I don’t often comment on films or – truth be told – usually care much about them. I leave that to those who do care and are much better at it. (See under: Miner, Brad.) Most movies seem, to me, to have a greater cultural impact than they deserve. I can’t deny that they’ve replaced the kinds of fiction that once shaped middlebrow culture. So my lack of interest is a fault, in a way. But in a culture like ours, from which Christianity is increasingly excluded, when a film like Christopher Nolan’s just-released Odyssey generates such mid-summer buzz – about a book almost 3000 years old – it’s worth considering what’s happening to some of our oldest cultural foundations.
So, given my adolescent obsessions with Greek and Latin, and the current cinematic excitements, I made an early trip to the theater this weekend.
It’s easy to nitpick about film versions of the classics. Troy, with Brad Pitt as Achilles, took vast liberties (far too weak a word, in fact) with Homer, but was in my estimation worth watching and even re-watching in its own right. There’s a substantial subset of Tolkien readers who cannot abide Peter Jackson’s trilogy and
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