The poem's own statement
The Odyssey puts its position on divine responsibility in the first speech any god makes in it. Zeus, opening the council in Book 1, complains that mortals blame the gods for their troubles when they bring suffering on themselves beyond their allotted share by their own recklessness — and gives Aegisthus as the example, a man warned by the gods who took another man's wife and life anyway.
The proem has already said the same thing about Odysseus's crew: he could not save them, and they perished by their own atasthaliai, their reckless acts, eating the cattle of the Sun.
Homeric theology is therefore not fatalism, and reading it as fatalism misdescribes the poem's causation.
Double motivation
The characteristic Homeric pattern is that a god acts through a human faculty rather than around it. Athena "puts strength into" someone, or puts a thought in their mind, or takes away their wits — and the person then acts, and is held responsible for acting.
Nausicaa is a clear case. Athena puts courage in her when the other girls flee, and the poem also says, separately, that she stood her ground. Both are stated. The god is not a substitute for the decision; the god is the decision, described from the other side.
Modern readers tend to want one explanation or the other: either she was brave or she was divinely compelled. The poem declines the choice, and does so consistently enough that it should be read as a considered position rather than as confusion.
Gods as powers, not exemplars
Athena is not good and Poseidon is not evil. They are powers with interests, and the interest that matters most to them is timē, honour as due standing.
Poseidon's complaint in Book 13 is not that a criminal escaped punishment. It is that if he lets the Phaeacians convey Odysseus home unchallenged he will be held cheap among the gods. The demand is for standing, and Zeus grants it.
A reader who expects divine justice will find the poem incoherent. A reader who expects divine interest will find it entirely consistent.
Where the gods stop
Two limits are worth noting.
The gods are constrained by each other and by moira, the allotted portion — Zeus can lament a death he cannot prevent without breaking the order he maintains.
And divine intervention does not solve the poem's human problems. Athena gets Odysseus home; she does not restore his household, which he does himself with a bow. What she does at the very end is impose a peace by force, which stops a war and settles nothing.
The Odyssey against the Iliad
The two poems differ here. The Iliad's gods are more frequently and more violently present, and its divine scenes are often comic against a tragic human foreground. The Odyssey's divine machinery is narrower — Athena, Poseidon, Zeus arbitrating — and more consistently moralised: its gods talk about desert.
Some scholars take this as evidence of a later composition and of developing religious thought. It is a reasonable inference and it is not settled.
The Greek terms
Moira, allotted portion, fate. Timē, honour as standing. Themis, established right. Atē, the ruinous blindness a god may send — which in Homer explains rather than excuses.
For adaptation
A film that declines to depict gods acting has to replace this machinery with something. The Odyssey's plot is driven by Athena's advocacy and Poseidon's grievance; remove both and the delay has no cause and the return no agent. How the 2026 film handles the problem is assessed at what the film changed.