Historical accuracy is a surprisingly modern idea

“The Odyssey” itself is deeply anachronistic.

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” is dominating the box office, scoring excellent reviews, and spiking sales of the epic poem.

But rather than taking the win for Western civilization, right-wing culture warriors are crying into their soup and Elon Musk is promising to harness the power of artificial intelligence to create a “historically accurate” version of “The Odyssey,” which in his mind seems to mean a specific Old Hollywood aesthetic.

Of course, in that era of epic filmmaking, cross-racial casting generally went in the other direction. “Lawrence of Arabia” is an amazing watch, but to the modern eye it’s funny to see Alec Guinness playing Prince Faisal. As recently as 2014’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” Ridley Scott claimed that if he’d cast “Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such” to play lead Egyptian characters, it would have been impossible to get the movie financed, which is how we got Joel Edgerton as Ramses II.

From where I sit, ultimately the difference is that “Exodus” is incredibly boring, even though it looks cool, while “Lawrence” holds up even though it’s a million years old.

Arguably the more interesting casting choice from Scott’s movie is Christian Bale as Moses. Bale fits very well within a cinematic tradition that looks back to Charlton Heston’s iconic performance as Moses, but he’s not Jewish or Middle Eastern-looking. Unlike Guinness, he’s not doing any kind of exotic accent, and unlike Edgerton, he’s not made up to look “ethnic.” There’s just English Moses shooting the shit with Pharaoh.

And yet, this seems fine to me. It’s a boring movie, but this specific scene isn’t boring, and in terms of “realism,” obviously these characters should be speaking Ancient Egyptian, but that wouldn’t be very fun to watch.

But I think what’s most interesting about the rightists’ opportunistic complaints about “The Odyssey” is that the whole idea of “historical accuracy” is a lot more modern than most people seem to realize.