Take the Suit Off

We don't review films here. House rule, stated once, in case anybody writes in. This is a magazine about books and it will stay a magazine about books. What follows is a review of a meaning, which is a different job, and the film is only the delivery van.
Because something happened this summer that nobody in publishing could have arranged with any amount of money. A three-thousand-year-old poem got dragged back up to the surface by Hollywood, and for the first time in living memory the whole internet is arguing about The Odyssey. Not the devoted ones. Not the six people in every city who reread it every few years and have opinions about translators. Everybody. The same crowd that argues about Spider-Man is now arguing about Ithaca, and it is glorious, and it is also making me lose my mind slightly, because look at what they're arguing about.
Wheels. Whether the horse should have had wheels. Whether that particular greave belongs to that particular century. Whether the shields are the right shape. Within about a week the internet produced roughly nine million classicists, all of them furious, all of them fact-checking a poem in which a woman turns men into pigs.
If accuracy is what you're after, watch a documentary. If you can find one with genuine location footage from Bronze Age Troy, bon voyage, send pictures, we'll publish them. But this film was not made so you could evaluate armour. And I'm not claiming any special access to the truth of it. I just think everyone is standing in the right room looking at the wrong wall.