But it also has an Odysseus who ruins his companions' homecoming because of his hubris when he brings a curse down on them all (omitted in Nolan's film); who returns to Ithaca and slaughters a bunch of defenceless men (Homer's Odysseus locks up the suitors' weapons; Nolan gives them arms); makes his teenage son hang a group of enslaved women (Nolan inexcusably turns Penelope into the executor of her enslaved woman, Melantho, and has Penelope actually push her into the slaughter); and then (also not in Nolan) almost starts a civil war.
This is the root of the story from which Nolan's film branches: a complicated man who isn't a straightforwardly moral modern leader, but who makes choices that are vexed and troubling and often unclear.
That's true for many of Homer's other characters, too – including the women.
Female characters such as Calypso (Charlize Theron), the goddess with whom Odysseus spends seven years of his return, aren't straightforward villains to be blamed for Odysseus's multi-year absence from Ithaca (Nolan makes her drug Odysseus with the infamous lotus so he “forgets” his home).
Nor is Penelope, in Homer's epic, ready to admit that the beggar who has wandered into her household and executed most of the local nobility is actually her husband.
Where is the challenge we see in Homer to whether she really wants him home or not?
In Homer but not in Nolan, Penelope proffers a test of her own (the famous bed–test) before she lets her guard down, not only showing herself a match for her cunning, complex husband but demanding that the recognition between them goes two ways: that if he forces her to recognise him, then she will make him recognise her.
