The squabbles have been epic. Sir Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” was causing conniptions long before anyone had even seen the thing. Ahead of its release on July 17th, there was harrumphing over everything from the actress playing Helen (too black); the colour of the plume on Odysseus’s helmet (too red); the soldiers’ armour (also too black, and too Batman-like) and the vocabulary of Odysseus’s son (too American: at one point he says “Dad”). On YouTube the film’s trailer was met with criticism. “If I saw this on a plane, I’d still walk out,” reads one disgruntled comment.
The film itself is unlikely to allay any anxieties about anachronisms. In everything from its scenery to its psychology it says far more about the modern West than about ancient Greece. Startling liberties are taken with the plot to turn Odysseus, the archetypally flawed ancient hero, into a simple modern goody by flattening his flaws. Any bad behaviour is explained away either by drug use or hinted to be due to proto-PTSD (the overdiagnosis epidemic having apparently reached the ancient shores of Ithaca). The ending, which has him pierced by arrows and turned into a St Sebastian-style pincushion, is sillier still.