Critics have said their piece about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” and now he is saying his piece about them.
While on “The Odyssey” press tour, the director spoke with podcaster Zhong Shu about “a fundamental flaw of film criticism” he sees with amateur critics.
“The criticism that’s often leveled at movies in general is, ‘Oh, the character has to be made sympathetic, so the character is manipulated in different ways or changed in different ways,’” he said. “And that’s a fundamental flaw of film criticism in a way, or storytelling criticism. Because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism.”
He added, “I’m thinking more of amateur criticism, because they feel they’ve identified the mechanism, they feel that it invalidates it. That can be true of certain elements, and film grammar, film language evolves with that. So when a trope becomes too familiar to an audience, then it has to be changed. But we do, as filmmakers, avail ourselves of that common language. We build on that understanding. Our audience has seen many films and they understand that language.”
There has been plenty of online discourse surrounding “The Odyssey,” which has grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide after three weekends in theaters and earned a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One critic who was notably unimpressed with Nolan’s work was Emily Wilson, an “Odyssey” translator whom the director credited as an inspiration for his adaptaion of the Greek epic. She wrote in a review for the London Review of Books that Nolan’s take was “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.”
Author Joyce Carol Oates later came to Nolan’s defense, writing on social media that Wilson was speaking in the “crude language of MAGA folks” in her blistering critique.
