As we look back on the history of modern cinema, people might come to study Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and its place in things, particularly its relationship, as a product, with swathes of the online movie community.
Some casting decisions that raised eyebrows, and perhaps Nolan’s complete refusal to even hint that he cared, set up some quarters online to enter into a weirdly adversarial relationship with the entire project that grew into an obsession. It became an article of faith to certain online commentators that The Odyssey must fail. Would fail!
When it was a hit with critics, and started to hoover up obscene amounts of cash at the box office, these same commentators started to look somewhat foolish by twisting themselves into knots trying to justify why they were right and the entire rest of the world was wrong. It was kinda funny.
It also reminded me of when a certain rotund online movie critic of years past was refused preview tickets by Nolan, so quite clearly was harbouring a grudge in his next reviews of Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, even going so far as to blame Nolan for his sleep schedule.
One of the things many of these critics started to fall back on as a crutch was pointing out that the movie relied on well-worn tropes. Well… duh! It is one of the most famous pieces of ancient literature. It probably created many of those tropes. Pointing out that a movie like The Odyssey relies on something like the classic hero’s journey is not a “gotcha!” – it is like pointing out that a porno film contains tits!
Possibly revelling in the critical reaction and financial success of his latest project vs. those online commentators, Nolan has pointed specifically to this when he has criticized a certain subset of critics. In an interview with BiliBili (via Nichole, and as reported by Dark Horizons), Nolan holds a mirror up to amateur critics:
“That’s a fundamental flaw of film criticism and storytelling criticism because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism. That’s a real problem with criticism today: people have this idea that because I can understand why the story effects me the way it is, therefore it didn’t work – that’s not how storytelling works.
When I was talking about film criticism, I was talking more about amateur film criticism than professional film criticism because professional film criticism tends to understand the necessity for the mechanisms… [amateur criticism] because they feel they’ve identified the mechanism, they feel that it invalidates it. That could be true of certain elements, and film language evolves with that, so when a trope becomes too familiar to an audience, then it has to be changed.”
Still. The Odyssey will fail any day now. Any day now…
