Above is Ben Shapiro’s podcast review of the movie conservative commentators and pundits declared woke and offensive long before it was released. Many also circulated false information to support their position, resulting in this Ethics Alarms post from May, which, thanks to a reminder from Ethics Alarms “gotcha!” master Neil Dorr, I returned to yesterday with a correction. All the reviews are out now, and the majority of them are raves, which doesn’t prove anything in my metaphorical book. (“The Crying Game” got raves. “Don’t Look Now!” got raves. “The Substance” got raves.) I do find Shapiro’s review above brave and encouraging, however. He’s a well known conservative activist and commentator and the creator of the Daily Wire, and still pronounced the film to be a) excellent and b) largely conservative in its perspective. Ben gets ethics bonus points for not following the herd.

Tangent: Ben does not get points for his delivery. Cowabunga, how can someone be peddling a podcast without taking the time to learn how to speak distinctly and clearly? Shapiro doesn’t open his mouth sufficiently when he speaks, he places his voice in his sinuses, and he speaks way, way too fast. I could make Ben three times as effective in a two-hour coaching session. Why doesn’t someone tell him? I found listening to his review excruciating.

But I digress. Christopher Nolan is a cult director who is intermittently daring and regarded as an auteur rather than an ideologue. His initially fame flowed from his Batman films, which posed provocative ethics scenarios. Personally, I thought “Dunkirk” was an inexcusable botch of an important historical film topic, and I haven’t forgiven him for it yet. I was still thrilled to learn that he was tackling Homer’s second-best story, however. “The Odyssey” has long been obscured by Virgil’s rip-off starring Odysseus mimic Ulysses along with stop-action films confounding “Odyssey” with the voyages of Sinbad.

Shapiro isn’t the only conservative critic to undermine the Right’s narrative that the movie is more woke propaganda: Christian Toto, the rightish Hollywood critic, also praised the movie. On the other side, several reliably progressive publications have slammed it. TIME’s critic called the movie an “eye-glazing dud of a movie.” The Economist—not that I care what that Eurocentric leftist pseudo-intellectual rag says about anything,  called Nolan’s film “a very silly adaptation of “The Odyssey”, and was particularly annoyed by the imposition of modern attitudes and conduct on the story. Anachronisms bother me too, but they are so frequent in period films that I tend to give them a pass unless they are really intrusive.

I now have enough information to make some ethics calls before I see the film. I have only paid money to see three films in a theater since Grace died, a) because I am in cash-flow hell, b) because I hate seeing movies alone and c) because seeing virtue-signaling Northern Virginia audiences wearing masks makes me crazy. I will see “The Odyssey,” however.

Ethics points: