There’s just no pleasing people who’ve chosen to be unhappy.

Nolan’s three-hour, R-rated, sword-and-sandal epic is well on its way to $1 billion worldwide. It holds a 94% critics’ score and a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Why?

Because it’s good.

It is gripping, exciting, and new. From score to imagery, The Odyssey does something well worth the price of admission: It marries the ancient with the modern. Just as composer Ludwig Goransson pairs eighth-century B.C. instruments with the synthesizer, Nolan pairs the Greek texts with the language of modern cinema.

For example, the imposing Agamemnon is presented in non-period armor. He looks like a Greek Darth Vader. He is meant to. Nolan meets the audience where it is, telling 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 continued silliness of the right-wing holdouts, the film’s themes should have them cheering.

The Odyssey argues that, though society is imperfect, the virtues and social etiquette that bind us into a peaceful whole are necessary and worth protecting, because the alternative is worse. Odysseus explicitly bemoans the loss of a high-trust society.

Themes of duty, honor, chastity, kingship, surrender to divine authority, family, home, and lineage run throughout. The script is basically an Arthurian reading of the Greeks.

Then there is the Christian imagery that undergirds everything.

“Zeus’s law” is the Golden Rule. When Odysseus leaves Calypso and takes to the sea, it’s only after he gives up the illusion of control and surrenders his life to the divine. It’s only after this, after his head and face are submerged in water, that he wakes on the shores of Ithaca, home at last. One of the more haunting lines in the film is when Odysseus’s second-in-command screams at him to “pray for forgiveness.” Lastly, before he can end his 10-year estrangement and free his soul from the guilt of sin, Odysseus must go to confession. He does. There is even a screen between him and his confessor.

Yet even these conservative elements have not cooled the pure hatred of the weird online Right, whose animus predates the film’s release and whose complaints encompass everything from costume design to color palette to the modern dialogue.

They complain that Nolan’s grieving Odysseus, deeply troubled by the victorious Achaeans’ excesses against the Trojans, is all wrong. This might surprise Homer, whose Odysseus weeps openly in King Alcinous’s court at the retelling of Troy’s fall — a scene that has led scholars for centuries to ask for whom his tears are meant. It would also surprise the later Greeks who recount that Odysseus pushed to have Ajax the Lesser executed for raping Cassandra, even after she claimed sanctuary in Athena’s temple.

Their biggest complaint of all, however, is the casting: Helen of Troy played by Lupita Nyong’o, a black woman, and Sinon played by Elliot Page, a biological woman who identifies as male. The latter draws the greatest ire.

Though it’s impossible to suspend disbelief for Page’s early scenes around Troy — it’s impossible not to see Juno — this is more than made up for in Hades, where Page gives a fantastic performance as an embittered shade. Nyong’o is equally strong in her similarly small role.

You may dispute the praise, but this is beside the point.

Disagreeing about a performance is one thing. Using a casting choice to claim the film is something it is not is another. Insisting on the false claim even after the movie is out — when audiences can see that the performances are strong, the casting works, and the story is no left-wing fever dream — is deranged.

Yet this is where the weird online Right stands: insisting on fiction and inventing new ones. Some claim Rotten Tomatoes is quietly blocking negative reviews. Others claim Page was first cast as Achilles and that an inexplicably “woke” Nolan, who gave the world George W. Bush as Batman, panicked and rewrote the role.

Others cheer that The Odyssey, whose budget was roughly $250 million, has grossed only $230 million domestically and $363 million internationally. It has not yet opened in China, which plans to dedicate 800 IMAX screens to the project.

The cope runs so deep that when Emily Wilson, whose “feminist” translation of The Odyssey 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 unhinged, meandering, nearly incomprehensible critique of the movie nearly outweighs all the months of right-wing craziness.

What a world.

WHEN EVERYTHING IS ‘WOKE,’ NOTHING IS

A big-budget summer blockbuster on its way to $1 billion incorporates her work, removes many of what she identified as “problematic” and “misogynistic” elements of earlier translations, and has audiences excited about classical literature — and she couldn’t be angrier.

And that’s the problem with politics as personality: Anything that’s not 100% of what you want feels like a defeat.

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