Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" is the blockbuster that launched a million takes. The interpretations crowd my social media feed like Agamemnon's assembled ships at Aulis. They keen in my ears like the Sirens' seductive voices. They ... OK, look, I'm just saying people have a lot of opinions about the biggest movie of the year.

And for good reason, because Nolan's film is perfectly calibrated for the contemporary culture war. First, because its source material is a story that everybody wants to claim: woke and antiwoke, masculinists and feminists, film bros and classicists, professional defenders of Western civilization and its would-be revisers and subverters.

Other classics are similarly claimed and counter-claimed, but not everyone wants ownership of "The Iliad" (too male), Jane Austen (too female), the Greek tragedies (too depressing), the New Testament (too Christian) or the plays of Shakespeare (too hard to follow the dialogue). But in life as in Homer's epic, everyone wants a piece of Odysseus.

Then, having plucked the ripest fruit, Nolan proceeds to serve........

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