freedelusionshere

And do the whole IMAX thing to prove you can put butts in seats after what Coogler did with Sinners and actually educated people about how films are made?

And Nolan wrote the film and the dialogue is so bad. Sound editing also shit (not just my solo opinion critics have said the same thing).

Which makes sense, because her translation made the work more accessible to a lot of people, including myself.

That translation paints Odysseus as extremely morally complex and he was always an unreliable narrator in every translation.

But then Nolan casting Matt Damon made me go hmm. Because Matt Damon doesn’t really play morally ambiguous anymore like he did way back when with Tom Ripley.

(In contrast, Jon Bernthal was cast as Menelaus and of course was always going to play him as an absolutely terrifying and uncomfortable person.)

Nolan’s The Odyssey plays out like many Oscar winning or nominated films over the years by white directors about the Vietnam war where men return home after having seen and participated in terrible things during war as strangers now in their homeland.

To the point where I question now how helpful it is folding The Odyssey into a part of this ongoing American myth about ourselves that we were a generous and hospitable country once. (Marvel didn’t even dare to pretend this, btw.)

When that generosity has always been undeniably selective about who it was extended to, and European settlers were not even the original inhabitants of this continent.

By contrast to modern American imperialist wars, Troy and Ithaca were not that far apart (565 nautical miles or roughly six days by ship), but it took 10 years for Odysseus to get home for a reason.

Nolan’s film hints at the horrors of imperialism, of course, and makes the person leading the war, Agamemnon, silent and visually imposing to be a catch-all for war in the place of the god of War in the original work.

Nolan’s film is really, of course, talking about civil war and the U.S. being at war with itself.

The Trojan War takes place well before the founding of the Roman Empire, and I think this is what Nolan’s film is mostly pointing to and concerned about.

Much like Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which was also suggesting the same exact thing, with Russell Crowe’s noble and clever general who just wanted to return home from his insane Caesar’s imperialist wars to his agrarian estate and his family (which had slaves) and “not do politics”.

These are both similar depictions of colonialist fantasies in historical settings where white men are depicted as the “salt of the earth” but also! clever intellectuals who have been corrupted and conscripted by imperialism and politics against their will (this is also a prevalent view of the Founding Fathers in the U.S. that is being heavily pushed right now while they actively erase competing narratives about genocide and slavery).

Hawthorne’s Last of the Mohicans is the same thing, presenting purist narratives about the founding of the U.S. from a white male perspective (At least Michael Mann had the guts in his film version to admit what white settlers and The British Empire were actually all about.)

All this to say, this isn’t a new or particularly inventive interpretation of The Odyssey being presented by Nolan.

He continues to never know how to write women in any of his films and they all kind of fall into the Ayn Rand model as being necessary to make men act and not having any interiority or their own real stuff going on.

He had a chance to do that here in a big way and he doubled down on the Ayn Rand side of things so that’s what he’s about at this point until he proves otherwise.

“And who will stop it? I am the answer!”

This is a great interview.