And then there's the hero.
Because, if the Odyssey is clear that it's all about that complicated man, Odysseus, then Nolan is just as preoccupied with the complex hero – albeit in a different way from the Odyssey.
Homer's Odysseus is cunning with an edge of pride, a liar and a storyteller, with the smarts to wile himself out of any situation and a determination at almost any cost to get his homecoming.
Those costs are spelled out many times by the poet before they're tossed away.
When the men who crew his ship back from Troy die (as they all end up doing), the common response in Homer is bitingly pragmatic: “We sailed off sadly, happy to survive, but with our good friends lost.”
Nolan's Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) makes gestures to complexity too, but here is a modern-day Hollywood hero who learns remorse for the atrocities he commits and spends much of his time trying to excuse having lost all his men, and retrospectively (with a final journey, not in Homer, to pay homage to them) earning their forgiveness.
There are glimmers of this, perhaps, in Homer's epic (Odysseus meets one of his dead comrades in the underworld and goes back to bury him).
Yet heroes, for the Greeks, are often destroyers of their communities in pursuit of what they want (think of Achilles in the Iliad asking Zeus to kill all the Greeks), not guilt-ridden survivors.
There's another layer that Nolan adds: his Odysseus is riddled with trauma and guilt, not only for the deaths of his men, but for the death and destruction (and, at one brief point, the assault on women) he caused in Troy.
