Will the cinema god forgive Nolan?

I held off on seeing The Odyssey. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I was flinching from the thunder of publicity — crammed with promises of spectacle, the unspeakable and the momentous, before the bogus and the bombast set in. Respectable newspapers were sounding off about the cinematic tradition of Homer, and the introspection of Christopher Nolan. So I held back (as Odysseus might have done). I waited six days. But still the theatre was packed (my wife and I had to sit in the front row, and she clutched my hand in the Polyphemus scenes where poor Bill Irwin was doing his technological best to scare us — chewing live Greek soldiers, et cetera). The audience seemed ready for a large Wow! But there was an odd silence, as if some subversive word had got around. It can be fascinating to watch an audi