Nolan's Odyssey: how far may an adaptation stray from Homer?

The argument here is about adaptation as a craft. Yangcheng Evening News sets out the test it thinks applies — an adaptation is not an inventory of the original, and what has to be judged is whether Nolan's cuts and choices let the film stand up as its own work. A Huxiu essay makes the historical case: adaptation is how classics have always been reborn, and a film that merely traced the text would have nothing to say to a living audience, so the question worth asking is why he changed what he changed. On a Jiemian roundtable one critic calls it unfair to spend the time listing what an adaptation left out instead of looking at what it put in. The Paper's dialogue with two literature scholars states the alternative directly: rather than hunting for the differences from Homer, understand what Nolan's rewriting is for.

The argument here starts from the casting row and works outwards. The Atlantic notes that objections dressed as historical inaccuracy were aimed at a fantasy film with magic and monsters in it. RogerEbert.com reaches for the stage: an adaptation of Homer owes no more to monocultural casting than a Shakespeare production does. Variety points out that the poem itself came out of an oral tradition that was reshaped over centuries, so refusing artistic licence denies the thing its nature — and Slate asks which era a faithful version would even be reproducing, given the poem absorbed imagery from all of them. The classicists quoted supply the formulation the reviews then use: a Boston University professor asks what the point of a film that replicated the original exactly would be, and a scholar tells Variety he keeps repeating to himself that this is Nolan's Odyssey, to be judged on its own terms.

What gets laid at Nolan's door here is a swap of moral systems. A Huxiu essay says he removed Homer's external logic of honour and shame and put a Christian story of atonement in its place. Jiemian describes the same move as a translation: fate becomes choice, divine punishment becomes guilt, and Athena comes down from Olympus into a man's head — at the cost of a stranger, less explicable world. Guanchá reads the softened Odysseus as anti-Homeric outright, and Guangming Daily traces the surviving adventure without its divinity, which it says makes the penitent Odysseus easy to grasp and the Greek pursuit of excellence hard. The Paper's interview with Xu Jilin and Jin Wen turns the same attribution into praise: this is a deep and personal reading, and it is the Odyssey that needed Nolan.

Here the film is read first as a Nolan film, and the charges are the ones his filmography already carries. The Los Angeles Times says he scrapped Odysseus's prickly personality to smuggle in a message about how empires collapse, calling the result a moralistic Oppenheimer prequel. The Ringer describes him sanding the gods down into a single quasi-Judeo-Christian moral authority and putting their weight behind themes he had chosen in advance. USA Today reaches for a long-standing complaint — half-baked female characters — and finds the women again there to move the men along. The Atlantic works the other way and credits him: the film is about the unintended consequences of breaking with tradition for short-term gain, an argument it says Nolan builds by implying that Odysseus's own act of perfidy broke the world.

The row is answered with the classical record. Xinmin Evening News calls fixating on the skin colour of Helen or on a transgender actor playing the Greek soldier Sinon shallow, given that in ancient Greece mortals, gods and monsters and their offspring lived side by side. Guanchá turns the objection on both camps at once: neither the Western left's Helen nor the Western right's blonde, blue-eyed Greeks match the dark-haired Mycenaeans of Odysseus's era, so the reader should be arguing about Matt Damon instead. The Paper quotes Daniel Mendelsohn saying Homer never describes what his characters look like, and calling Musk ignorant of the classical tradition. A Huxiu piece declines to speculate about the studio's motives at all: watching a film is watching a film, and what is on the screen is what there is to judge.

Here the row is refused rather than rebutted. The Hollywood Reporter's review states outright that it will not get into the tiresome online controversy, since nobody in the cast is Greek or Turkish anyway. RogerEbert.com calls it clickbait-y culture war nonsense in a story that also contains Scylla and the Cyclops. Time finds it hard to fathom that the most controversial trait of a woman hatched from a swan's egg should be the colour of her skin. Where the reviews do engage, they engage with the film instead of the argument: The Ringer notes the furor attached itself to a marginal presence, and Fox News lists the rumours and the backlash and concludes that petty squabbles should not decide whether you see a film.

The takings arrive here attached to the rollout. Yicai reports the mainland preview and pre-sale gross alongside the worldwide figure and the records it was approaching. Huxiu goes to the exhibition detail, reporting what the handful of surviving large-format film screens contributed and what share of IMAX's own haul that was. The Cover and The Paper open on the global record before turning to archaeology and to a scholars' dialogue respectively. Scores are present in the same passages — Douban, Rotten Tomatoes, the attendance rate at advance IMAX screenings — but they sit beside the gross rather than carrying the account of how the film landed.

The takings arrive here measured against the budget. Vanity Fair sets the opening weekend beside the production cost to make the point that it had already been earned back; the Los Angeles Times does the same and adds the milestone the film was in reach of, an R-rated release grossing a billion dollars. Deadline reports the running total and its domestic and overseas split as trade news in its own right. Where a score appears it is doing supporting work: Variety pairs the CinemaScore grade with the second-weekend gross.