Names, which also takes place in the world of the Trojan war: the book is a human form, he said, and the gods have no role. And for Nolan, at least, so is cinema. But why lose the desire for sex? I had a sneaking suspicion that by minimizing Odysseus’ extramarital affairs (and Penelope’s conflict with the men competing to marry her in Ithaca), Nolan had found another way to make the Odyssey more acceptable to the modern age.

Read the poem. You won’t regret it. (If it seems illegal, Mary Beard and I have podcast series about this.) And pre-order Alice Oswald’s book Rhapsody: A Manifestowhich comes out in September and tells the amazing story of Homer’s flood, the sheer wonder of his stories in stories, the Odyssean stories that flow like layers of an onion to reveal other stories. He will show you how the metaphors of the poem and the familiar descriptions of the characters are a kind of time travel where different, conflicting things can exist in the shimmering darkness of the poetic time that a movie, or a movie of this kind, cannot capture.

You will experience such things only if you immerse yourself in poetry. What you will learn in this film is about us: about Nolan’s concerns, and about what modern ideas can do. Reading poetry turns the gaze outward – to something that we recognize, but at the same time it is strange and wild and strange and sweet and confusing and very different from our own. Watch the video, yes. Then turn the pages of a book and disappear into another world that no Imax cameras can summon.