{"text":[[{"start":5.5,"text":"The release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film of The Odyssey has launched a thousand critics. Classicists have weighed in from across the world’s wine-dark seas to defend Homer against Hollywood. The director stands accused of clunkily reimagining Odysseus as a troubled, guilt-racked 21st-century metropolitan and stripping back the complexity of the glory-seeking Bronze Age hero of the original. What is more, he removed the humour, the sex, the feasting, one of the poem’s celebrated translators, Emily Wilson, has written indignantly; in short, he took out the fun! (She is right in this, as it happens; the film is quite dour.)"}],[{"start":46.6,"text":"At times the post-launch battles over the meaning and worth of the film have taken on an epic grandeur. Famous writers have delivered long ripostes to other famous writers’ long ripostes to Nolan’s nearly three-hour cinematic riposte to the many previous reimaginings of The Odyssey. The pace of the literary duelling recalls the intensity of the battle scenes in Homer’s other great poem, The Iliad. And there are the meaner-spirited attacks on the film by the “anti-woke” warriors such as Elon Musk, who has decried Nolan’s race-blind casting, saying it has “desecrated” Homer."}],[{"start":79.75,"text":"Do not be disheartened by the nitpicking. The democratisation of Homer has been under way for nearly 3,000 years. The Odyssey was set at the end of the Bronze Age and composed centuries later, probably in the eighth century BC. Since then it has inspired many of the finest writers in the western canon. Virgil, Dante, John Milton and James Joyce all drew on the storm-tossed wanderer. They also all reimagined Homer’s portrayal. Two thousand years ago Virgil was presumably lambasted — in private — by contemporaries for pandering to the then imperial zeitgeist by imbuing Aeneas, his Odysseus character, with the traits of an ideal Roman. To those disapproving of Matt Damon’s Odysseus, is Leopold Bloom, the mock-hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, any more “Homeric”?"}],[{"start":130.3,"text":"There is a reason Homer’s poem has endured. Even more than The Iliad, it is the story of humanity. It is a tale of a long-thwarted homecoming, of a complicated marriage, of an awkward father-son relationship, of taking in strangers, of fate. It is a gripping story of adversity on the high seas; surely the poor tanker crews trapped in the Strait of Hormuz can identify with Odysseus when he was stranded by ill winds. It is a story of power. Odysseus had to steer a course between the dictates of rival and sometimes fickle gods. Is that not the lot of so many “middle powers” in our own times, navigating a path to accommodate the desires of China and the US?"}],[{"start":170.5,"text":"More sweepingly, there is something immensely reassuring about a nearly 3,000-year-old poem that speaks to our lives. Some hazard that the age of uncertainty depicted in The Odyssey echoes our own age of anxiety at a time of mass migration, climate change and war. Nolan somewhat clumsily enunciates such thinking in his dialogue, with characters repeatedly referring to marauding “sea peoples”. There was no need. The story is a timeless reminder of the continuity of the past yet also, as Wilson says, how different it is to now."}],[{"start":206.3,"text":"To reframe the Roman poet Horace’s gentle riff on Homer and the idea that even the greats stumble: “even Nolan nods”. His final scene allowing the hero literally to sail off into the sunset is woeful. Homer’s Odyssey, by contrast, ends brilliantly bleakly. But we should not argue with the box office. It is already a $1bn film. It includes extraordinary cinema: the claustrophobia inside the wooden horse; the righteous anger of Circe. It has been something of a summer of Homer, and an implicit tribute to one of the greatest poems of all time. We should celebrate."}],[{"start":247.65,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786717198_8841.mp3"}