What happens when you take Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, and leave out the pervasive presence of Goddesses? When you make the wily, lusty hero Odysseus sexless? When you strip power and seduction from the women he encounters on his ten-year return from Troy? When you replace the poetry of “rose-fingered dawns” and “wine-dark seas” with today’s lingo like “Hello! Anyone there?”, “My dad’s coming home”, “Let’s get off this fucking beach”?

You get the IMAX blockbuster The Odyssey, written and directed by Christopher Nolan.

This is not a movie review. It’s a brief list of the sexless characters Nolan serves up.

Circe (Samantha Morton), the Goddess of irresistible beauty
and power (she knows how to turn men into swine), is a
post-menopausal hag who pummels and squeezes the faces of Odysseus’ comrades into Grand Guignol pig snouts. Nolan’s Odysseus threatens her with violence to lift the spell, and they all take to their heels. Homer’s Odysseus needs no violence and he spends a whole happy year in Circe’s arms. His men, who come out of the ordeal younger and stronger than before, finally remind him to get on with the voyage home.

Nolan’s nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) is a bland beauty who first drugs him with lotus, then changes her mind (donna e mobile) and detoxes him like a self-help therapist so he can remember his wife. In Homer, Odysseus is neither drugged nor forgetful. No drug is needed apart from eternal beauty and sexual seduction to keep him there… for seven years. Get that, Hollywood!

In the original, Helen, the “face that launched a thousand ships,” is so desirable that after the ten-year siege and fall of Troy,  her royal husband takes her back to Greece and to his bed. What  staying power! Surprisingly played by Lupita Lyong’o, there is no focus on her seductive powers. She is double-cast as the murderous Queen Clytemnestra, coming across as a sharp -tongued nag.

Athena, the War Goddess and daughter of Zeus, guides Odysseus through the entire twenty years. She helps him shape-shift -- from strutting youth to decrepit old age and back again -- and is as devious and eloquent as Odysseus himself. For Nolan, Athena (Zendaya), is a meek figure, veiled in some kind of Muslim fashion and mostly mum.

This systematic clean-up or wipe-out of the women caught the attention of Emily Wilson, the translator whose modern version (2017) Nolan based his movie on. There was already grumbling in the manosphere about using a woman’s translation at all, as if her words could shrink the phallic potency of  Homer. I find her text less poetic than older ones (Robert Fitzgerald’s, for example), more matter-of-fact modern. Wilson was not impressed by the impact her work made on Nolan: “… I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” (London Review of Books).

Wilson deplores not only the flattened female characters, she is particularly dismayed by the misconception of Odysseus. Some translators have characterized the hero as “shifty,” or “a man of many tricks and turns” while Wilson chose “a complicated man.” Homer’s Odysseus is an ambiguous hero: a vengeful warrior (“sacker of cities”) a trickster, brilliant story teller and liar, the smartest strategist of all Greek warlords, and a great lover of women. Nolan’s hero is a witless, humorless moralist, according to Wilson “an action hero who regrets his actions.” (And what actions, indeed. In scene after scene, he and his men kill and slaughter in spectacular settings.) Played by Matt Damon, he is immune to women’s temptations. He is the remorsefully admirable brute, forever the Good Shephard, if you will. This “uncomplicated man” (Wilson) seems to be Nolan’s ideal of a true leader of men.

It’s a man’s world. The faithful wife Penelope (Ann Hathaway) is, you guessed it, sexless. Was there even a kiss? If so, it didn’t make the headlines. In the one scene of intimacy, Odysseus and Penelope are lying down with their faces toward the camera, and she is awkwardly clinging to his back like a crab. (Certain critics joked Matt Damon must have a contract clause curtailing any sexual activity on the set.)

Yes, a dignified Anne Hathaway gets some screentime, but Nolan’s script gives her little more to do than to long and pine -- no chance to match Juliette Binoche in Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 version of The Odyssey, The Return.