"Where are the gods in all of this? They appear in the film the way they would appear to humans: through thunder and lightning, through the elation of triumph..."

"... and the experience of pain and longing. Among the major gods, only Athena is personified (by an ethereal Zendaya), but she is not the warrior goddess of the poem. She is more like a projection of Odysseus’s own conscience, materializing the way an angel might land on one’s shoulder. She represents his desire for goodness, home, and order. (In the scenes of Troy’s sacking, we return to a repeated image of Athena’s statue being beheaded, the ultimate violation.) This is all very far from the dominant film depiction of Greek mythology that I remember from my own childhood, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, in which the gods hang out together in togas on Mount Olympus, with Laurence Olivier as Zeus dictating much of the action."

Writes Gal Beckerman, in "The Odyssey Was Never About the Gods/Christopher Nolan’s largely deity-free blockbuster adaptation only highlights the humanity of the original" (The Atlantic)(gift link).