I had not read The Odyssey since I was a student. Stories change when we return to them later in life, or perhaps we are the ones who change. Christopher Nolan’s film made me want to find out what I had missed.

More specifically, it made me want to read Emily Wilson’s translation. Her scathing essay about the film nearly stopped me from buying her translation. I bought the book anyway.

I did so because Wilson is not simply another critic. She chairs the classical studies department at the University of Pennsylvania, is a MacArthur fellow and has translated both Homeric poems. Nolan cited her version’s opening line when explaining what drew him to Odysseus. Her work has shaped how contemporary readers encounter Homer.

Wilson’s objection is not simply that Nolan compressed a sprawling poem, or that several of Homer’s women reach the screen with less to do. Her larger objection is that “the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together”. The film condemns the Greeks for using deception to destroy Troy, then asks us to cheer when Matt Damon’s Odysseus uses deception and violence to reclaim his home.

Wilson treats those contradictions as proof that the film has no coherent argument. But they are the argument. Nolan’s film is about what happens to victors after they discover that breaking the rules works.

The Greeks did not break into Troy. The Trojans carried them inside. The horse arrived as a gift and concealed an army. The Greeks turned trust into a weapon, and victory made the violation look righteous. They sailed home having learned that deception and desecration could be justified against an enemy.

Zeus’s law, as the film presents it, is less a statute than a compact: feed the stranger, honor the dead, respect another man’s household and restrain yourself when no one can stop you. These are the terms on which strangers can live together without the stronger simply taking what he wants.

The key rule is xenia, the sacred obligation between guest and host. Nolan’s larger concern is what happens after violating it leads to success. Civilizations begin to fall not only when their enemies grow strong, but when the winners decide the rules were written for the losers.

Athena guides Odysseus in the form of a young Trojan priestess killed during the sack his plan made possible. The choice turns memory into confrontation: he receives counsel about divine law through the face of someone his victory destroyed. Odysseus receives counsel about divine law through the face of someone his victory destroyed. Nolan has built a moral language in which victory and guilt cannot be separated.

In this film, savagery begins with the collapse of obligation. Repeatedly, the Greeks treat another’s home as a supply depot. Odysseus blinds the cyclops Polyphemus after entering his cave for supplies. Later, from a safe distance, he shoots him out of spite. His men believe the act has angered Poseidon. In another episode, despite Tiresias’s warning in Hades, the crew invites its own destruction by eating the sun god’s cattle.

These encounters are not merely obstacles between Odysseus and home. They record a law losing its authority one exemption at a time. Compression costs them some complexity, but Nolan has organized what remains around the repeated failure of people to honor obligations they cannot be forced to obey.

Ithaca has not been spared. The suitors do not enter as invaders, but they behave like occupiers. They eat another man’s stores, treat his absence as the cancellation of his rights and assume that Penelope, Telemachus and Ithaca itself belong to whoever can establish dominance. The conduct of conquest has reached the dining table.

That is where the contradiction Wilson identifies becomes the film’s point. Odysseus must use deception and violence to defend a law that Greek deception and violence helped hollow out. Nolan’s hero is less complicated than Homer’s, but the film relocates rather than removes the complication. He must restore civic order even though he helped teach the world that order was optional.

Nolan stages the slaughter of the suitors largely as catharsis, encouraging the audience to enjoy the righteous violence the film has taught us to question. That gives Wilson part of her case. But he does not restore Odysseus to the throne. Odysseus cedes it to Telemachus and sets sail with Penelope to honor the men who died under his command.

Wilson faults Nolan for removing Penelope’s test of the marriage bed. I found the change progressive rather than diminishing. Penelope recognizes Odysseus by his heart and skill, not his knowledge of their bed. She is judging not merely whether he is the man who left, but whether the man who returned is still worthy of being her husband.

Wilson’s criticism of how the film treats women still lands. Nolan’s most devastating image of war’s cost is a murdered woman who never speaks, and Anne Hathaway, Samantha Morton, Lupita Nyong’o and Charlize Theron must supply interior lives the screenplay or the edit seldom grants them.

What Nolan removes matters. So does what he builds in its place: an argument that the methods developed for an enemy abroad do not stay abroad.

Last week, the Guardian reported that an ICE health service corps record confirms the Trump administration subjected an immigrant hunger striker to forced medical treatment, though it does not identify whether that meant force-feeding, forced hydration, catheterization or an involuntary blood draw. Force-feeding became notorious at Guantánamo Bay. The ICE record places such coercion within civil immigration detention. The exception becomes a practice, then a habit of government.

That process is not uniquely American. Every power that suspends its rules to defeat an enemy risks teaching its institutions that the law is optional whenever officials can find the right label for the person beneath their control. Nolan asks his victor to give up what victory won him. That is the part of the story no government has adapted.

Odysseus reaches Ithaca. Nolan does not end with a king restored. He ends with a victor learning that coming home is not the same as being fit to rule.

• Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist