Chastity, nodding and enormous pores: will women also love Nolan’s Odyssey?

Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation has been met with almost universal acclaim – from mostly male film critics. Might women find the journey less comfortable?

Long ago, almost as long ago as Homer composed The Odyssey, I was a film critic on the Sunday Telegraph. People sometimes ask me how sexist the scene was then, back in the bronze age mid-noughties, when male critics outnumbered female by about eight to one. Well, there wasn’t any sexism. It was actually totally fine and everyone was really nice.

They were nice in Soho, anyway. Farther afield, less so. Particularly certain readers, when it came to certain films, made by certain directors. Quentin Tarantino, obviously. Ken Loach, weirdly. And Christopher Nolan. Question their genius and prepare for epic correction by a legion of self-appointed bouncers.

I’d forgotten about that until 2020, when Peter Bradshaw was away and I reviewed Nolan’s sci-fi drama Tenet. I didn’t really like it and was duly admonished. I’ve since deleted much of the feedback I received at the time, but an old Reddit thread gives a flavour: “silly cow”, “bitter”, “probably a feminist”; “I can guarantee that bird was on the blob when she wrote that review lol”; “women make decisions based on emotion rather than logic”.

It is not Nolan’s fault that some of his fans are so emotional they insult strangers online for reviewing a movie they want to see. Nor is it his fault that his films, at least the ones after The Dark Knight, tend to go down better with men.

And nor, of course, should this stop women reviewing them. Be it Bridget Jones or The Football Factory or The Zone of Interest, art shows you lives other than your own. Engaging with stuff that isn’t a mirror, or for which you may not be exactly the target demographic, is sort of the point.

Yet the only review of The Odyssey I’ve so far read with which I broadly agree was written by Stephanie Zacharek for Time. This probably isn’t much of a spoiler by now, but she didn’t really like it. Meanwhile, the vast majority of reviews have been raves, and the vast majority were written by men (that eight-to-one ratio seems a bit optimistic these days).

And so I couldn’t help but wonder, to paraphrase a journalist unlikely to be first in the queue on opening weekend: will women go and see The Odyssey? And if they do, will they enjoy it as much as men? (In fact if Carrie Bradshaw did see it, she’d understandably be transfixed by one unavoidable byproduct of high-resolution Imax: everyone’s pores are absolutely enormous. Watching scenes with lots of closeups in them is like looking at yourself in one of those 12x magnification mirrors – ie, upsetting.)

Anyway, will women see their experiences represented with anything like the depth, accuracy or interest of their male counterparts? Because even the most enthusiastic write-ups – and definitely those assessments by classicists – seem to agree that women (not, historically, Nolan’s strong point) get a bit of a rough deal in the movie.

A few examples. Zendaya’s Athena – one of the really top gods – has almost nothing to do here but vaguely shadow Odysseus, Scottish Widows-style in a headscarf, softly nodding, sometimes doing a sad head-shake, like the teacher who tells you they’re not angry, just disappointed.

Charlize Theron’s Calypso likewise only really functions as a sounding board, ambling after him in the sand with drinks and lotus flowers. The flowers, it’s suggested, are secretly to stop Odysseus remembering who he is. The movie makes no mention of her keeping him as a sex slave for eight years. Homer’s Calypso is a great part. Nolan’s is some woman who runs a beach bar and is thinking of pivoting to psychotherapy.

These changes consistently make the women either more boring or more bonkers. The scenes with Samantha Morton’s Circe start promisingly, as she cooks a feast for Odysseus’s men in her Landmark Trust-ish cottage (good spoons, no telly) before vengefully turning them all into pigs. Odysseus comes by, twigs what she’s done and persuades her to reverse the spell not by – as in the poem – a year of sex and complex rhetoric, but just a quick word, conceding that men can be awful, but these ones aren’t too bad, as it goes.

Such alterations aren’t about the women, of course. They’re about Matt Damon’s hero, changed from tricksy shagger to gentle feminist – as well as super-cool warrior dude (an added scene involving him walloping some goons disguised as priests is really outrageous).

Happily, I haven’t reviewed The Odyssey, for I can only imagine the state of Zacharek’s social media mentions. But as it storms the box office this weekend, I wonder how many in the audience might feel a bit alienated – and a bit nervous of saying so.