Christopher Nolan has pointed out what he views as the “real problem” with online amateur film criticism.
The filmmaker is currently riding high with The Odyssey, his adaptation of the epic poem by Homer starring Matt Damon. The has enjoyed enormous box office success and high scores with both critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite this warm reception, he voiced his concern about the misunderstanding of storytelling in the eyes of amateur critics.
Speaking to podcast host Zhong Shu (reported by Deadline), he said: “The criticism that’s often levelled 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.
“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. And that’s a real problem in criticism today.”
He then clarified that the issue was more common in amateur criticism, found in social media posts and websites such as Letterboxd. “I’m thinking more of amateur criticism, because they feel they’ve identified the mechanism, they feel that it invalidates it,” he said.
“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.”
The Odyssey continues to have vocal dissenters despite its success, with classics professor Emily Wilson, who wrote a celebrated translation of Homer’s poem, having said she would be “ashamed” to have written any part of Christopher Nolan’s script.
Conversely, the warm audience response to the film has prompted a substantial rise in people interested in learning Greek.
NME’s own five-star analysis said that “cinema may have peaked” with Nolan’s epic and concluded: “It’s hard to see how cinema can get much bigger than this.”
