No, not the movie. However, I did read the book because the movie is currently in theaters. When I was in college, I read The Iliad and enjoyed it immensely. The book included The Odyssey and I started reading it next. Amazingly, I lost interest about halfway through. That was in 1993. I picked it up last week.
The story opens with an argument among the gods. Athena wants Odysseus to be allow to return to Ithaca after 20 long years. Zeus ascents and Poseidon is not around to veto. While Athena ushered Telemachus - Odysseus's son - to travel abroad in search of news about his father, Hermes informed Calypso that she was the release Odysseus; she had him sequestered on her island for the last 7 years. Odysseus sailed toward home but was once again shipwrecked. He found himself on an idyllic island of Scherie where the residents treated him with the greatest of honor and eagerly heard his tale of woe. Interestingly, virtually all of his adventures from departing Troy until arriving on Calypso's island are detailed here as he narrates them to the credulous folk. There are sirens, a cyclops, giants, divine bags of wind, a sorceress who transformed his men to pigs, a journey to the underworld, the wreck that killed the last of his men, and so on. Here is all the crazy adventures and it is all told by Odysseus.
The folk of the island sailed Odysseus back to Ithaca and bequeath him with tremendous wealth, far more than he had - and lost - from Troy. No sooner has he set foot on Ithaca than he met a young man - Athena in disguise - and he spun a tale of being from Crete. Athena brushed away his needless deception and sent him to Eumaeus the Swineherd. Disguised as a beggar, Odysseus told a tale of being a prince from Crete who had fallen on bad times in Egypt and was now reduced to begging. When he went to his palace and mingled with the suitors who sought to marry his wife, Penelope, he again spun a tale. Penelope asked to meet this stranger and Odysseus lied through his teeth, testing his wife. Soon thereafter, he dispatched the suitors, though he was aware his vengeance would not be appreciated by the families of the suitors. Next he went to his father's farm. Laertes was an old man who looked more like a laborer than a former king of Ithaca. Of course, Odysseus went up to him and... spun a tale of being someone who had met Odysseus some years before. When the suitors' families arrived at the farm to kill Odysseus, he and his coterie of loyal men slew several before Athena intervened. She said, effectively, 'knock it off.' They did and peace returned to Ithaca.
Odysseus is a larger than life type of fellow who demonstrates impressive combat prowess and great feats of strength. However, he and honesty have a tentative relationship. It is peculiar that the only folk with whom he does not assume an alias was on the island of Scherie. Were the adventures he told true or just another fantastical tale? It all depends on whether Odysseus is a reliable narrator.
Odysseus is not a particularly likable fellow. He spoke with pride about sacking a random town on his way home from Troy. He's just a roving pirate, a band of coastal raiders. Then there are the suitors. Penelope led them on, giving the indication that she might marry one of them, using a strange stratagem to hold off when she would make a decision. And regarding that, why are these men trying to marry a woman who has a 20-year-old son? It appears that the estate should be Telemachus' and that Penelope would move to the home of the winning suitor. It felt like she was a tease who wanted the attention. Then again, it has been 20 years!
The translation was done by Samuel Butler in 1900. In his preface and throughout the endnotes, he refers to his previous book, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), where he posited that the poem was written by a young woman on Sicily. Initially, that sounded preposterous, but the more I read the more I thought he might have a point. The frequent weeping and moping of Odysseus and several other male characters struck me as odd. Penelope has spent the majority of the last 20 years weeping. Maybe that is just a Mediterranean thing.
There is a lot more to the book than any movie could ever cover. It tells all sorts of tangential stories from Helen, Agamemnon, Achilles, Hercules, and more. It was a good read and recommended.
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