But more specifically, Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem pinpoints how pervasively violence against women is a part of civilization’s moral decay. And it’s Lupita Nyong’o’s dual performance as twin sisters Helen (of Troy) and Clytemnestra, queens of their city-states and victims of their husbands, that clarify the way women are bartered, owned, and abused. Nolan is not always the best at writing female characters, but here, he taps into an elemental anger that Nyong’o brings to exquisitely painful life.

Nolan’s The Odyssey doesn’t show how Helen, wife of Sparta’s King Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and sister-in-law to Mycenae’s King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), was taken from Sparta to Troy; that’s the Iliad’s problem. Was she abducted? Did she go willingly? We do know that whatever happened to Helen was then used by the men around her — not to defend her but to chase their own glory; not for Helen’s virtue but for better trading routes. The Odyssey doesn’t beat around the bush with this. Early in the film’s first act, Odysseus explains Agamemnon’s opportunism to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), remarking that the king wouldn’t “let it pass, ever” (it being the seeming insult to his brother, Menelaus). Even worse, Agamemnon sacrifices his own young daughter with his wife, Helen’s twin sister, Clytemnestra, to the gods for favorable winds to reach Troy.