having feelings about fiction

[John Mulaney voice] THERE IS A DOG LOOSE IN THE ARCHIVES-

That's it?

All those beautiful words to validly tear apart everything else, including how she understands what the Black Best Friend is as a trope, and you weren't willing to say anything else about just how bad Black people were/are treated during production as well as on screen? Potentially on purpose, for attention? As another one of Nolan's critiqueable decisions in this creation process? You recognize the presence of racism in all of this, but weren't willing to even say the word? Just "inevitably deplored". Girl. Understatement.

"Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion."

and

"There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem."

Well, that tracks for a Nolan film -

"The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting."

Yikes -

"If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat."

The lines she calls out in this section will probably make a least a couple of my friends laugh incredulously -

"I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script."

....oh my GOD, EMILY -

"The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt."

I would never do that.

Them

Imagine if this was a human walking in the park and they see another human and they go over to socialise only to see that there is something not quite right with this person.

They move wrong, they speak with the wrong inflections, their hair and skin seem false. Their eyes are dead and unmoving.

It is the puppet of a being with higher intelligence beyond your own understanding, mimicking your humanity for its own amusement.