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Notes -
I wouldn't say that it has nothing to say, whether it is a good movie or a good adaptation.
Nolan's Odyssey is a little-c conservative movie, about how civilization is a result of maintaining a tradition of law and order that people can believe in, and what happens when you undermine that belief and destroy your civilization as a result.
While I do think guilt has largely replaced hubris in the movie, I think a lot of the threads Nolan is pulling on are actually in the original epic in some form. Whether it is the Cretan Lie that Odysseus tells the loyal swineherd inspiring the Sea Peoples plotline, or Achilles speech in the Underworld (sadly ommitted in the movie), where he says he would rather be alive and a nobody than be the glorious dead warrior that he is, inspiring some of the anti-war (or anti-norm-violations-in-war) storyline of this movie. (And this is more of an Illiad thing, but Homer did a lot more to humanize the Trojans than many war movies do today. He gives the scene of Hector with his infant son, and often will give a short biography of a Trojan as he is cut down. Imagine a modern war movie showing a mini montage of a person's life every time an enemy soldier was killed!)
I liked the movie overall, and while there are scenes and episodes I wish that had been kept ("nobody", and the Phaeacians were sorely missed), I thought it was a fine retelling of the story. When the medieval world gave us things like Sir Orpheo (a retelling of Orpheus and Euridice, were she is kidnapped and taken to the Celtic Otherworld instead of the Greek Underworld, and it has a happy ending where they actually leave the Otherworld together), I don't really mind if an adaptation is unfaithful. We'll always have the original.
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