‘The Odyssey’ Backlash Failed Tremendously

《奥德赛》的抵制运动惨遭失败

On the day of its release, I woke up at dawn and drove 25 miles to the Philadelphia suburbs to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, at one of the few remaining cinemas in the northeast equipped to screen large-format, super-high-resolution 70-mm IMAX movies. 在电影上映当天，我黎明即起，驱车25英里前往费城郊区，去观看克里斯托弗·诺兰执导的《奥德赛》。那是东北部为数不多配备了放映大画幅、超高分辨率70毫米IMAX电影设备的影院之一。

I arrived to find clusters of idlers in “NOLAN” sweatshirts and Letterboxd dad hats shifting their weight, grousing outside the theater. The power had gone out, and the 8 am screening of The Odyssey would have to be canceled. Stressed-out employees manually jotted down ticket numbers in order to issue refunds (when the computers were back up and running) and handed out vouchers, apologetically. Filmgoers groaned about not being able to see the film—in its intended format, at the earliest possible time—and about wasting a day’s worth of PTO. A thought crossed my mind: Maybe it was sabotage? 抵达后，我发现影院外聚集着一群穿着“NOLAN”卫衣、戴着Letterboxd棒球帽的闲散影迷，他们正焦躁地挪动着脚步，抱怨连连。原来是停电了，上午8点的《奥德赛》场次被迫取消。压力巨大的员工们正手忙脚乱地记录票号，以便（在电脑恢复运行后）办理退款，并连声道歉地发放补偿券。影迷们哀叹着无法在第一时间以预期的格式看到电影，还浪费了一天的带薪假。一个念头闪过我的脑海：这会不会是蓄意破坏？

Threats against Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of the ancient Homeric epic have dogged the movie, basically since its announcement. A certain class of terminally online right-wingers—legitimated and amplified by no less than Elon Musk, on his own echo-chamber social media platform—have been pulling their oars against the movie, and the prevailing tide of public enthusiasm for it. For a bunch of mostly stupid reasons—the casting of Black and trans actors, or of Matt Damon as wily Odysseus; the Americanized English dialect; the ahistorical ship designs; the fact that Tom Holland says “dad” in the trailer—many had written The Odyssey off, sight unseen, as nothing short of a “psyop” designed to undermine Western culture. One X user lambasted Nolan as an enemy of “the west.” 自诺兰宣布改编这部古希腊荷马史诗巨作以来，针对该片的威胁就从未停止。一群沉迷于网络的右翼分子——在埃隆·马斯克及其社交媒体平台的推波助澜下——一直在试图阻挠这部电影，对抗大众的热情。出于种种荒谬的理由——比如启用了黑人和跨性别演员，由马特·达蒙饰演狡黠的奥德修斯；美式英语口音；不符合历史的船只设计；以及预告片中汤姆·赫兰德说了一句“老爸”——许多人在没看电影之前就将其定性为旨在破坏西方文化的“心理战”。一位X用户甚至抨击诺兰是“西方世界”的敌人。

Even the nearly unanimous good reviews (The Odyssey currently holds a 96 percent Critic’s Score on Rotten Tomatoes) were seen as part of a “woke conspiracy.” These self-appointed Odyssey haters conspired to downvote the movie’s trailers and generally campaign against seeing the movie. 即便是近乎一致的好评（《奥德赛》目前在烂番茄上的影评人新鲜度为96%）也被视为“觉醒派阴谋”的一部分。这些自封的“奥德赛黑粉”串通一气，给电影预告片刷差评，并大肆宣传抵制观看。

But there was no sabotage at the King of Prussia Regal Cinema. The local power grid map shows dozens of similar outages across the region, attributable to recent bouts of extreme weather. And I was told this cinema, specifically, had been suffering from outages in recent weeks. 但普鲁士王城Regal影院的停电并非蓄意破坏。当地电网地图显示，该地区发生了数十起类似的停电事故，均归因于近期频繁的极端天气。而且据我所知，这家影院近几周确实一直饱受停电困扰。

Bracketing a few hundred early-morning soldiers of cinema turned away from a multiplex, and a few thousands dollars in lost revenue for the theater, the boycott against The Odyssey is shaping up to be a tremendous failure. Early ticket sales—including IMAX screenings sold out across the country—are indicating a $200 million worldwide box office return. This would make it the most profitable opening for any of Christopher Nolan’s movies that don’t feature the character Batman. Resale markets have seen tickets fetching $1,000—for a movie! It wouldn’t be shocking if The Odyssey clears a billion dollars, globally, when all is said and done. 撇开几百名清晨被拒之门外的影迷和影院损失的几千美元收入不谈，针对《奥德赛》的抵制运动正演变成一场彻头彻尾的闹剧。早期的门票销售情况——包括全国范围内售罄的IMAX场次——预示着全球票房将达到2亿美元。这将使其成为克里斯托弗·诺兰非蝙蝠侠系列电影中开画成绩最亮眼的一部。在二手转卖市场上，一张电影票甚至被炒到了1000美元！如果《奥德赛》最终全球票房突破10亿美元，我也不会感到惊讶。

People are booking off work to see the movie. Die-hards are crossing state lines, and national borders, to see the movie on the biggest screens possible. A story circulated earlier this week of a California woman who delayed her pregnancy so as not to spoil the chance of seeing the movie, opening weekend, on IMAX 70-mm. I myself traveled about an hour-and-change round-trip only to not see it. 人们纷纷请假去看电影。死忠粉们跨越州界甚至国界，只为在最大的银幕上观看此片。本周早些时候流传着一个故事：一位加州女性为了不错过首映周末的70毫米IMAX观影机会，甚至推迟了怀孕计划。而我自己往返奔波了一个多小时，结果却没看成。

The disjoint between the anti-Odyssey backlash and the film’s actual, organic fandom is revealing. Despite the best efforts by some of the world’s worst people, you just can’t quell the basic human desire to see big-name actors on enormous screens, battling enormous monsters and bedding down with witches. You can downvote a trailer. But you cannot downvote the dreams of the larger moviegoing public. 反《奥德赛》的抵制浪潮与电影实际拥有的自发粉丝群体之间的脱节，揭示了一个事实：尽管世界上最糟糕的一群人竭尽全力，你依然无法压制人类观看大牌明星在巨幕上与怪兽搏斗、与女巫共枕的原始渴望。你可以给预告片点踩，但你无法给广大影迷的梦想点踩。

It speaks to just how cavernous the chasm is between certain elements of The Discourse and reality itself. Maybe they should have picked a more modest target to derail, and not a filmmaker whose movies, whatever one thinks of them, are pretty much synonymous with “making money.” 这充分说明了某些“舆论圈”与现实世界之间的鸿沟有多么巨大。也许他们应该选一个更容易对付的目标，而不是去挑战一位导演——无论人们对他评价如何，他的电影几乎就是“票房保证”的代名词。

So much of this culture war jockeying exists purely online, to sustain an infrastructure of monetized outrage that is increasingly preoccupied with Western chauvinism, racism, and just plain antisocial weirdness. It reminds me of a favorite Simpsons joke, where Marge bakes Homer (the other one) a fake cake to ruin so that he won’t destroy Maggie’s real birthday cake. X is the fake cake. 这种文化战争的博弈大多只存在于网络上，旨在维持一种货币化的愤怒机制，而这种机制正日益沉迷于西方沙文主义、种族主义以及纯粹的反社会怪癖。这让我想起《辛普森一家》中我最喜欢的一个桥段：玛姬烤了一个假蛋糕让荷马（另一个荷马）去破坏，这样他就不会毁掉玛姬真正的生日蛋糕了。X平台就是那个假蛋糕。

All is not lost for the anti-Nolanites, however. Earlier week, it was announced that AI film studio Fountain 0 is releasing a completely AI-generated Odyssey movie, to cash-in on both the excitement around Nolan’s movie and the backlash. 不过，反诺兰派也并非一无所有。本周早些时候，AI电影工作室Fountain 0宣布将发布一部完全由AI生成的《奥德赛》电影，意图同时蹭上诺兰电影的热度和抵制运动的流量。

It feels like a concession to the haters. Real movie fans can have a real, three-hour IMAX action blockbuster. The armchair defenders of Western civilization can hate on Nolan and get their Odyssey fix with some rushed-to-streaming AI slop—a rare chance for them to have their fake cake and eat it too. 这感觉像是对黑粉们的一种妥协。真正的影迷可以享受三个小时的IMAX动作大片，而那些坐在扶手椅上捍卫西方文明的键盘侠们，则可以一边痛恨诺兰，一边通过流媒体观看粗制滥造的AI垃圾来满足他们对《奥德赛》的执念——这倒是让他们既能拥有假蛋糕，又能吃掉它的难得机会。