granted, it would have been annoying in a different way if Nolan had just had all of the female characters throwing themselves at odysseus, which is how this aspect of the story is depicted in pretty much every other movie adaptation, but I guess what bothers me about it is that rather than make the story element more interesting by giving more agency to female characters, the modern liberal filmmaker's response to feminist critiques of the films of the past is to simply excise sex altogether.

it's the general pattern with filmmakers like Nolan. he'll put lupita nyong'o as clytemnestra/helen, but he won't change the fact that those characters are depicted strictly as objects who are acted upon by men. the right winger's feral opposition to minority representation is the mirror image of the liberal's surface level inclusion of it, with both of them fundamentally missing the point in different ways.

that said i do like the plot thread that odysseus is reckoning with how his plot at troy was a terrible idea with long reaching consequences. the very first thing we see odysseus and his crew do after the war is burn down a village for the crime of running away when a bunch of heavily armed strangers arrived on their beach, and by the end of the film odysseus realizes that the "people from the sea" are more or less blowback from the trojan war. that's a cool way to adapt an old story to a modern framework.

it is unfortunately super idealistic. oddysseus' plan seemingly introduced the idea of violating xenia to the mycenaeans, and this idea's very existence spells the end for mycenaean civilization. the result is that the film positions the sack of Troy as bad because the greeks did it the wrong way, rather than being bad because murdering tons of people is bad. it's both the liberal and fascist critique of the war on terror, incidentally - libs think we just needed more precise munitions, while fascists think that we just needed more indiscreet bombing campaigns, and neither can engage with the fact that we shouldn't have been invading another country in the first place.