I know it’s only appreciated when I really hate a movie, but I liked Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Sorry.
Hey friends —
Before I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey this weekend, I did my research. Not by reading the Odyssey, which I’d read in translation in high school, but by looking up what some of the most ludicrous characters on the internet were saying. So here’s Matt Walsh:
Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is “the most beautiful woman in the world.” But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave “the most beautiful woman” role to a white woman. Nolan is technically talented but a coward. Too afraid to do anything that even slightly challenges the spirit of the age.
There is a lot of concern about the casting. Lupita Nyong’o gets a lot of hate, because she’s black, but I’m sorry, Matt, she is a beautiful woman. I wouldn’t say she’s the most beautiful, but that’s because I’m already married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and that’s an assessment based on opinion. What counts is how well she acts, and one of the most memorable moments in the movie is when Agamemnon returns from the war and Clytemnestra reacts with rage and murders him in his bed. Sweet justice!
A lot of anger online is focused on that they dared to cast a black woman in the role of the most beautiful woman in the world. It’s very silly. There are no contemporary images of Helen of Troy, so they’re just projecting their imagined view of what she must have looked like. I don’t know, she was an Eastern Mediterranean woman, there’s a wide range of ethnicities there, and I am willing to embrace any actor who does a good job with the role.
Another element that sparked furious hatred is that Elliott Page exists and was given a role in the movie. They didn’t even know what role he had! Just the fact that a trans man was in the movie made the right-wing trolls upset. He was actually very good in a heart-wrenching role.
I should mention that there is a lot of cope about those actors, saying that Page and Nyong’o only had small roles. There are no small roles in this movie! There may be brief roles, but every speaking role is intense and memorable, and Nyong’o and Page hit hard.
The destruction of the Odyssey by Nolan and the Left isn’t just about a movie.
It’s about Western Civilization.
The Greeks were its foundation.
From Democracy to Art to Philosophy to Culture.
The Left wants to destroy Western Civilization and everything that helped create it.
Despite all the warnings that this was a WOKE movie and that its goal was nothing less than the destruction of western civilization, I went to see it. I had to, I was the volunteer projectionist.
I was prepared beforehand by these defenders of truth, justice, and the American way. I left the movie 3 hours later with one word to summarize it all.
EPIC.
I will give them that this was not Homer’s Odyssey. It’s Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and he did add a lot to it. Yeah, the armor and the ships were not period accurate, and Elliot Page’s character was not from the Odyssey, but the Aenid, and he gave woman characters much more of a voice than Homer did, and Odysseus was a much more conflicted character, but that’s OK. The Odyssey was the product of a long oral tradition, created by artists who would have elaborated on and shaped the story to reflect their contemporary concerns, so Christopher Nolan is just fulfilling a long respectable tradition. He sings a story of wily Odysseus that emphasizes the horror of war, the pain of regret, and makes Odysseus a tortured hero who just wants go home and feels remorse for his actions. He still possesses elements of a modern action hero — there are multiple fight scenes in which he rips apart mobs of bad guys — but he also grieves deeply for his dead friends.
A welcome addition is the fleshing out of the women’s stories. Helen is bitter and scarred, resentful of her status as a pawn and a trophy. I already mentioned Clytemnestra and her righteous vengeance. One scene that made me sit up and pay attention was when Telemachus goes to his mother Penelope and tells her the country needs a king, and she rears up in fury and reminds him that she has governed for 20 long years, and yet her work is counted less than the the stubble growing on his chin.
So yeah, those critics were totally right in their condemnation of a movie they hadn’t seen: it was promoting modern Western values and was in direct opposition to the world of Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, the regressive idiots at the Daily Wire and Fox News, and all the rot their kind have inserted into our evolving civilization. I hope more people watch it and are inspired to tear down the poisonous version of western culture that is currently ascendant.
I don’t judge movies based on their box office, but apparently the Odyssey is doing gangbusters in that department. I couldn’t see it in my experience: we’re coming off three weeks of kids movies, Minions and Moana, that aren’t great art, but do pack the theater with families. Attendance at the Odyssey was very good, but it doesn’t compare to a family movie that brings in a mom, a dad, and 3 or 4 kids. Do not bring your children to this movie! It has long contemplative moments, it has bloody battle scenes, and it has monsters. Apparently, the eastern Mediterranean was an archipelago stuffed full of cannibals, one-eyed giants, and sorceresses.
I’m looking forward to being the projectionist again on Thursday, and since it’s going to run for a while, I’ll probably be there the week after as well. I’m going to see it at least 3 times! I’m not complaining, though — this movie can hold up under repeated viewings. Everyone should see it a couple of times, if for no other reason than that it will make Elon Musk mad.
All right, that’s all I have to say. It’s an epic movie with real depth. Make more, please. Not remakes and not franchises, make more movies that are this deep and complex.
Speaking of deep and complex, I’m going to end this with some video of my back yard, which has turned into an overgrown jungle full of insects and spiders. I’m loving it.
Epic! I’m talking about the backyard.
(Same comment on YouTube.)
Right now I’m working on one of these awful neural networks. Perhaps you’re going to have a positive opinion on that too? If it works, it will recognise a number somewhat better than other models.
The idea is to tell it to recognise certain images as CLEARLY NOT A NUMBER (such as white noise or regular patterns). The goal is then a uniform distro in the output. We’ll see how well it does.
Without AI, I couldn’t learn to classify the local flora at all. Nonetheless I do believe that the bubble will burst, which means tons of cheap hardware :-DDD
That being said, I thought that there are quite a few contemporary Greeks whose story is worth telling. Consider for example Iannis Xenakis, the composer and architect (given his own statements and Le Corbusier’s history of misappropriating designs, it seems clear that Xenakis designed, for instance, the monastery of La Tourette by himself). He first fought the Nazis, then the monarchy and ended up in France, where he studied with Messiaen.
The upside is: He’s not conflicted, he’s a real hero. AND he was a mathematician.
Am I the only person finding it hysterically funny that the homophobes are up in arms about a movie about ancient Greeks being “woke”.
By the way, do you have some of our flora in the US? From the blurry motion picture, I’d guess at a few silenes, a bit of hypericum and perhaps even verbascum in the background. But of course, these are only the best matches to what’s around here in Germany.
andywuk @3: That’s because their idea of Ancient Greece comes from 300, which definitely is not full of homoerotic imagery.
Matt Walsh’s racism is obvious; he thinks the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’ must be white. He doesn’t name names though. I guess Aishwarya Rai, Zendaya and Tyra Banks wouldn’t even get in the door.
Long time since I’ve seen a movie based on ancient Greek history. Sounds like it’ll have to go some to top Jason and the Argonauts with the Ray Harryhausen stop-frame animations, though. I can still remember being spooked by the sight of those skeletal warriors emerging out of the ground and the statue of Talos coming to life,
I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m not sure when I might get the chance, but I probably ought to since I’ll be teaching the Odyssey again next year. I have seen Mary Beard’s next-day reaction on her podcast (she was at the world premiere, as she should be at all world premieres), and I’ve read things about the film. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m a nerdy classicist who will talk at length about these things until someone barges in to stop me.
First of all, they should have cast Elliot Page as Achilles. When I first heard the rumour that they had I was very impressed by some highly classically aware casting. It’s not in the Odyssey, but the surrounding epic cycle tells the story of how Achilles tried to hide on the island of Skyros when Agamemnon was calling in favours to build his Greek army, disguised as one of the king’s daughters. Odysseus, being chief underhand tricks officer, was sent to get him back, which he did by pretending to be a traveling pedlar and spreading his wares out in front of the king’s daughters – a mixture of jewellery, homewares and weapons. He then got an accomplice to blow a warning horn and pretend they were under attack, at which point Achilles’ intrinsic masculine drive kicked in, he grabbed a spear and ran off to fight, revealing who he was. Achilles was a man pretending to be a woman, whose inner masculinity shone out in the end – I don’t think a cis actor could do that justice, and want trans men playing all versions of Achilles from now on.
Also, as you say, Sinon was not in the original Odyssey – our only substantial version of the character is from book II of Vergil’s Aeneid. And he was not a positive character – he was a shameless liar and deceiver who was unafraid to mouth the worst impieties to back up his cover story and get the Trojan Horse into Troy. Admittedly his character in the Aeneid is outlined in a story that Aeneas is telling Dido, and hence is probably a very biased account (Aeneas wasn’t even present when the Trojans found Sinon!).
As for the female characters getting more of a voice than in the Odyssey – they actually get quite a lot of voice in the Odyssey. I hear Christopjher Nolan has cut out the entire Phaeacian episode (hence removing two great female characters in Nausicaa and Arete) and radically changed the relationship between Odysseus and Calypso. But Helen gets to be impactful, mysterious, commanding and morally ambiguous in her dazzling appearance in Book IV, and Penelope appears almost as much as Odysseus in books XIX-XXI and XIII – certainly much more than Telemachus does. It seems Nolan has deliberately made Penelope more commanding and self-assured in her early appearances – she gets that way by the end, but in Book I Telemachus famously sends her away upstairs when she asks the bard to play something a little less sad, saying that speech is men’s business, and his most of all as master of the house.
I grumbled a little at “the Eastern Mediterranean was full of cannibals, one-eyed giants and sorceresses”. A lot of people assume the landscape of Odysseus’s travels is supposed to be the Mediterranean (this goes back to the ancients themselves, with Vergil mapping the peoples Odysseus meets onto real world geography), but the language of the original is difficult to reconcile with this. After his visit to Ismarus in Book IX Odysseus rounds Cape Malea (the southernmost point of Greece) and is thrown off course by a storm for nine days, after which the encounters with strange monsters, goddesses and unknown peoples begin. At the beginning of Book XIII his Phaeacian hosts, keen to see him home, joke that they can get him back in a single night, even if he lives somewhere at the other end of the world – like Euboea! (central Greece). Their magic ship does just that, taking him back home in a deep sleep without the aid of sail or oar, as fast as a sea bird or thought itself. It seems much more likely that these stories (and they are told in first person by Odysseus to his hosts, so they are in the register of tall travellers’ tales) are set in a fantastical otherworld, in deliberate distinction to the real Greek setting of the first four books (the Telemachy) and second half of the poem when he returns to Ithaca. Indeed, one of the main themes of this tetrad of books is an exploration of what it means to be human, civilised, and Greek – what are the boundaries? What do human, civilised Greeks eat? Animal meat and bread – subhuman vegetarian Lotus-Eaters who behave like grazing animals and human-eating Cyclopes and Laestrygonians don’t count (though the latter do have some elements of civilised behaviour, like pastoral farming, families, cities, political assembiles, etc).
Ultimately, though, this isn’t history. It’s myth. And it’s myth told in the form of oral epic poetry. There probably wasn’t one “Homer” at all, but a tradition of bards (aiodoi) passing down their best stories, their best lines and formulas, their best similes and epithets and ring compositions, over many generations – possibly for hundreds or thousands of years. People complain that the armour and architecture and setting doesn’t look “period accurate” – but what period would that be? The poems as we have them were composed at the beginning of the Archaic age, about 750BC. The geography of the Greek world in it suggests Mycenaean Bronze Age – somewhere between 1600 and 1000BC. There was editing and compiling and preservation into the early Classical age, by about 500BC, and both the Iliad and Odyssey are consciously backward-looking, evoking an age where men were larger than life compared to today. So should it look Mycenaean or Dark Age or Archaic or Classical? The wargear is all over the place – greaves with tower shields, figure-eight shields and round shields at the same time, bronze and iron used together, chariots everywhere, temples when the Mycenaeans had no temples, palaces that look more like large dark-age farmhouses (Odysseus’s “palace” is far less Knossos or Mycenae or Tirins than middle of nowhere). Even the language of the Homeric epics is a mishmash art-language with dialect forms from different ethnic groups and periods all interleaved together – it’s a palimpsest of a composition, it doesn’t HAVE a specific historical period it’s referencing!
drdr….. @4
Neither hypericum (world wide) nor verbascum (Europe and Asia) are German.
I’d been ignoring the movie, thus did not know that Helen is played by a Black actor. Now I understand this column better: https://dgardner.substack.com/p/an-outrage-against-the-people-of
Bravo, Cartomancer!
I appreciated your lengthy and enlightening comment.
I tried to convey many of the same concepts to my students when I was teaching, but you did it much better than I ever did.
A study of The Aeneid was a major part of the Latin IV AP class that I taught, but I also asked my students to read an English translation of the Odyssey so that they would be comfortable discussing, comparing and contrasting the two major epics.
Not seen this yet. I really liked Epic: The Musical, adapting The Odyssey. Initially a concept album. Various artists made animatics (low-fps storyboard visuals).
HoldUpKnight – Full animatics movie w/subs (2h24m)
* The Scylla artist made her an eel hydra, wearing her old human face as a hat.
* Lotta good comments therein, too.
* Easter Egg: Lyrics went from 600 men to 43, then tallied 558 losses, eliding Elpenor.
@ 10
The outrage is coming from inside the house.
I liked the movie, but not as much as our host (or most other reviewers). I just didn’t emotionally connect with most of the characters — crucially, not Odysseus or Penelope, the two main characters. I liked several of Christopher Nolan’s other movies better. It was still a fun three hours at the theater, but I’m awfully glad I didn’t, like, fly to London as some fans did.
Nolan definitely strayed from the true spirit and form of the original Odyssey. Really, I’m outraged. Rather than make a feature motion picture, he should have memorized the story, line by line, and embarked on a tour of American cities, getting up on stage and reciting the entire saga for what I’m sure would have been spellbound audiences.
Really, the only way to stay true to the original.
Bye-bye, sinuousrills.
Now this is disrespect for source material.
Wikipedia – Troy
Smithsonian – the man who ‘discovered’—and nearly destroyed—Troy
Wikipedia – Schliemann’s Trench
The Ancient World podcast – The man who sold Troy (31:16)
i will go see The Odyssey this weekend. even though it, like Shakespeare’s work, is better in the original Klingon.
@18
FIFY
I just read of research indicating that Ithaka may not even have been an island in Homeric times.
Not my original observation, but…
Saving Private Ryan
Interstellar
The Martian
The Odyssey
We keep spending millions getting Matt Damon back home. Maybe we should just keep him under house arrest.
Reginald Selkirk @20: Thanks, the UN agreed to change the name in June 2022. That Smithsonian article was published a month prior, as the request was submitted to the UN. Erdoğan had ordered expanded official usage in 2021.
The Conversation (a USian linguistics prof) – Why does Turkey want other countries to start spelling its name ‘Türkiye’?
Reginald Selkirk @20: I’m sure enlightened Frenchpersons are correcting their compatriots with ‘Ce n’est pas ‘Angleterre’, c’est ‘England”.
Sky Captain @23 quoting theconversation.com:
Fixed that for them.
Well, it is almost impossible to render the “Odissey” faithfully in cinema, unless in several motion pictures.
But (and this isn’t abotu the new film inspired in the “Odissey”, because i didn’t see that yet) i always find ridiculous when, in a film, the original story is so modified, the original characters so diferent in key aspects, that seems, more than an hommage or different interpretation of an old story, a new story (quite often, a horrible new story) that uses the fame of the original story to atract viewers and money.
I enjoy a good Nolan flick, but will likely wait til The Odyssey is streaming. I would expect it to be more Nolanized than Homerized. Here’s a bit of prewatch critique from another angle, basically saying how Ancient Greece has been laundered by more modern sensibilities, the we can’t handle the Greeks and…well…that they were super gay:
Maybe not the sort of take Elon Musk would want to hear.
Eliott Page was in Inception and did a great job in that, so why wouldn’t Nolan put him in The Odyssey? Damon was in Interstellar. If anything I would worry Damon might be too wooden.
Based on a previous installment of PZ’s movie takes, I got around to watching Backrooms. Very good IMO.
I also watched Obsession. Quite offputting. One scene in particular put me on the verge of puking. I had to wait until the next day to finish it. Not quite my cup of tea (or sandwich 🤢🤮 )
Riling the Marcus Aurelias avatar bearing dipshits was probably the most predictable thing about this production. That schtick remains outrage proof and retains its bilious aftertaste but damn is it stale.
I enjoyed it more than expected. I’ve no idea how well it adheres to the myths it draws from but as a statement in itself, the film was solid and beautifully shot. Odd as it is to say about a 3 hour film, it felt for stretches like a speed run of Greek mythology’s greatest hits. There were tragic undercurrents to each encounter that might have benefited from deeper exploration, though it would probably have wound up with a two parter and I’ve had more than my fill of those. A single film has a momentum that an artificially cleaved half story lacks, so the trade-off is probably worth it, but I’ll be there for the five hour directors cut should it eventuate.
I too have read reviews.
Best as I can tell, it’s a typical Hollywood movie.
I’ll touch only one aspect (thus leaving aside historical and narrative etc):
Casting:
(https://www.britannica.com/art/Controversies-About-Christopher-Nolans-The-Odyssey-Explained)
Reaction. A meme sums it up:
(https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinephiles/comments/1uzs8om/does_historical_accuracy_actually_matter_in/)
John Morales @29
Good points about representation. Funny thing is that in that Damon Walter video I just posted upthread he makes the point that a partly Kenyan character in a Greek myth would not be quite near the stretch of a Scots-Finnish character. So Damon was the miscast one perhaps?
As for Mel Gibson he was a decent director (eg We Were Soldiers) who went astray on The Passion and in his personal life trainwreck. And guess what?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Resurrection_of_the_Christ:_Part_One
Why did we need this? I guess Jim Caviezel aged out of the role of Jesus.
I liked Jim Caviezel in other stuff but IRL he’s batshit too. One movie Gibson made more recently Fatman should be a Christmas classic though. I kinda enjoyed it.
I can’t think of much Nolan has done as offputting on camera or off as Gibson’s Passion or well known meltdowns.
I like Nolan’s movies (that I’ve seen), though there are fair criticisms to be made (see Damon Walter above).
Gibson is a hot mess. He is a visionary, but some of those more grotesque visions, such as The Passion snuff film should have been left well alone.
Hemidactylus, not my meme. But illustrative of artistic/ideological commitment to original sources over moneymaking.
And reiterates the one aspect I noted.
Wikipedia sez: “The dialogue is entirely in reconstructed Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin. Although Gibson was initially against it, the film is subtitled.”
At the end of your video I see a lot of of invasive Perennial Sowthistle (Sonchus arvensis), they’re the tall dandelion-like flowers. I recommend removing the ripening flowers and dispose of them in the garbage before they ripen and the seeds blow away to colonize more areas. Pulling the plants by the roots will help slow their spread otherwise they will take over your yard. It is good for pollinators for a short time but that’s all it’s good for, and it takes up a lot of space and resources that other plants that benefit native invertebrates and birds more could use. A good native replacement for Perennial Sowthistle is False Sunflower (Heliopsis helianthoides). I notice Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense) in your yard too, it is non native and invasive, but a lot of pollinators and insects and birds utilize it so i see it as being desirable if you want to attract and feed insects. I see a gall on the thistle that is likely from an introduced Thistle Gall Fly (Urophora cardui), they are good spider food. I see Creeping Bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) another invasive non native that is good for some pollinators but not much else, i recommend keeping it in check so it doesnt spread further. Other non native plants in your video include Ground Ivy AKA Creeping Charlie (Glechoma hederacea) and Prickly Lettuce (Lactuca serriola).
If you haven’t, don’t go to see “Odyssey”. Much of it was apparently filmed in Western Sahara, illegally occupied by Morocco, which has been systematically persecuting the local inhabitants. Almost as bad as filming it in Gaza or Crimea.
@ ^
So if I don’t go see it this alleged filming will be magically unfilmed? I mean, this filming is a historical event right?
“Don’t watch the Babykillers movie, it was made by filming babies being killed using equipment entirely powered by burning live puppies and kittens”
Silentbob: “So if I don’t go and see this, the babies will be magically resurrected?”
Wait – PZ liked a movie? Without any spiders?
I was undecided. First I heard reviews were good so wanted so see it. Then I heard Odysseus is nothing like Odysseus the prideful trickster, so that put me off. But if even PZ likes it? Wow, that’s a high bar. Guess I’m going. X-D
P.S. It may be different in Minnesota (out there on the edge of the prairie) but in Australia you would have a yard full of rodents and therefore snakes. Fine if you’re into that sort of thing but you would never let a youngster like Knut anywhere near it, if you valued their life.
Expanding upon KG @33.
Movie-Locations – The Odyssey (2026)
The Guardian – Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey used occupied land as a film set
Wikipedia – Western Sahara conflict
Gizmodo: Right-Wing Haters Try to Stop the Steal as ‘Woke’ Odyssey Conquers Global Box Office
Reginald: Sounds like those racists are trying to pretend this movie is no more “real” than their own overhyped flop “The Sound of Freedom.”
I echo the appreciation for Cartomancer’s lengthy comment. While I enjoyed the film, FWIW I missed the language used by many translations of the Odyssy – for me the story makes sense most when embedded in poetry & cadence – I’ve read the Odyssey a few times in my years (mid-70s now). [I took 5 years of Latin in middle & high school in the 60’s and my senior year we concentrated on The Aeneid]. It probably didn’t help my appreciation of Nolan’s movie that there were so many familiar faces amongst the actors that in my mind I was bounced out of the experience with echos of other movies: the previews we viewed beforehand featured Zendaya & Holland (Dune & Spiderman upcoming releases) & of course Bourne, Black Panther, Yesterday, Prada, Twilight, Chef, Old Guard. Great to see so many familiar faces, but for me it kept happening.
I felt the same thing! Throughout Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I was mentally referring to Matt Damon’s Odysseus, Ann Hathaway’s Penelope, Zendaya’s Athena, etc. It also took me out of the movie.
So if I don’t go see it this alleged filming will be magically unfilmed? – Silentbob@34
There’s nothing “alleged” about the filming in Western Sahara.
So, if making the film had involved, say, the slaughter of a few thousand people, you’d still be happy to go and see it? Well, I guess you probably would, because not doing so would not make those people alive again.
Hemidactylus @27 – I have to say this is one commentator who’s closest to my own take on Nolan in general. There’s a line right at the beginning – “his films are clever, like a sudoku” that I’m definitely going to wind up stealing. Overall, he’s just frustratingly safe – his Dark Knight leads with stories about political discontents and Occupy Wall Street but utterly fails to engage with them, Dunkirk takes the heroism and savagery of war and turns it into a sliding-block puzzle, Inception tries to jam the fluid chaos of the dreaming mind into a flowchart and a business plan… Nolan’s very good at spectacle and I can’t fault him as a cinematographer, but as a storyteller he’s a goddam vacuum.
I saw the movie on Tuesday and thought it was excellent. It is not Homer, and its great strength is that it does not really try to be Homer. We don’t sit around campfires listening to blind poets recite. Nolan took a huge gamble, picking bits and pieces of a legend that has been around for thousands of years, cobbling them together and presenting a great tale. Which is what it always was. The Odyssey is a wilder epic than The Iliad
In 1966 I could read Homer in the original (I started Latin in 1956 when I was 7 and ancient Greek a couple of years later). I loved Homer, for his stories and indeed his language, absolutely including the fact that even the great Liddell and Scott occasionally had to admit they were guessing what a word found only once in Homer actually meant. Said I at 16, he’s as good as Dylan. And Shakespeare.
He used a specific translation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey_(Emily_Wilson_translation)
Matt Damon’s The Odyssey stunt double is B.C. woman with ‘the greatest arms’ he’s ever seen