I haven’t seen the film. Nothing I’ve heard about it moves me to see it.<\/p>\n
The reviews came in around 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and an 88 on Metacritic, with the film opening to $124 million, Nolan’s best debut since The Dark Knight Rises. <\/p>\n
Why the elite ecstasy over this movei? First, Homer flatters the reviewer. A critic who writes about The Odyssey gets to display his classical education, weigh fidelity to the poem, and quote Emily Wilson or Fagles. The assignment confers status. A Marvel movie makes the critic a consumer guide. A Homer adaptation makes him a humanist. Reviewers have an interest in treating the film as an event because the event elevates them.<\/p>\n
Second, Nolan occupies a rare position: the one director who makes original-feeling, adult-scaled films that also gross a billion dollars. The critical class has spent a decade mourning the death of theatrical cinema and mid-budget seriousness. Nolan is their counterevidence. Praising him is coalition work for the institution of moviegoing. When Deadline’s critic calls it “a return home to the robustly entertaining action movies that cinema was invented to tell,” that sentence defends an industry, not just a film. The film was also the first shot entirely in Imax, and critics saw it in Imax theaters, which stacks the sensory deck. You review the format along with the film. <\/p>\n
Third, momentum. Oppenheimer grossed nearly a billion dollars and swept the Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Awards pundits started calling this one the Best Picture front-runner, with predictions that Damon could win his first acting Oscar, before most critics had seen it. Once the trade press frames a film as the season’s front-runner, dissent carries a cost. A critic who pans the consensus masterpiece looks contrarian; a critic who joins the chorus looks perceptive. The incentives run one way. <\/p>\n
Fourth, Universal managed the rollout. The studio let only professional press see it early, cutting out influencers, which flattered the critics with restored gatekeeper status and made their verdict feel authoritative rather than one voice among fan reactions. <\/p>\n
Fifth, it gives elites the opportunity to scold regular Americans about their lack of appreciation for diversity. Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy, Elliot Page plays Sinon, the Greek soldier behind the Trojan horse ruse, and Travis Scott took a role as well. The backlash was large: the final trailer reportedly drew over 542,000 dislikes, and Musk declared Nolan had “lost his integrity” over the Helen casting. <\/p>\n
The reviews praised the film; the think pieces disciplined its critics. TheWrap ran a piece arguing that anger about race and gender in the film says more about the angry viewer than the film, and asking why some people only care about historical inaccuracy when it invalidates their preconceptions. Slate deployed a military historian to argue the woke-agenda accusations collapse because the ancient Mediterranean was diverse anyway. Forbes filed the objections under culture war grievances placing politics above art. The casting functions as a boundary marker. Objecting sorts you into the out-group, and the columns writing up the objectors let the writers perform membership in the in-group. The scold is the payoff. A critic who spends 800 words on Musk’s tweet gets to demonstrate sophistication without doing criticism. <\/p>\n
There’s also an asymmetry in the standard applied. The same publications treat armor anachronisms and Tom Holland saying “dad” as trivia for pedants, then treat objections to the casting as a moral failing rather than trivia. If nothing in the film is meant to be accurate, both complaints should get the same shrug. They don’t, because one complaint is useful.<\/p>\n
Homer is myth, not history; the poem has been recast in every medium for centuries; stage productions of Greek drama have used colorblind casting for decades without controversy. Helen’s beauty in the poem is a force, not a phenotype. The defense of the casting becomes dishonest only when it pretends the casting carries no contemporary political meaning, that Universal made these choices in a vacuum and only the objectors are political. Everyone in the transaction knows the casting signals something. The critics know, the studio knows, the objectors know. The only forbidden move is saying so plainly.<\/p>\n
The reception owes as much to what Nolan represents to the people writing about him as to what plays on screen. He lets an anxious cultural class believe that spectacle and seriousness can still share a theater, and they reward him for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I haven’t seen the film. Nothing I’ve heard about it moves me to see it. The reviews came in around 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and an 88 on Metacritic, with the film opening to $124 million, Nolan’s best debut … Continue reading