I watched this film recently. Undeniably it is an epic film, but is it faithful to it’s source material?
At almost 3 hours running time, it contains a lot of the material from the original poem. However, it seems to focus on the events at Ithaca (before and after Odysseus’s return) at the expense of the rest of the story.
Another thing that I noticed was te absence of divine influence on the events. Whilst appreciating that this may have been done to cater for the tastes of the modern cinema-going audience, it took away from the narrative.
Most of the major events of the journey have been shown in a fleeting manner, apart from the episode with the Cyclops. However, even that has been changed from the original, in particular the escape from his cave. The land of the giants barely rates a few minutes, but Circe turning the travellers into pigs is related in detail.
The events in Hades are similarly rushed, together with the Sirens. You could be excused for missing the Charybdis and Scylla episode, it also seems to be a footnote.
The episode where his men kill the cattle of the Sun God is a little longer, following which their ships sink in a storm and Odysseus is the sole survivor landing on Calypso’s island. Here, the lotus flowers cause him to forget about Troy, his soldiers and family.
The film becomes an engrossing watch when he finally arrives home in Ithaca. The machinations of the suitors are dealt with in detail, together with the actions of his wife and son. Incidentally, I remember a recent film (‘The Return’, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus) which focuses on this aspect of the poem, which I enjoyed very much. In the current film Odysseus seems to suffer a lot of self-doubt about his actions in relation to the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy.
Altogether it is an enjoyable film, well worth sitting through the 173 minutes.