"Frequent apologias for feminism": Calling Nolan's film "an epic mistake", The Economist dismisses the movie as "a very silly adaptation" of “The Odyssey”

You have read Ed Driscoll's collection of movie reviews of “The Odyssey”— good as well as bad — on Instapundit (if you haven't, do check 'em out). Now The Economist joins the fray.

Calling Christopher Nolan's film "an epic mistake", the London weekly turns to the favorite adjective of the Monty Python troupe to dismiss the movie about "Odysseus, the sacker of cities" as A very silly adaptation of “The Odyssey”. (Thanks for the Instalink to Sarah who comments: WHEN EVEN THE ECONOMIST THINKS YOU’RE TOO WOKE.)

Warning: the film review, which happens to be this week's story most read by subscribers of The Economist, contains a spoiler (!) at the end of the very first paragraph quoted below: 

The film itself is unlikely to allay any anxieties about anachronisms. In everything from its scenery to its psychology it says far more about the modern West than about ancient Greece. Startling liberties are taken with the plot to turn Odysseus, the archetypally flawed ancient hero, into a simple modern goody by flattening his flaws. Any bad behaviour is explained away either by drug use or hinted to be due to proto-PTSD (the overdiagnosis epidemic having apparently reached the ancient shores of Ithaca). The ending, which has him pierced by arrows and turned into a St Sebastian-style pincushion, is sillier still.

 … Sir Christopher’s retelling … is manifestly a product of the present day. Female characters offer frequent apologias for feminism (not a noted strong suit of the ancients). The casus belli of the Trojan war is given as a desire to improve trade routes, as if Agamemnon were merely a blameless advocate for free trade rather than one of antiquity’s greatest thugs. 

… The simplistic, visual modern world has taken Homer and turned him into social-media spats and an absurd Cyclops—and thus into a tragedy that is all its own. ■ 

Meanwhile, three critics at The New Yorker are enchanted by the film, with Naomi Fry, Vinson Cunningham, and Alexandra Schwartz giving it 4, 4.5, and 4.5 stars out of 5, respectively.

When asked, by Newsletter editor Caroline Mimbs Nyce, "how might this version reflect our current cultural moment?", Alexandra Schwartz confirms the Economist's review, answering that 

The thing that feels the most contemporary to me is the film’s treatment of women, who are universally depicted as prisoners of a patriarchal world. Helen’s famous face has been disfigured, presumably by her angry husband, Menelaus; the sorceress Circe uses her witchcraft in self-defense, seemingly as a result of traumatic encounters with men. Nolan has been criticized for his thin treatment of women in the past, and I sense he’s making up for it here—but I fear this approach is differently reductive.