Misunderstanding the Odyssey

No character study of Odysseus comes closer to perfection than Tennyson’s: 

And tho’ 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The Ulysses of Tennyson—and for that matter, of Alexander Pope—is a cunning and amoral man in rebellion against fate and time. Cleverest and wittiest of all heroes, he surpasses even the Olympians in arrogance and ego, and in consequence is disfavored and punished by them all (excepting only gray-eyed Athena).

The Odysseus of Homer, when recognized by his dying, feeble dog, stifles his tears and walks away. The Odysseus of Homer avenges the disloyalty of his maids by executing them all without mercy. The archetype of a flawed, spiritually pagan hero, resigned to the machinations of fate and cruel gods, he would be instantly recognizable in Sergio Corbucci’s Django or Gregory Peck’s Captain Mallory in The Guns of Navarone. 

Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus, however, is a latently Christian patrician and soldier. He is concerned about the end of civilization resulting from both normative and structural factors, such as a breakdown of civility and propriety, open thuggery from temporary migrants who in the absence of order abuse hospitality, and wars over “trade routes.” His instincts are conservative. He suffers from the trauma of a brutal war and the guilt of middle age, from two decades of destroying castles in the sand and decapitating women next to godforsaken ruins.