You could think of it as a Venn diagram. One circle would contain all the people who have read Homer’s Odyssey (it would contain a much, much smaller circle of people who have read it in the original Greek). The other circle would contain all the people who have seen Christopher Nolan’s film. The second of those two circles would contain all the people whose opinion on the movie was remotely worth listening to. The overlap between those two circles would contain all the people who, potentially, would have anything interesting to say about the relationship between Christopher Nolan’s work and the Homeric poem.
Grumbling that movies aren’t the same as the books goes back forever
And yet. Until just a couple of days ago, the overlap between those two circles was precisely nil – but news pages around the world were resounding to a series of “controversies”, ginned up by idiots on social media, centring on precisely Nolan’s fidelity, or otherwise, to his source material. The sort of people who enjoy losing their minds over this sort of thing were losing their minds over the casting of a black Helen of Troy. The inclusion in the cast of a trans actor, Elliot Page, produced just the reaction you’d expect too. (Wait’ll they get a load of Tiresias.) It wasn’t all from the culture-war right, I should say. There was a bit of leftist handwringing that more of the actors weren’t Greek.
