Christopher Nolan has made an Odyssey for our times – by sacrificing the delicious darkness of Homer's epic | Charlotte Higgins

‘The director, as I had hoped, follows the spirit of the original poem’s twisted, coiling structure with his own complex design.’ Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesView image in fullscreen‘The director, as I had hoped, follows the spirit of the original poem’s twisted, coiling structure with his own complex design.’ Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesChristopher Nolan has made an Odyssey for our times – by sacrificing the delicious darkness of Homer’s epicCharlotte HigginsThere’s no denying the power of the film on the big screen.

But how far should modern moral sensibilities influence adaptations of classics?Everyone knows how dumb it is to be this person: the one who mourns the film adaptation of a favourite text because it misses out this scene, or misreads that particularly beloved character, or has a slightly “inauthentic” take on some detail. Of course I’m talking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Odyssey, a poem I have loved since I was a teenager.

I enjoyed the movie, in common with a huge number of other people. It seems remarkable, even dizzying, that the adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old poem took $264m (£196m) at the box office over its opening weekend, has sent translations of the Odyssey surging up the bestseller charts, and is sold out (for instance) at London’s BFI Imax screen deep into September. We are living in an Odyssey time, amid an Odyssey frenzy.

There is no point trying to be a purist about a beloved classic text. Whoever reads the Odyssey, including Nolan, inescapably does so through the prism of their prejudices, informed by the conditions of their own place and time. Since the Odyssey is the result of decades, maybe centuries, of non-literate oral poets working with memory and improvisation, there’s no precise “original” place or time to return to, anyway.

But what I can’t help doing is observe the choices Nolan has made and think about their consequences – because there are always divides in the road, paths not taken by any adapter.Nolan is brilliant at recreating one aspect of the original poem: its complicated structure. The poem tells the story of the decade-long return journey from the siege of Troy of its hero, Odysseus: the adventures he has along the way and how he reinstates himself as the head of his household once he’s home.

There are monsters and witches and magic and storms at sea. And then he must infiltrate himself into his home disguised as a beggar, before a Tarantino-esque bloodbath of revenge. It is a story told not in sequence, but through parallel timelines and flashbacks.

Nolan, as I had hoped of the creator of Inception, Memento and The Prestige, follows the spirit of the original poem’s twisted, coiling structure with his own complex design.View image in fullscreenMatt Damon (left, with bow) as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesBut his Odysseus, as filtered through Matt Damon’s performance, is a grim and agonised figure, not the loquacious, rhetorically able, charming liar that I see in the poem.

Cinema is a visual medium – not a genre for wordy speeches – but nevertheless, Nolan’s hero is a notably laconic figure. He is also guilt-stricken and conscience-laden in a way that speaks more of a Judeo-Christian inheritance and Nolan’s sense of a war-weary world than anything in Homer. Where the poem has Odysseus inducting his son Telemachus into the life of a warrior, the pair fighting their domestic enemies together, the film finds a way to release the younger man from the burdens of a killer’s life.

The Odyssey, though, is not an anti-war poem, though it is a post-war poem. Homer’s Odysseus is placed in a genealogy of warriors stretching back from the great veteran fighter Nestor and beyond (Nestor is absent from the film, so this layer of inheritance is lost) and forward to the next generation. War is, for the Odyssey, a fact of life – albeit one that is grievous and destructive.

But the idea that Odysseus bears a moral burden for the destruction of Troy is pure Nolan. He has swamped the poem with his own preoccupations and anxieties, as all readers do in the end, and created an adaptation that is tamed and tuned to modern sensibilities. Had he cleaved closer to the source material, I’m not sure the movie accountants would be now totting up the money so gleefully.

Would modern cinemagoers really queue up to see a row of enslaved women hanged, like doves caught in a trap (says the poem) their feet twitching as they are killed?Nolan has added, but of course he has also subtracted. He has removed not just dark and horrific moments like the hanging of the slaves, but also, by contrast, the epic’s lightness and wit.

This is especially apparent in his treatment of female characters. Nolan’s resentful Helen, played by the excellent Lupita Nyong’o, is literally and metaphorically scarred, rather than poised and gleaming and elegant. His Circe is magnificent and