It's a weird time to be a Classicist and a known Cinephile because I keep getting asked if I've seen The Odyssey, have I seen it yet, what do I think of it, etc etc to which the answer is, of course, no. No I haven't seen it. I don't want to see it. It brings together two things I collectively dislike: Christopher Nolan and the Odyssey. I don't like Christopher Nolan! I think he makes very technically accomplished, emotionally empty movies. Like Denis Villeneuve he creates these incredible visual spectacles that leave me completely cold because his character work is dreadful. (Actually, Nolan's worse than Villeneuve because Villeneuve doesn't think 'shit sound design' needs to be defend as an aesthetic choice in a movie that cost half a billion dollars.) Nolan movies are consistently, unpleasantly misogynistic, or at least callously indifferent to female interiority: he treats his female characters as disposable where he doesn't just erase them entirely, and he has a Portentous Cinema streak I find wearying. (This is, after all, the man who made a big deal of how he was a pioneer in using special Black and White IMAX film stock so that half of Oppenheimer was black and white because that's Serious Cinema... but who did not once tailor his cinematography, set design, or direction to play to any of black and white's strengths, leaving all the B&W scenes to look not much different than had he shot it in colour and just slapped a filter on it in post.) In many ways he's a very skilled director of vista and scale, but his movies are glum and soulless because he's not a man who has really anything of substance to say—or rather the things he has to say are tired masculine bromides of the sort so common in cinema as to be generic. Three Batman movies about stoic manpain. An Oppenheimer movie so myopic and hagiographic about a troubled mangenius you'd be forgiven for walking out thinking Robert Oppenheimer personally invented the atomic bomb, and that the biggest tragedy of its use was that it made a tortured genius feel sad. A Superman movie (he has producing and story credit on Man of Steel) that saddled us with a second decade of brooding men crushed by the weight of being cool superheroes (and the constantly crying women who love them.)
If Michael Bay could frame a shot he'd just be Christopher Nolan. Hell, in some respects Nolan's just Zack Snyder with better cultural cachet. Philosophically there's not nearly as much difference between the three of them as pop culture imagines there to be—Michael Bay wishes he could reduce his female characters to silent, naked nonentities like Nolan got away with in Oppenheimer. Michael, you should have shot Revenge of the Fallen in black and white - that would have made it art and you could have had Megan Fox be as silent and naked as you like! (And frankly a pair of giant robo-testicles would improve most Nolan movies). Meanwhile, on the other side of the scale, I don't like The Odyssey. I don't even like Greek myth much, I never have, it is not why I studied Classics. (Greek mythology is mostly a series of plodding, all-too-human assholes squabbling over touchy prerogative you want interesting mythology, look the Egyptians, dive into the Mayans, go for something hasn't been mined completely empty by the Western World since the Macedonian Wars.) Anyways if we're talking Greek Poetry, if we're talking Homer, I much prefer The Illiad: give me haughty Achilles' cruel disdain and the tragedy of the genuinely noble Hector over Odysseus' decade of blundering incompetence any day. Even by the rather morally dubious standards of Greek heroism (whose focus was rarely on things like 'making the world better), Odysseus is a buffoon — he's a bad husband, a bad lover, a bad captain, a fucking abysmal navigator, and a shitty dog owner. And he helped murder Iphigenia to boot, honestly one of the most loathsome moments in all the Greek canon. Virgil had the right of it: the guy sucks. So of course Nolan and The Odyssey are a perfect fit — there's a reason Nolan's adapting the Western World's ur-text of blundering manpain[1] and not anything by, say, the Greek Dramatists, since its much easier to reduce the women in The Odyssey than it would be with, say Antigone or Lysistrata (though I would be morbidly curious to see Nolan brooding manpain his way through The Bacchæ.) And, of course, I don't want to see it! The right wing chud pushback over Nolan making The Odyssey woke is nothing but their usual clownery for a writer-director whose politics are somewhere slightly to the right of Don Draper. Nor is Nolan's utterly humourless sensibilities at all an interesting fit for a story about a scoundrel: another po-faced, portentous, and visual sumptuous Nolan flick where under all the buzz are a bunch of articles by experts going 'he cut all the women out again'? No thank you. I'll pass. ... but if anyone gives a Nolan-sized budget to a film adapting those medieval stories where Alexander the Great's mom fucks a dragon, call me. That sounds like a movie worth my time. [1] 'Well actually The Epic of Gilgamesh is the ur-text of blundering manpain—' let me stop you right there, chief. While an older text by far, it fell into obscurity and was lost by the time of the Classical Greeks, its influence—if any—diluted by intervening works. It was not rediscovered until the late 19th century, while The Odyssey has, in a manner of speaking, never been out of print.
