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If you’re terminally online, you’ve probably found yourself swept up in this year’s exhausting discourse over creative license and beloved IP.
When the now well-received Lanterns premiered its official trailer earlier this year, a vocal subset of fans objected to the premise of taking the ring-powered space cops of the Green Lantern Corps and grounding these colorful, cosmic superheroes in small-town Nebraska for a desaturated, Taylor Sheridan-esque riff on True Detective. Earth’s first Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, played by Kyle Chandler, also drew criticism for being portrayed as an older, messier iteration of the most famous intergalactic peacekeeper rather than the more idealized version in his prime.
Concurrently, Christopher Nolan’s modernized adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek poem, The Odyssey, endured endless kvetching prior to becoming the highest-grossing film of his storied career. Some found fault with the use of American accents instead of British ones, something Hollywood has long conditioned audiences to hear in sword-and-sandal epics. Others argued that the characters should be speaking with Greek accents or even in an ancient Greek dialect to honor the source material’s roots in Greek mythology. Additional gripes, among many others, targeted the use of the word “dad,” the Greek soldiers’ anachronistic armor and two casting choices that together accounted for less than ten minutes of screen time.
