I slept on it, and I think I was wrong. I think I understand what they were going for with a more muted portrayal of Odysseus. Until the 3rd act, these are his retellings of what happened to him and his crew, told to Calypso, and under the haze of the lotus. Told from the perspective of a man who sees his greatest "triumph" (the Trojan Horse) as an act of barbarism and a betrayal of human decency. A man with the blood of all of his men on his hands. A man wracked with guilt over the things he's done. Of course he's going to downplay his own cleverness in the stories. He's going to highlight his mistakes. He's going to focus on his own hubris and cowardice.
This Odysseus ruined the world, in his eyes.
From that perspective, I think I get it now.
I'm glad you slept on it.
Nolan specifically chose a subdued version of him. Here's are a few personal takes on why I think that creative choice works so well:
Odysseus in this film is the unreliable narrator. For the first two hours, these aren't objective, omniscient historical events; they are filtered through the mind of a broken man. When you are drowning in survivor's guilt, you don't star as the hero in your own memories, you star as the architect of the tragedy.
The 'weight' of the horse. The Trojan Horse is traditionally celebrated as the ultimate display of cunning. But in the psychological reality Nolan builds, a man weighed down by the deaths of his entire crew would look back at that trickery not as genius, but as the original sin that cursed them all. It’s the act that set the gods against him and kicked off a decade of bloodshed.
Nolan also subdued the myth and humanized him. If you play Odysseus as the swaggering, untouchable mastermind straight out of the gate, to me, you lose the tragedy. By stripping away his legendary armor and making him small, haunted, and defensive under the influence of Calypso and the lotus, Nolan earns the third act. The cleverness has to return only when the fog clears and he has to reclaim his life at home.
It turns a standard, larger-than-life action-myth into a psychological character study.
And to address the other post: those scenes you mentioned are all ******* awesome. I can't get Hades out of my mind. Everything from the dialogue to the visuals to the makeup. Just awesome.
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