From missing scenes and characters to a brand new ending, the director has taken some artistic liberties with Homer’s epic poem

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Turning a 12,000-line poem that takes a day to read aloud into a three-hour film was always going to require some pruning. So it has proved with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which dispenses with a number of scenes and characters from Homer’s ancient Greek epic. The director has also changed the emphasis in some of the story’s most famous episodes and made a few of his own additions. Here we run down the most significant alterations.