Yet, the two groups you think would be most excited for the movie’s financial and critical success, the hardcore Right and the author whose “feminist” translation served as a blueprint for the script, are seething.

There’s just no pleasing people who have chosen politics as a lifestyle.

It is not entirely surprising that The Odyssey is an unambiguous cinematic triumph.

It is gripping, exciting, and new. From audio to visual, the film does something well worth the price of admission: it marries the ancient with the modern. Just as its score pairs eighth-century B.C. instruments with 20th-century synthesizers, the cinematography pairs the Greek texts with the language of modern cinema.

For example, King Agamemnon spends nearly all of his scenes wearing imposing but decidedly non-period-accurate armor. He looks like a Greek Darth Vader. He is meant to. Nolan meets the audience where it is and tells a 3,000-year-old story in a language it understands. Modern viewers know what to feel when they see a Vaderian figure — they know Agamemnon before he speaks.

As for the right-wing holdouts who still insist that The Odyssey is “woke,” the film’s themes should have them cheering.

The movie argues that, though society is imperfect, the laws and social standards that bind it into a peaceful, civilized whole are necessary and worth protecting. The alternative is worse.

The movie upholds these goods as necessary to civilization: family, law and order, duty, honor, service, chastity, respect for private property, free trade, tradition, and the examined life.

Odysseus himself bemoans the loss of a high-trust society.

The Odyssey upholds these values while excising the extreme pagan barbarism of the original, actions that are as revolting as they are inexcusable to a world that says Anno Domini instead of Before Christ. It identifies as grave, civilization-killing evils: murder, rape, looting, excess, cruelty, inhospitality, wanton destruction, avarice, cowardice, and treachery.

Then there is the Christian imagery that undergirds everything.

“Zeus’s law” is the Golden Rule, with characters practically saying verbatim, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

To find redemption, Calypso urges Odysseus to pray and repent. During a moment of extreme crisis, Odysseus’s second-in-command similarly urges him, “Pray for forgiveness.”

When Odysseus is freed from Calypso’s island and sails for home, it’s only after he abandons the illusion of control and surrenders his life to the divine. When his raft is threatened later by a storm, he does not fight it. Instead, he allows himself to be submerged in the waters and later wakes on the shores of Ithaca, home at last.

Before Odysseus can end his ten-year estrangement from home and family and free his soul from the weight the audience understands as the guilt of sin, he must first go to confession. He does. The film even places a screen between him and his confessor.

Yet these conservative elements have not cooled the pure hatred of the weird online Right, whose animus predates the film and whose complaints run from costume design to color palette to the script’s use of the modern vernacular.

They say portraying Odysseus as deeply grieved by the Achaeans’ excesses at Troy is all wrong. This might surprise Homer, whose Odysseus weeps openly in King Alcinous’s court at the tale of Troy’s fall, a scene that for centuries has left scholars asking for whom the tears are intended. The idea of an Odysseus untroubled by the barbarism exacted on the Trojans would likewise confuse the ancient Greeks who recorded his efforts to have Ajax the Lesser executed for raping Cassandra in Troy’s temple to Athena.

Their biggest complaint of all, however, is the casting: Lupita Nyong’o, a black woman, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, a biological woman who identifies as male, as the Greek soldier Sinon. Of the two, Page draws the greater ire. Let’s agree on this: Disbelief is hard to suspend in Page’s early scenes around Troy. One cannot help but still see the 20-year-old woman from Juno, even with the makeup department’s best efforts. Yet Page’s later turn as an embittered shade in Hades is excellent. Nyong’o is equally strong in her respective role.

Praise may be disputed. That is beside the point.

Disagreement over a performance is one thing. It is another thing entirely to cite a casting choice as proof that a film is something it is not. To insist on the false claim even after the movie is out, when audiences can see for themselves that the performances are strong, the casting works, and the story is no left-wing fever dream, is plain irrational.

Yet this is where the weird online Right stands: insisting on fiction and inventing new ones.

Some claim Rotten Tomatoes quietly blocks negative reviews. Others claim Page was first cast as Achilles and that an inexplicably “woke” Nolan, the same one who gave the world George W. Bush as Batman, panicked and rewrote the part. Others cheered that The Odyssey, budgeted at roughly $250 million, took “only” $230 million domestically and $363 million internationally in its two weeks. (This latter point was stone-cold desperation from the jump. Early projections that excluded China, where The Odyssey opens later this month on roughly 800 Imax screens, showed it would easily clear $1 billion.)

The right-wing cope runs so deep that when Emily Wilson, whose “feminist” translation helped shape Nolan’s script, condemned the movie for not being progressive enough, parts of the weird online Right claimed victory.

Speaking of Wilson, her critique is so unhinged and incoherent that it nearly outweighs the months of right-wing frenzy.

What a world.

WHEN EVERYTHING IS ‘WOKE,’ NOTHING IS

A billion-dollar summer blockbuster incorporates her work, removes many elements she called “problematic” and “misogynistic,” and stirs excitement for classical literature — and she could not be angrier. 

That’s the problem with politics as personality: Anything short of total victory feels like defeat.

Becket Adams is a journalist and occasional film critic in Washington.