Then, a homerist, an archaeologist and a dentist walk into a bar.

Fresh from a Thursday night screening of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” a group of 17 people spent the evening doing what scholars have done with Homer’s epic for nearly 3,000 years: arguing about it.

“We had a really intense debate,” says Joel P. Christensen, editor of “The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey.” Christensen was accompanied by retired Homer scholars (often called Homerists), editors, professors, historians, and various public intellectuals. “And my wife is a dentist,” he adds, “so she was the red herring in the crowd.”

The conversation ranged from Nolan’s decision to make Polyphemus (the Cyclops who Matt Damon’s Odysseus stabs in the eye) non-verbal to the film’s depiction of language itself. Each intellectual devoted himself fervently to a different academic discipline, but Homer’s “The Odyssey” is one of the few works that transcends any field of literature or history.

“I was surprised by how many academics liked it,” Christensen says. “My wife had to hold me down several times. Everyone knows I’m the worst audience for the movie.” After a long pause, he continues: “I’ve been saying to myself, ‘This is not Homer’s “Odyssey.” This is Nolan’s “Odyssey.” And it should be judged in different terms.'”

There is a palpable excitement surrounding “The Odyssey” that film exhibitors have been craving. Beyond its colossal box office projections, it is the first feature film shot entirely with Imax cameras. More than 95% of 70mm Imax screenings (the format Nolan says the film is intended to be seen in) have already sold out in the first five weeks. The show is also fueling a cultural resurgence of classical literature in a way that scholars have rarely seen before.

“I’ve been in this business for a long time, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this,” says Monica Cyrino, a classics professor at the University of New Mexico who has spent decades studying ancient worlds on screen. “It’s had the same impact as the old ‘Gladiator,’ but even that one didn’t have the same impact. Hundreds of academic papers have already been published, and the movie hasn’t even been released yet. It’s crazy!”

In the months leading up to its release, Nolan’s film has become a flashpoint for online debates about the culture war. Critics have argued that the “woke” castings of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, along with certain production design choices, are historically inconsistent with the Mycenaean world traditionally associated with “The Odyssey.” but after Variety When he spoke to leading classicists and historians, it became clear that these were not the topics driving the conversation in academic circles.

“I’m really disturbed because so much of the conversation has been about how ‘woke’ or progressive this movie was going to be,” Christensen says. “In fact, I think it’s a very conservative movie. The roles for women are limited. The interracial cast is made up of women of color who simply marry white men, which is not progressive.”

From a cinematic perspective, both literature and film experts will argue that no Hollywood epic depicting the ancient world has ever achieved complete historical accuracy, but has instead reflected the cultural assumptions and audience preferences of the time.

“These are fictional characters,” says film critic Alonso Duralde in his review of “The Odyssey” on the “Breakfast all day” podcast. “There probably wasn’t actually a Helen of Troy. There probably weren’t many of these people. And if there were, the ancient world was a lot more mixed than we think from all the Italian epics about swords and sandals we were told in the ’50s and ’60s. There were people from Africa, Asia, and Europe. They had ships, all of you!”

As for criticism of the film’s production design, whether it’s the polished Trojan Horse or the costumes (many fans online argued that Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon looked more like a Batsuit than Bronze Age armor), Nolan has described his philosophy as: “What’s the best speculation and how can I use it to create a world?” That approach didn’t seem to irritate classicists, many of whom have tempered their expectations of what a Hollywood blockbuster is designed to do: entertainment.

“No one cared,” Christensen laughs, speaking on behalf of his academic cohort. “Not even the chief archaeologist cared. Because here’s the thing: ‘The Odyssey’ is full of anachronisms. Homeric poetry contains different historical layers. The important thing is that the performance functions as a vehicle for the audience’s fantasy about the past.”

While most classicists are embracing the spectacle of Nolan’s blockbuster, opinions begin to diverge when discussing his adaptation of Homer’s language for the screenplay. As Harvard classics professor Gregory Nagy says, there is no single “original” version of “The Odyssey” in the modern sense; that is because the poem emerged from an oral tradition.

“‘Homer’s Odyssey’ was already historical fiction, a reimagining of an ancient past when it was first composed,” says Richard P. Martin, a professor of Greek and Latin literature at Stanford. “My classicist colleagues are happy with Nolan’s version because we all recognize it. is a version. There is no “correct” treatment, because each generation makes its own version of the poem, either through retranslation or re-visualization in various media. “All publicity about Homer is good publicity.”

Just as Odysseus assumes different identities to survive his arduous journey home, there is a long-running debate over whether “Homer” was a single author or, as Friedrich August Wolf first argued in 1795, that the poems were the product of “the entire Greek people” and were edited several times to suit changing contemporary tastes.

Famously, Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation turned “The Odyssey” into a text about polite manners and tact, while Richmond Lattimore’s 1960s translation sought to preserve the rhythms and formulas of the original Greek language. Laura Slatkin, a leading Homer scholar, says Lattimore’s translation often seems “archaic” to her New York University students because the diction is too quaint and formal.

“None of them are definitive,” says Slatkin. “That tells you something about the problem of translation, but it also tells you something about ‘The Odyssey’ because it’s not simple enough for a definitive translation. You’re building on existing resources from earlier songs, from earlier poetic traditions, but you’re not just repeating or recapitulating them. You’re… assimilating them.”

More recently, Emily Wilson’s translation suggests that “The Odyssey” was socially progressive for its time and “meditates on what women do.” [and other suppressed groups, broken down by race or economic status] might be able to do.” He argues that “Homer is, and is not, our contemporary,” and that his translations (along with all others) must be contextualized as a “text that exists in two different temporal and spatial moments at once.”

Slatkin described Nolan’s script, which Varieties Awards editor-in-chief Clayton Davis predicts it will compete for best screenplay at next year’s Academy Awards, as “the newest song” in a series of adaptations. “The Odyssey” has always been a story containing multitudes, balancing realism and fantasy, moral certainty and reconciliation, strangeness and familiarity. Just as the ancient Greeks (and all the civilizations that followed them) used “The Odyssey” to express their own ideas about morality, Nolan is doing the same.

“The consensus I’ve heard so far is that it will generate a lot of discussion in the classroom,” says Justin Arft, a fellow Homerist and associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Even with all the omissions and changes, no one is too upset about it. Honestly, we’re all curious, maybe confused, at times, but we’re really interested in this as a work of art. Nolan’s movie is a work of art, and Homer is a work of art.”

Once classroom discussion begins, academics will surely have more words for all the creative liberties Nolan’s film takes. Martin, Christensen, and several other classicists criticized Nolan for diluting the “sophisticated” morality of Homer’s poem and devoting more narrative time to spectacle, such as the fall of Troy.

“I understand where the criticism is coming from because I can speak on both registers,” Cyrino said. “What they don’t understand is the short- and long-term benefit this has for us as a discipline. Humanities programs are being cut everywhere, especially classics programs. I’m a department head and I guarantee you my Greek classes will be fuller this year.”

And she concludes: “You know what Hollywood does: one thing is successful and ten more follow. This is going to be fantastic. As my husband always says, business is booming!”