Christopher Nolan’s smash hit epic has continued to excite and enrage everyone from rightwingers to academics, an old-fashioned throwback to a uniting big-screen event
Peter Bradshaw reviews The Odyssey
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If a high-profile academic is reviewing a movie for the London Review of Books, that movie in question must be making some kind of mark on some kind of culture. And if people are actually reading a movie review in the London Review of Books, and writing thinkpieces in disagreement or favor of said movie or its review, that movie may actually be a cultural phenomenon.
Normally, volume of discourse about a movie should not be mistaken for a sign that people are actually seeing it. Sometimes online factions just have a bored fixation not shared by the rest of the world. But Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has some major receipts at the box office, too: the movie has already outgrossed Oppenheimer, Nolan’s last movie, itself a shockingly popular movie for adults. Though The Odyssey’s audience skewed male in its first weekend, by its second its gender split was closer to 50/50, suggesting reach beyond the stereotypically male-driven action-adventures. It’s also reaching out to older moviegoers, an endangered demographic in a summer where under-25s have driven the success of Obsession and Backrooms. Three-quarters of The Odyssey’s audience has been over 25, while memes inspired by the movie (most popular: Matt Damon’s anguished face portraying Odysseus listening to the sirens’ song and Robert Pattinson’s slimy suitor demanding that “someone get these BEGGARS out of here!”) have indicated that younger people are paying attention too.
