Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey did something remarkable this weekend: it officially grossed more than $1 billion.
Not bad for a three-hour, R-rated retelling of an Iron Age poem.
Yet the two groups one might expect to be most excited by the film’s financial and critical success, the hardcore Right whose chief concern is the preservation of Western values and heritage and the author whose “feminist” translation served as a blueprint for the script, are seething.
There’s just no pleasing people who have chosen politics as a lifestyle.
It’s not entirely surprising that The Odyssey is a runaway success, beloved by critics and audiences alike.
It’s gripping, exciting, and new. From audio to visual, the film does something well worth the price of admission: it marries the ancient with the modern. Just as its score pairs eighth-century B.C. instruments with 20th-century synthesizers, the cinematography pairs the language of the Greek epic with the language of modern cinema. For example: King Agamemnon spends nearly all of his scenes wearing imposing but decidedly non-period-accurate armor. He looks like a Greek Darth Vader. This is by design. Nolan meets the audience where it is and tells a three-thousand-year-old story in a language it understands. Modern viewers know what to feel when they see a Vaderian figure; they know Agamemnon before he speaks.
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