"But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before."

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Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.

Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.