{"id":1127038,"date":"2026-08-03T02:05:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T02:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1127038\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T02:05:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T02:05:20","slug":"christopher-nolan-there-is-a-fundamental-flaw-with-film-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1127038\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Nolan: There Is a ‘Fundamental Flaw’ With Film Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCritics have said their piece about Christopher Nolan<\/a>\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey<\/a>,\u201d and now he is saying his piece about them.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile on \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d press tour, the director spoke with podcaster Zhong Shu<\/a> about \u201ca fundamental flaw of film criticism\u201d he sees with amateur critics.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe criticism that\u2019s often leveled at movies in general is, \u2018Oh, the character has to be made sympathetic, so the character is manipulated in different ways or changed in different ways,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe added, \u201cI\u2019m thinking more of amateur criticism, because they feel they\u2019ve identified the mechanism, they feel that it invalidates it. 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThere has been plenty of online discourse surrounding \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d which has grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide after three weekends in theaters and earned a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One critic who was notably unimpressed with Nolan\u2019s work was Emily Wilson, an \u201cOdyssey\u201d translator whom the director credited as an inspiration for his adaptaion of the Greek epic. She wrote in a review<\/a> for the London Review of Books that Nolan\u2019s take was \u201cpsychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAuthor Joyce Carol Oates later came to Nolan\u2019s defense<\/a>, writing on social media that Wilson was speaking in the \u201ccrude language of MAGA folks\u201d in her blistering critique. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Critics have said their piece about Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d and now he is saying his piece about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1127039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3935],"tags":[42315,77,3943,56531,16,15],"class_list":["post-1127038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-the-odyssey","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117029131624713241","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1127038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1127039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1127038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1127038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1127038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}