I’m glad Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey exists. It’s heartening to see that a largely analog blockbuster is doing remarkably well at the box office in this age of AI slop and persistently reheated Marvel / DC franchise installments, with a welcome side-effect being that its victory lap offered Nolan a chance to weigh in on the AI-in-filmmaking debacle that made the proponents and apologists for this “glass Trojan horse” look like flailing, petty fools.

For better or for worse, when Nolan talks, people listen. And on this subject, he is thankfully very much on the side of the angels, albeit those of a flesh-and-blood variety, which I suppose makes them both less and more angelic in their composition. This is an awkward, pained metaphor that gracelessly melds the literal and the symbolic. And I think that a similar blight plagues Nolan’s take on Homer’s 3K+ year-old epic poem.

Like most of his work, it is undeniable in its architecturally awesome construction; once again pulling off that seemingly delicate balance of creating a piece of pop-spectacle that at least grasps at serious, high-minded concepts and themes. But it is ultimately a construction bereft of elasticity and charisma, with masterfully crafted disparate elements glued onto a large structure that threatens to topple under its own weight.

But this is fine. I don’t think we should attempt to shame ambition into silence during a time when entertainment of any kind is otherwise rendered utterly banal by algorhitmic repetition and dizzying, distracting and constant availability. I’ve snarkily referred to Nolan as ‘Michael Bay for pretentious normies’ in conversations with friends but when you think about it, is that really so bad? Bay is unlikely to ever accept a paycheck for Marvel, and you can tell you’re watching one of his films a couple of seconds into the experience, even if you’ve stumbled in mid-way by accident.

All of this is to say that Nolan’s take on The Odyssey is very much his own, and that I believe this is to be cautiously applauded because our pathetic times have reduced such individual acts of expression into a rarity, at least when it comes to works at such large and expensive scale that otherwise make accountants and executives so nervous as to either say no off the bat or pull the plug mid-way through the process. And classics exist to be reworked, so Nolan has every right to do his own thing with the material.

(The caveat here being that, alas, I highly doubt Karyn Kusama, Jane Schoenbrun or Celine Sciamma will ever get a shot at their own $250 mill version, with all that that implies.)

There’s certainly stuff in it that I like. The practical effects yielding brain-searing creature work: Polyphemus and Circe’s pig-trick… like both Ray Harryhausen and An American Werewolf in London, all grown up. Robert Pattinson going all-in as the eminently hissable Antinous, proving once and for all that his diet-goth-heartthrob days are very much behind him, even if he’s still playing in the mainstream arena by dint of being our current freaking Batman. That we don’t ever really see Benny Safdie as Agamemmnon because his Darth-Vader-like helmet obscures any distinguishing facial features into oblivion: a fitting design for an obstinately single-minded warrior who sacrificed his own daughter to ensure military success.

It’s something of a relief that the sum of its parts contains just so many intricately crafted bits. It means that most of us will get at least something to enjoy, and that includes the likes of yours truly, who certainly didn’t appreciate the lumbering whole all that much. Which is, really and truly, of a piece with how I’ve been experiencing Nolan’s work of late. Yes, I did see The Dark Knight in cinemas not once, not twice, but three times (in two separate countries) in the summer of 2008. But his subsequent work failed to elicit a similar electric charge. (Imagine if Heath Ledger had remained alive to serve as a returning collaborator?)

Which brings me to my critical touchstone for this whole experience – Emily Wilson’s now-infamous review of the film. Very handy for me, since I can now just shoot a link to it to whomever asks my thoughts on the matter. (Though I’m not sure whether a 4,000-plus article really does the desired trick with the necessary economy).

More than the review itself, however, it’s the online backlash to it that I found to be quite telling of where we are as a supposedly living, breathing, thinking-and-breathing species.

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I won’t quote chunks of ‘discourse’ directly here, partly because I can’t quite be arsed but also because citing such opinions in the same way you would cite a primary source just cuts to the root of the problem for me – I know it’s a done thing in legitimate critical spaces, but this is my own space with all of its particularities, and it’s not down to me to determine how legitimate it actually is – but I’ll summarise some of what I’ve heard in line with what I feel is most relevant to me right now.

And it mainly comes down to:

“Emily Wilson is being irrationally mean towards the film, almost as if she holds a personal grudge against it. Some of her comments and asides just feel like catty insults and are out of place in what should otherwise be a clinical dissection of the film as a standalone piece of art – surely that’s what film criticism is in the first place? To that point, however: let’s remember that while Wilson may be one of the most respected living translators of Homer’s work into English, she is not technically a film critic or reviewer, so for all of the authoritative bluster evident in the piece, isn’t she technically coming at all this as an upstart?”

(This is the kind of summary you would have asked your favourite LLM to churn out, here I am reminding you that even a hack such as myself managed to whip it up in less than two minutes. Believe in yourself, kids)

There’s lots to get into here, and I’m almost tempted to bullet-point my way into dissecting each side of it. But I’ll once again go for synthesis instead.

What I find baffling about this reaction is that it actually reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what film criticism can and should be at its very best. Nay, cultural criticism of all kinds. An engaging piece of writing trumps any ‘points-driven’ assessment of a work. Criticism becomes exceptional only when it exists as an engaging piece of writing, or broadcasting, in its own right. Using it as a barometer of whether you should watch something or not is not the purview of the greats in the field – and nowadays, that function has been delegated to Rotten Tomatoes anyway.

Pauline Kael hated Blade Runner (!) – I still read her and will continue to do so. Because she is an excellent stylist with fantastic verve who happens to have been focused on an area of life that I’m predominantly interested in (cinema). I don’t agree with Mark Kermode’s verdict on every single film he yaps about, but the yapping is irresistible either way. Susan Sontag certainly pulled no punches when her galaxy-brain applied itself to whatever area of cultural production was in her crosshairs at a given time, but her sharpness and precision is precisely why we continue to read her and hold her in such high esteem.

This is not about critics trolling or triggering on engaging in ‘hot takes’ for the sake of it. These are people interested in weaving an argument and contributing to the rolling tapestry of conversation and insight that the original work inspires.

Christopher Nolan undertook the massive task of adapting one of the foundational texts of world literature into a three-hour feature film. A bunch of us gave him it its full attention in a darkened room full of strangers. Our smartphones tucked away on silent. Our brains flitting from one narrative timeline to another as the many nested stories of The Odyssey unfold, ricocheting from character to location, from numinous to profane.

Whatever we made of that experience, I would suggest that we now supplement the film’s apparent mission – made as it is, in opposition to the current tendency towards attention-sapping fragmentation and ‘content’ optimization – by giving the scholars and critics a similar space in our minds.

Wilson’s review appeared in the London Review of Books; a broadsheet specialising in long-form critical reviews of primarily books but also other media, which tend to be written with an unhurried care that feels positively meditative in this day and age. There’s many others like it, of course, but we tend to forget about them in the din generated by their more social-media-friendly counterparts. But much like Nolan’s most recent film, the fact that they still exist proves that we do not have to succumb to the tyranny of low-hanging fruit.