How 'bout a li'l fire, scarecrow?

Okay. For my money, the entire thesis of Chris Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey is that society chokes and sputters and dies when we abuse, ignore, or violate social norms like the laws of hospitality. That is not really what The Odyssey (the book/poem) is about, but I can clearly see why in the horror that is the 2020s, someone could read The Odyssey and go oh my god that’s a lot of bad dropping in. That’s a lot of bad visits. That’s a clear vision of how the loss of social norms and cohesion fucks you up and how war, literal, brutal war, is a terrible wound that destroys your humanity and your understanding of what civilization and society is. I don’t know that the iteration of Greek society that ultimately birthed the poem would agree with Nolan’s take, but I think this movie is quite ideologically coherent, that Nolan knew exactly what he was trying to say with each and every adaptational change, and I think he wasn’t nuts for using one of the most famous classical western civilization works as a way to make that argument.

THIS.

Yeah I think his stance is fundamentally legitimate and it's totally fair to want to draw your inspiration from such a major work, especially one that is so ancient that, fundamentally, it has no "canonical" version in the modern sense. My only grievance is that Nolan didn't make his intentions clear. The movie was faithful enough to the poem to look like an adaptation while simultaneously betraying - for lack of a better word - the spirit of the literary work as we know it. For a film adaptation, the plot was actually pretty much untampered with, but everything felt off. I feel like maybe he should have been a little bolder and openly placed a more significant distance between his work and the literary version(s).

no more kinky pervy asexuals. i'm getting rid of them. no more sweet pure uwu baby asexuals either. we're going back to our roots and becoming heartless unloving killers again #serialkillersummer

It's a good thing that Black Lagoon is set in 1995-1996 because Could You Imagine if Revy had any kind of social media. Half her posts would be Pjackk-esque ramblings made after a few too many shots of Bacardi about her various weird lesbian situationships or how her life sucks and nobody understands her. The other half would read like Chris Pratt's "fat fuck Italian" tweet