Who gets to have an opinion, professionally?

A grand time for the discourse this week after Emily Wilson, the first woman ever to translate The Odyssey into English threw eloquent shade at Christopher Nolan for his adaptation in the LRB. I very much enjoyed reading it, particularly the fact that she ends by expressing gratitude for the film, despite thinking that it's not good.

I also had a reasonably good time watching Nolan's Odyssey despite also thinking that it's not good. This is not a review and I'm not going to go into detail about why I didn't think the film is good – that's what letterboxd is for. I will say that the title card reading In a time of apparent magic did get us off on decidedly the wrong foot.

I will maybe also say that he is simply to heterosexual a man to be fucking with Greek mythology, insane to make an Odyssey where the only thing even remotely camp is Agamemnon's fit.

Wilson's piece unleashed a couple of days of le discours and a lot of it involved questions around whether it's meaningful for a translator and author to review a film at all. There was a surprising amount of authors don't really understand cinematic language. Quite a bit of film criticism should only ever come from film critics. Several it doesn't matter if it's an accurate adaptation, only if it's a good films.

I disagree with most to all of this, but I think it raises an interesting question. Namely, whose opinions on art and entertainment are valid or valuable. At a professional level, you understand; we are obviously all entitled to our opinions as amateurs.

We are all also entitled to dismiss anyone else's opinion we like.

Criticism is a weird area. There's not one straightforward path to it – not in film, not in theatre or dance or opera, not in music or visual art. It's an art form in and of itself, and it does take a specific kind of skill. But the skill required of any individual critic is just one facet of a whole world, and that world needs multiple perspectives.

There are film critics who went to film school. There are film critics who went to journalism school. There are film critics who have no training. I have done a non zero amount of professional film criticism work.

It's something a person might aim for specifically as a career path, and something you might stumble on through experimentation. The idea of someone critiquing one film one time because it relates to their area of expertise is not new – it's just part of the discussion.

Because that's what art is. An endless conversation about what it means to be alive that anyone can take part in. Criticism is part of that conversation. And it can be a destructive part. It can be done in bad faith, it can be spiteful. That just makes it all the more important to include and embrace views from a wide range of people.

This is not science. We don't do peer review in the arts. There will never be a consensus on anything here.

You are under no obligation to read the opinion of a classist and Homeric myth expert and give it more weight than your own. You are under no obligation to read the opinion of an experienced critic at an esteemed publication and give it more weight than your own.

You are under no obligation to read or listen to or think about anyone else's opions at all, if you don't want to.

Art is subjective. Critiques are also subjective. That's what makes it interesting! That's what makes it fun!

I am astonishingly inconsistent with how I engage with criticism. Quite a lot of the time my interest in analysing or discussing a film disappears after like, five minutes. Most people's opinions are not just meaningless to me, but actively annoying. Not because of the people themselves, or their opinions, just because I reached the point where discussing that film became tedious on my way home from the cinema.

But from time to time, for whatever reason, there'll be a film that I keep turning over and over in my brain. The Odyssey has been one of those films for me, even though in my opinion it's a fun but mediocre and inessential movie. Even though I expect the films Nolan writes to be mediocre because he's not good at writing. Even though I went into it already expecting a somewhat drab, prosaic film when I prefer colour and excess and imagination.

It left me cold for a lot of reasons I understood myself immediately – both as a film in its own right and as an adaptation of a story I know well. But it's a big story, and there are things about how Nolan approached it that have, for me, taken a bit more consideration.

I found it interesting to have the perspective of one of the world's foremost experts on Homer. Translation is interpretation, just as adaptation is; just through having been through that process Wilson will be approaching the film with questions that have likely not occurred to the vast majority of viewers, even those who have read the book multiple times.

And while I understand people wanting to experience the film as a stand alone project without worrying too much about the source material, I think it's valuable to ask why tell this story? Why adapt this work?

It's clear that what interests Nolan about The Odyssey is not what interests me about it, and that's fine! I guess! But I want to understand what interested him and why. I want to figure out whether I think he was successful at exploring his own take on the story and it's just not for me, or whether he aimed for something and missed.

I don't know why I care so much this time, when I usually find it so easy to dismiss films I don't like. I don't know why I care so much when I already thought of this particular director as technically skilled but often unexciting.

But for some reason I do. For some reason I can't stop thinking about it.

I've been reading a lot of professional reviews and a lot of letterboxd reviews, and I'm still not done – I have Film Crit Hulk's several thousands of words open in one tab as we speak, because if anyone can convince me it's good, actually, it'll be him. I have Angelica Jade Bastién on how bad Nolan is at writing women in another.

I've enjoyed Anne Helen Peterson on why Matt Damon's Odysseus is very good, even if it's not really anything to do with the Odysseus from the poem. I've been thinking again about reading The Odyssey for the first time for my high school classics class – we were asked to think about who we'd cast in a movie and my pick was Denzel Washington, an opinion I stand by.

This is all fantastic. This is the point.

I think it's great that the LRB had Emily Wilson write about this film. I'm glad her opinion is out there and I think a literary publication was the right place for it. I think it's great that people are debating the film, and her piece. I do not think it's great that people are suggesting this isn't her place.

A work of art or entertainment has value because it has value to someone and the same is true of works of criticism. It's not really debatable, and yet we will continue to debate it until the heat death of the universe.

It's all part of it. That's just art, baby.