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00:00:57.240Now that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been released to near-unanimous critical acclaim and significant box office success,
00:01:05.440we've been told that all the criticisms made against the film prior to its release, mostly by conservatives, have been proven baseless, even embarrassing.
00:01:14.120Those who raised concerns about the movie should now hang their heads in shame and crawl before Christopher Nolan on hands and knees,
00:01:20.640begging for forgiveness, offering gifts of supplication like an ancient Greek standing before the shrine of Apollo.
00:01:26.660This has been the basic inclusion of commentators on the left and even a fair number of commentators on the right.
00:01:32.020The wokeness allegations, they say, have been refuted.
00:01:34.980The movie is an artistic triumph, a masterpiece.
00:01:37.920And now it is our job to show that we are culturally in tuned by joining in with the applause or at least ceasing our criticisms.
00:01:44.720That is the general consensus, as you've probably heard.
00:01:48.460And the general consensus is, as the general consensus so often tends to be, wrong.
00:01:53.800Now that I've actually seen the movie, I can definitively say that every single criticism
00:02:00.000from conservatives was entirely correct on every point. We were not only correct in our
00:02:06.580prejudgment, but much more correct than we ever knew. You can judge a book by its cover most of
00:02:13.540the time, and the cover of this one had a gender-confused woman in a man costume and a race-swapped
00:02:19.180Helen of Troy. We judged those to be massive red flags, and turns out we were right. The Odyssey0.99
00:02:26.520is indeed a three-hour-long middle finger to its source material, to Western civilization,
00:02:31.860to white people, to Greeks, to literature, and to moviemaking in general. It contradicts itself
00:02:36.120to the point that every important aspect of the story, from the plot to the theme to the
00:02:39.860characterization, is reduced to incoherence. The dialogue in the rare moments where it's
00:02:44.380even intelligible, is often clunky and heavy-handed and wildly out of place, most of all, the film
00:02:49.880does not feel like a story set in the ancient world. Which is a fatal problem for a film
00:02:56.320set in the ancient world. It barely feels like a film at all, in fact. It has more the feel of a
00:03:01.760rough draft, a V1 that Nolan was contractually obligated to produce, which probably isn't far
00:03:07.620from the truth. Everybody understands that with the rise of streaming services and the glut of
00:03:12.440content all over the internet, movie theater attendance has plummeted. Profit margins in the
00:03:17.320entertainment industry are lower than they've ever been. And at this point, now that Marvel has
00:03:21.860died, at least for now, there are only two reliable ways to fill theaters and generate
00:03:27.480significant profit, at least from the perspective of movie studios. And the first approach is to
00:03:31.540fund an existing IP to include very recently viral meme IPs like Back Rooms. And the second
00:03:37.720approach is to produce an event film by somebody like Christopher Nolan, an epic that has enough
00:03:43.200set pieces and feels big enough that people will be compelled to get off their sofa and pay 20
00:03:48.900bucks to see it. And that's what we have here. Nolan is done making original risky stories that
00:03:54.240might not go over well. The days when he made Memento are over for the simple reason that you
00:03:58.660don't need an IMAX theater to enjoy a film like Memento. You can watch it on your phone and get
00:04:02.840basically the same experience because it's a high concept dialogue driven film with no reliance on
00:04:08.380giant monsters or 20 different A-list actors filling out the cast. Not that there's anything
00:04:13.160wrong with giant monsters, by the way. That's actually one of the only good points of Nolan's
00:04:16.740Odyssey, as we'll discuss. But in any case, with very few exceptions, films like Memento are no
00:04:22.000longer interesting to the big studios or to directors like Nolan. They're only interested
00:04:25.980in green lighting films like this one. So whether you like it or not, that's the economic reality
00:04:30.980of the industry right now, and there's nothing wrong with a film like this one either, by the
00:04:35.660way, at least conceptually. An event film, an epic film based on an ancient foundational story of
00:04:41.580Western civilization, could be, should be, a wonderful thing, which makes the failure of this
00:04:48.080film all the more tragic. Now, to be sure, if any director could withstand those pressures,
00:04:53.720you'd think it would be Nolan. He's about as bankable as a director can possibly be,
00:04:57.600but you have to wonder, especially after the flop that was Tenet, if he's lost his will to do
00:05:03.140anything particularly novel or outside the box. Tenet lost something like $100 million for the
00:05:07.820studio, which was only partially because of COVID. People didn't like the movie for the
00:05:11.840understandable reason that it made no sense. So now after that catastrophe, maybe Nolan is more
00:05:18.420concerned with protecting his image, which is why he's increasingly relying on established stories
00:05:52.160more feminine, less patriotic, more depressing, and of course, less white. Now, I've seen people0.74
00:05:57.260desperately trying to describe this film as path-breaking, awe-inspiring, even transgressive,
00:06:03.140almost as if they're trying to make it true by saying so, but infusing modern liberal values
00:06:08.380into an ancient story is pretty much the least transgressive thing a Hollywood director can do.
00:06:13.080It's utterly cliched and expected, not the slightest bit challenging or interesting or bold.
00:06:18.680Nolan's not interested in telling transgressive stories. He's too afraid. And that's at least
00:06:22.560that's one theory. I mean, you can make up your own, uh, explanations for Nolan's motives,
00:06:27.680whatever the motives are, the end result speaks for itself. And to begin with, yes, this movie was
00:06:33.240just as woke as we thought it would be. The DEI casting in particular is far worse than we knew
00:06:40.120far worse. Nolan's version of ancient Greece is a kind of multiracial utopia. Well, perhaps not0.99
00:06:46.920utopia. Actually, Nolan's ancient Greece is relentlessly drab and dreary and depressing
00:06:51.320and colorless. All the buildings look like ancient ruins, which yes, it makes sense for those0.61
00:06:56.240buildings to look like ancient ruins today, but they would not have all been ancient ruins in
00:07:01.120ancient times. So this is not a utopia, but in Nolan's vision, it is nonetheless absurdly diverse
00:07:06.400and multiracial. Blacks and Asians, Hispanics, somehow all coexisting in the Mediterranean1.00
00:07:12.280in 3,000 years ago. Now, Nolan does not softly coax the audience into the DEI net, easing us
00:07:21.380into it slowly but surely. No, he cranks the diversity meter up to 1,000 from the very first
00:07:27.420frame. The first character we see is the rapper Travis Scott, who somehow manages to turn in a
00:07:33.100bad performance despite appearing on screen for 12 seconds. He got 12 seconds and he completely
00:07:37.860botched it somehow. And then we see Ellen Page portraying a Greek warrior waddling around the
00:07:44.620desert like a child with a soiled diaper, straining under her rubber armor, looking like she's about
00:07:49.560to die even before she gets shot through with arrows. The defenders of this film, especially
00:07:54.080on the right, have tried to claim that Page's appearance is not a huge problem because she only
00:08:00.060has a small role. You've probably heard that. It's a very small role. Now, I don't want to ascribe
00:08:05.180sinister motives to anybody or accuse them of lying. So I will generously assume that the
00:08:11.200conservative commentators making that claim must have fallen asleep 10 seconds into the movie,
00:08:17.900which would be totally understandable, frankly. If they actually watched the entire thing in a
00:08:22.880state of full consciousness or at least half consciousness, then they would know that Ellen
00:08:27.300Page is not a minor character in this film at all. She is utterly pivotal to the plot.
00:08:33.600She's one of the most important characters in the entire film.
00:08:37.580She is more than that, and as Steve Deese has pointed out, the moral conscience of the story.
00:08:42.020Her inclusion in this film, in that role, is without question one of the wokest, most radically left-wing things we have ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster film.
00:08:56.480if any director but Christopher Nolan had done this, he would have no conservative defenders at
00:09:02.840all. To claim that a movie is not woke when there's a trans-identified female actress pretending
00:09:09.100to be a male Greek warrior who serves as the linchpin of the plot and the film's moral conscience0.98
00:09:14.800is just ridiculous. I mean, if we're going to rightly claim that it's woke to have a brown-skinned0.99
00:09:21.760Hispanic Snow White, then how can we possibly argue that there's nothing woke about a trans
00:09:26.960female portraying an ancient Greek warrior? Now, the argument from Nolan's conservative
00:09:31.580defenders seems to be, rather explicitly, that it's okay when Nolan does it. I find that argument
00:09:37.380to be unpersuasive, if not pathetic. Indeed, if you believe that Nolan is one of the greatest
00:09:42.900filmmakers of all time, then the logical conclusion is that it's worse when he does it, not better.
00:09:50.780DEI casting in a crappy Snow White remake directed by random Disney director number 1242 is far less
00:09:57.200significant and culturally corrosive than DEI casting by one of the most influential and
00:10:01.920marketable filmmakers of all time, obviously. And that's not where the diversity casting ends,
00:10:07.160not by a long shot. Odysseus's crew consists of many people of different races, multiple Asians,
00:10:12.880including his second in command. Now, this character, the second in command played by
00:10:17.560the actor Himesh Patel, has a heavy presence in the film. He has a ton of screen time, and every
00:10:22.860minute he's visible on screen is another minute where total immersion in the story is impossible.
00:10:29.360I mean, at one point, this character says the line, we're Greeks from Ithaca, and it's one of
00:10:35.200the most unintentionally hilarious moments in the movie. Now, there are no intentionally hilarious
00:10:40.400moments, as the movie, unlike Homer's original epic, is totally humorless, utterly devoid of
00:10:46.080charm or wit, but there are several moments where you can't help but laugh, and this is
00:10:50.460one of them. I mean, imagine a movie set in the 12th century China, where a white actor0.90
00:10:55.820with a slight southern accent looks at the camera and says, we're Chinese from the Chengdu
00:11:00.520province. And you'll get an idea of how totally ludicrous this spectacle is. All that to0.88
00:11:05.560say, this is one of the most out-of-place characters I've seen in a major film in memory.
00:11:10.380And on top of that, his performance itself was flat and bland and uninspired. He brought
00:11:14.860nothing to the role. I mean, if you're not going to look the part, at least act the part, but he
00:11:19.360doesn't even do that. So why is he there? Okay. Anyone trying to rescue Nolan from wokeness
00:11:24.580allegations, answer me this. Why was that guy in that role? It was a bland, pointless performance.
00:11:33.500He wasn't there because of his acting chops. So what was it? I wonder. Now, as a side note,
00:11:41.520I'll mention that Patel was actually born in the UK. He has a British accent. Yet in this movie,
00:11:47.480he affects an American accent. All the actors, even the British ones, use a contemporary American
00:11:51.740accent. This was a creative choice by Nolan, but it doesn't work. You know, I'm not saying that
00:11:57.600Nolan had to go full Mel Gibson and have the characters all speak in the original language
00:12:01.940of the source material, although I personally would have appreciated that. But I'm not saying
00:12:06.400you have to do that. I'm saying that if you're going to make a movie set in the ancient world,
00:12:10.720the characters should speak in a way that sounds and feels ancient. Having them speak in a modern
00:12:18.600accent using modern slang and modern colloquialisms interferes with the immersion into the film,
00:12:24.260which is a theme we'll return to frequently. So put another way, in a story set 3,000 years in
00:12:29.880the past, none of the characters should look or sound or act like someone who's ever been to a
00:12:36.840McDonald's, and yet they all look and sound and act exactly like that. But back to the DEI elements.
00:12:43.280Now, even if you pretend that Himesh Patel is a good actor, the casting doesn't work. I mean,
00:12:47.800keep in mind, this is a movie about how difficult it was for Odysseus and his crew to travel just
00:12:52.380560 nautical miles from Troy to Ithaca. This is a point that Steve Saylor made on his substack.
00:12:57.960In ideal circumstances, with no interruptions, ancient boats could have made that trip in about
00:13:02.000a week. But the journey takes Odysseus many years, with considerable interruptions along the way,
00:13:06.920of course. And that gives you an idea of how fraught it was to travel even short distances
00:13:11.620at that time. And yet, in defiance of all common sense and logistics, a bunch of South Asians1.00
00:13:17.600apparently managed to travel thousands of miles to Greece, where they joined Odysseus' crew. In fact,
00:13:22.860in this version of the ancient world, people from all over the globe apparently travel and
00:13:26.700intermingle with each other with ease. And the problem here, one of the problems anyway, is that
00:13:31.880But the casting by itself contradicts the internal logic of the story that Nolan is supposedly telling. When African rappers have landed in Ithaca and Koreans and Indians and Hispanics have somehow made the trek there as well, and they all live there not as exotic foreigners, but as regular inhabitants of the region, then you're sending the message that travel isn't that difficult.
00:13:56.480In fact, you seem to be saying, I don't know, that air travel exists. It makes you wonder, somewhere during this three-hour runtime of the film, why exactly Matt Damon didn't just log into his Expedia account and book a first-class ticket on Delta. I mean, that would have been a lot easier. Although, in fairness, if the only tickets available were on Southwest, he probably was better off on the ship.
00:14:17.320Now, Nolan was obviously aware of all these issues. We have to give him credit. He's a talented, competent director. Even I will admit that. So that means the choice was deliberate. Nolan went out of his way to make the crew as diverse as possible, even when his casting decisions undermine not just the audience's immersion, but the foundational logic of the plot itself.
00:14:39.660It's the worst-case scenario for DEI hiring in a film because you can't ignore it without also ignoring the setting, the plot, the characters, and everything else.
00:14:47.560And yet you'll hear some conservatives defending Nolan on this point.
00:14:51.220Their main argument, as best I can tell, is that the DEI casting is relatively minimal and doesn't take up much screen time.
00:14:56.880But even if that were true, and it's not, not even close, it's extraordinary to watch how quickly conservatives are willing to cave in scenarios where their opponents would never dream of doing so.
00:15:07.740I mean, it's the kind of thing that only happens in one direction. If somebody made a movie set in Africa and based on ancient African folklore and then populated the cast with white people and other random races and ethnicities that have nothing to do with Africa, everybody would say the casting is ridiculous and distracting at best.0.78
00:15:30.300and they would be correct. If the movie was set in sub-Saharan Africa in the year 1100 and Chris1.00
00:15:36.200Pratt showed up in tribal garb and said, howdy there, folks. I'm an African tribal chieftain.
00:15:41.260How do you do? There wouldn't be a single soul on the planet who would defend that obviously
00:15:48.580preposterous casting choice. Yet the same thing is done in the reverse to a foundational text
00:15:54.620of Western civilization, and even conservatives line up to defend it. Again, the word that comes
00:16:01.140to mind is pathetic. Now, if you're a conservative and you're unwilling to tell the truth about0.99
00:16:05.840what's happening here for fear of being labeled a culture warrior or something, God forbid.
00:16:11.100We don't want to be culture. You wouldn't want to fight for the culture. Well, who would want
00:16:15.140to do that? That's silly. That's ridiculous. But if you have those reservations, you should know0.97
00:16:21.240the left has no such reservations. They explicitly want future generations to see Western culture as
00:16:26.780a universal product, as the outgrowth of modern-day diversity with no distinct contribution from0.79
00:16:33.520whites. There's no better way to undermine the future of Western civilization than to pretend0.98
00:16:36.820Western civilization was invented by everybody as some kind of multiracial democratic group effort,
00:16:43.040and that's why they're doing this. That's what they're going for, whether you want to pay0.63
00:16:47.600attention or not. Now, when I made this point on X, I was informed that actually white people are0.83
00:16:53.760doing the exact same thing. I was told that there are plenty of films, recent films, where white0.63
00:16:58.380actors are taking roles where they don't belong as an effort to stamp out other cultures. And as0.89
00:17:02.820evidence of this proposition, I was informed about the existence of precisely one movie called Gods
00:17:08.440of Egypt. And this came into my feet a bunch of times because I made this point about if this
00:17:13.900happened in the reverse, everybody would be upset. This is the only movie anyone, all of a sudden,
00:17:18.380everybody was a gods of Egypt. Like no one's ever heard of that movie. Well, as you can see from the
00:17:22.040poster there, the film features Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Rush, who don't appear to be Egyptian.
00:17:27.360And yet they're starring in a film called gods of Egypt. So, so there you have it. White people are,
00:17:31.080are trying to erase non-whites from Hollywood. I have to admit it's amusing. If nothing else,1.00
00:17:35.540people are desperately searching for an example of a modern movie that's been race swapped like
00:17:40.300the Odyssey, but in the opposite direction. And the best they can do is some obscure film nobody's
00:17:45.600heard about from 10 years ago that nobody watched and has a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes
00:17:50.160that was in fact panned by everybody. So if your intention was to prove my point, you succeeded.
00:17:58.020Like I said, these race swaps only go in one direction and everybody knows it. Now, if I had0.89
00:18:03.340to play devil's advocate, I'd say that the conservatives, you know, are giving Nolan a
00:18:07.880on the casting because they think the overall message of the film is conservative. But that's
00:18:13.420not true either. Not even close. Okay, during the film, you'll get multiple lectures from women
00:18:18.480about how they're oppressed by the patriarchy. Late in the film, we're treated to a cartoonishly0.54
00:18:22.700anachronistic speech from Odysseus's wife, Penelope, about how unfair it is that the suitors
00:18:27.380won't let her become king in Odysseus's absence. She has all this knowledge and wisdom, but the
00:18:33.320patriarchy is keeping her down. And it's played completely straight, even though it's clearly a
00:18:37.140clumsy attempt to airdrop contemporary feminist attitudes into a story where it doesn't belong
00:18:41.980and into a time period where such attitudes did not exist. And certainly at no point in Homer's0.95
00:18:47.360Odyssey did Penelope whine about how she could take over as king, because it would have been
00:18:51.780totally absurd. But in this film, with a supposedly conservative message, we're supposed to be okay
00:18:57.100with the idea that Penelope has the exact same attitude you expect from a newly minted women's1.00
00:19:01.200studies major in the Bronx. Then there's the fact that the film goes out of its way to strip the1.00
00:19:05.940story of divinity as much as possible. Nolan suggests that Odysseus' problems amount to bad
00:19:11.880luck rather than divine intervention. No gods show up at all. Zeus and Poseidon don't appear
00:19:17.580as characters. Only goddesses appear in the film, and then only as PTSD hallucinations, basically.
00:19:24.520Zendaya as Athena pops up incessantly and, again, just does nothing with the role.
00:19:30.800that's a theme here you have these actors the movie is chock full of A-list actors a lot of
00:19:37.900them doing nothing with the roles they're given it's amazing it's kind of amazing to watch
00:19:42.320she's in this she does nothing she just kind of somberly somberly stares at Odysseus that's all
00:19:47.860that happens but the point is that she isn't real within the context of the story she's a kind of
00:19:53.280therapeutic coping mechanism for a man struggling with trauma. Nolan's Odyssey, unlike Homer's,
00:20:01.060is a story completely disenchanted, devoid of the supernatural, aside from like the odd witch or two
00:20:06.000that shows up. And now Nolan's apologists will say that, well, he did this because he was going
00:20:10.420for a more grounded film, right? That's what we keep hearing. Well, it's a grounded, it's a grounded
00:20:15.440film. Oh, okay then. So, um, oh, ground, grounded is what we're doing. So, so then why does ancient
00:20:21.920Greece have the demographic makeup of Los Angeles circa 2026? Why is there a tiny little woman1.00
00:20:29.140running around pretending to be a dude? Why is there an Asian guy delivering the line,1.00
00:20:32.580we're Greeks from Ithaca? Grounded? Really? Grounded in what? So the apologists are letting0.99
00:20:39.520Nolan have his cake and eat it too, like always. I mean, you cannot argue that Nolan had to take
00:20:44.620the gods out of a story of Greek mythology in order to ground it and then also argue
00:20:48.700that Ellen Page's appearance isn't a major problem.
00:20:52.920In fact, Nolan himself has said that he expelled the gods from this film
00:20:56.960because he preferred to handle the supernatural in a, quote, real-world way.
00:21:02.220Well, again, if he's worried about the real world of ancient Greece,
00:21:07.100then why does ancient Greece look absolutely nothing like ancient Greece?
00:21:12.400Now, to the extent that Zeus does play a role in Nolan's film,
00:21:15.120it's because he's mentioned about 500 times in the context of Zeus's law, quote unquote. Again,
00:21:20.580this is a concept that doesn't exist, at least in the way Nolan portrays it in Homer's Odyssey.
00:21:24.780The idea of Zeus's law, as the characters tell you to your face, and one of the many examples
00:21:29.660of on-the-nose exposition that treats the audience like it has a collective IQ of 45,0.84
00:21:34.620is that Greeks should treat strangers as they'd like to be treated. Now, more broadly,
00:21:38.220Zeus's law is Nolan's spin on the Greeks' concept of xenia or hospitality, which does play an
00:21:44.060important role in Homer's poem. But contrary to what Nolan seems to think, his idea of Zeus's law
00:21:49.040is very different from the Greek concept of hospitality as outlined in Homer. And you don't
00:21:54.400have to squint very hard to see how Nolan is trying to twist this concept into a not very
00:21:58.940subtle sermon about modern day immigration policy. And in Nolan's film, Odysseus spends a significant
00:22:05.160amount of time moping around sullen and depressed after enabling the destruction of Troy by using
00:22:11.240the Trojan horse. And for those who somehow aren't familiar, the Greeks presented the horse as a
00:22:14.820gift, but they had filled it with soldiers. And at night, the soldiers opened the gates of Troy,
00:22:18.980enabled the Greek army to invade. So this was a massive and unlikely victory, which was brought
00:22:24.540about because of the Greeks' trickery and cunning. And in Homer, it was a heroic maneuver. Odysseus0.96
00:22:29.440had outsmarted his enemies. It was a virtue. It was not portrayed in Homer as a violation of
00:22:35.260xenia or hospitality or anything like that. There was no sense that Odysseus had committed some
00:22:40.040grave crime. Odysseus was very confident, but he was also effective in crushing his enemies. In
00:22:46.120Homer, Xenia didn't mean that you would never trick your enemy in a war. It was about hospitality,
00:22:51.620a very different concept that applied to your dealings with strangers. And on the other hand,
00:22:55.420in Nolan's film, Zeus's law works very differently. Zeus's law, as Odysseus explains it,
00:22:59.940means that you're not supposed to use gifts, like the Trojan horse, as a trick in order to enable a
00:23:04.440ground invasion. So in other words, whether Nolan realizes it or not, he's completely bastardized
00:23:09.080a central concept in the poem. And in the name of this bastardization, Nolan transforms Odysseus
00:23:14.380into a whiny, solemn shell of a man plagued by trauma and guilt because he violated some fake
00:23:20.360idea of Zeus's law by destroying Troy. And of course, the idea of an ancient warrior feeling
00:23:26.040really bad about a glorious victory is absurd on its face. And the more you think about it,
00:23:32.880the worse it gets. I mean, if you have any familiarity at all with the source material,
00:23:36.460It's actually kind of incredible that Nolan would even try this. First, the Trojan horse wasn't the
00:23:41.680start of the conflict. You know, it's not as though Odysseus started the war by defying some
00:23:45.880sacred norm. The film suggests the war actually started over trade routes and Helen was basically
00:23:50.320a pretext and was not, in fact, the most beautiful woman in the world. So it's not clear why it's
00:23:56.160some grave sin to end a war that's been going on for 10 years with all the brutality that war
00:24:00.200entails. I mean, is the implication that it would also be unethical to execute a clever flanking
00:24:05.040maneuver that tricked an enemy general? Would the Battle of Chancellorsville be a violation of
00:24:10.160Zeus's law? Who knows? The other problem is that in the film, Odysseus is so weepy and sad about
00:24:16.180his violation of Zeus's law that he decides to go into exile. But first he has to kill a bunch
00:24:21.140of suitors who are trying to marry his wife. Specifically, he has to pretend to be a beggar1.00
00:24:25.260in order to infiltrate the palace, at which point he'll launch a surprise attack where he brutally0.65
00:24:29.260murders the suitors. So in other words, in order to rectify his violation of Zeus's law during the
00:24:34.700Trojan War that he feels really bad about in the movie, Odysseus violates Zeus's law again by
00:24:42.440killing the suitors using trickery, you know, to get into the palace. But he thinks it's partially
00:24:49.000okay, I guess, because the suitors themselves were taking advantage of Penelope's hospitality by
00:24:53.100getting drunk in the palace and hitting on Penelope while Odysseus was away. And then after this
00:24:57.420massacre, Odysseus decides that he's tired of violating Zeus's law and sails away with Penelope.
00:28:01.420and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city,
00:28:04.860which you'll see what no one does with all of that,
00:28:07.680but it's different things from what Homer does.
00:28:09.840Right. I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. I think it's a film
00:28:16.460that has some interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory.
00:28:23.620Well, she's right. I never thought I'd say that about someone that looks like that. And when she1.00
00:28:28.560says that, by the way, that Odysseus uses drugs to deal with his trauma, that is also in the movie.
00:28:33.620He essentially, he's essentially taking like the ancient equivalent of SSRIs to help deal with his depression.
00:28:42.140I mean, that's that's what's in this movie. I'm not making this up.
00:28:45.520And this is the same woman, by the way, that we just saw who suggested that Odysseus was a problematic hero who says he's complicated in her translation.
00:28:53.420She routinely chose words to make Odysseus seem less heroic and noble.
00:28:56.840So she clearly is coming at the story from a feminist modern perspective.
00:28:59.740And even for her, Nolan's film was a little too weepy, you know, a little too morose.
00:29:05.920Nolan took a story about an epic hero, as she said, that's about glory, and made him peevish
00:29:12.020and insecure, all because Odysseus violated some fake law Nolan invented, which apparently
00:29:16.140says you're not supposed to use clever strategies to win wars.
00:29:18.560It's reminiscent of Oppenheimer, where Nolan made it clear he had a similar attitude, of
00:29:27.920Now, some of this stuff, qualms about Zeus's laws and its applications, may seem pedantic, but it's not pedantic to expect internal logic from a film, especially one being hailed as an artistic masterpiece and one of the best movies of the century, if not all time, which is what some critics are saying.
00:29:47.980and more importantly, it all points to the film's greatest fundamental flaw, which was Nolan's
00:29:52.700decision to infuse modern psychology and therapy speak into a story about an ancient warrior three
00:30:00.320millennia ago. In the ancient world, to triumph in battle was the greatest virtue. It would not
00:30:08.540be a source of shame. That is a modern attitude. It is not an ancient one. Now, if Nolan wanted to
00:30:15.920make a modernized version of the Odyssey that imposes modern psychology and modern preoccupations,
00:30:22.400not to mention racial demographics, onto an ancient epic, well, he could have done an
00:30:27.180interpretation set in the current day. There are many examples of that kind of thing, and some of
00:30:32.240them are pretty good. Oh, brother, where art thou? Set in 1930s America, comes to mind.
00:30:37.420But transposing the modern mindset and worldview into the ancient world turns the whole thing into
00:30:43.520a farce, which is why a number of scenes look and feel kind of like a Mel Brooks movie with
00:30:49.580better cinematography. I mean, it's totally absurd. What's the point of a story set in
00:30:54.780ancient times that doesn't even try to actually capture the look and feel and perspective,
00:30:59.780most importantly, of ancient times? The best films set in the ancient past are able to transport
00:31:06.140you to that world and crucially show you the world through the eyes of those people. That is
00:31:14.560the magic of film, at least good films. And Nolan never achieves this. He never comes close to
00:31:20.600achieving it. He never even tries, it seems. In Apocalypto, Mel Gibson transports you into the
00:31:27.080mind of a Mayan 500 years ago. In The Northman, Robert Eggers transports you into the mind of a0.98
00:31:33.700Viking a thousand years ago. And in the Odyssey, Christopher Nolan transports you into the mind of
00:31:38.860a liberal woman in 2017. At no point in the story does Nolan ever actually take the audience to the
00:31:46.240ancient world. You never feel like you're 3,000 years in the past. You feel like you're watching
00:31:51.120modern liberal Westerners put on a pageant because you are. Nobody would be calling this
00:31:57.320thing a masterpiece if it was made by a director not named Christopher Nolan. There's a difference
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00:35:10.220So they don't have to face the future alone, which is so important.
00:35:44.300Now, hearing all this, maybe you're saying to yourself, well, I don't care about the cultural messaging or the casting or the politics or any of that.
00:35:50.220I just want to see a well-constructed movie on a technical level.
00:35:52.620Well, the problem is that it's impossible to overlook all these flaws because the film itself is not very well constructed or all that entertaining.
00:36:00.840For the most part, it's disjointed, dull, self-serious, convoluted, somehow feeling both verbose and overly rushed at the same time.
00:36:07.880The dialogue is some of the worst I've ever heard in a critically acclaimed film.
00:36:12.840On the nose and clunky are descriptions that can't even begin to describe the script.
00:36:17.780The Odyssey is the kind of movie where a character in the Bronze Age actually says,
00:36:23.020I'm not making this up, the age of bronze is collapsing.
00:36:27.420And the dialogue is like that throughout.0.98
00:36:29.220I mean, you cannot have genuinely subpar, sometimes bafflingly stupid dialogue in a0.99
00:39:34.680Yeah, so it's basically that over and over again.
00:39:36.940And you might argue that, well, it's hard to avoid this kind of episodic thing where we're repeating the same beats over and over again when you're trying to adapt this source material.
00:39:48.840But avoiding that is part of the challenge if you're supposed to be a great filmmaker, right?
00:39:54.340That's part of the whole, that's your job is to figure out a way to handle that.
00:39:58.340um there's one encounter like this in the odyssey where odysseus and his men come across a bunch of
00:40:04.340giants wearing armor and the giants end up attacking them and damaging their boat and
00:40:08.420killing a bunch of them as far as i can tell the point of the sequence is to show kind of show off
00:40:12.280the costume design of the giants so that the giants can be featured on marketing materials0.94
00:40:16.500like this one uh as you can see and it looks really cool i mean it does look cool they can
00:40:21.140put it on posters and blast it all over reddit and that's kind of it the scene doesn't really serve
00:40:24.900in Nolan's story, any purpose beyond that, it doesn't advance the story that Nolan is telling.
00:40:31.600They just immediately run from the giants like it's a Monty Python movie.
00:40:35.840Now that said, I will praise the visuals of the film. And particularly in one respect,
00:40:42.860they kind of mark a return to Jurassic Park style effects rather than CGI. And you can see how they
00:40:48.840built the Cyclops here, for example. And in general, throughout the film, the practical
00:40:52.700effects are impressive. I mean, they're easily the best part of the entire project. Better than
00:40:56.900the acting, the plot, the dialogue, the score, everything. Nolan absolutely deserves an Oscar
00:41:01.280for visual effects. Not for any other category, although he surely will win every other category
00:41:07.180too. But even the Cyclops scene, despite being one of the best sequences in the film,
00:41:12.480feels abbreviated and ultimately kind of empty in Nolan's telling. It's missing something.
00:41:20.520even the good scenes in the movie when they come up it's it's there's something missing here and
00:41:26.740what's missing in the case of the cyclops scene is the wit and humor of the original because
00:41:32.800Christopher Nolan has an apparent religious objection to including anything witty or humorous
00:41:37.320in his films everything everything must be approached with this kind of reverent ominous
00:43:12.860Now, despite everything I've said, if you feel like you want to watch this movie anyway because you're in the mood for a historical epic of some kind, I'm compelled to remind you that you have far better options.
00:43:21.900You know, you could watch Master and Commander, Apocalypto, The Northman, Gladiator, just to name some of the best from this century.
00:43:28.760The Odyssey is well below those films on the list of historical epics.
00:43:32.340And to clarify for all the nerds who are going to get ready to nitpick, when I say historical epic, here I mean an epic adventure film set in a real and recognizable period of the past.
00:43:41.500whether based on true events or entirely mythological so i wouldn't include for example
00:43:46.620like the lord of the rings on that list although those films lord of the rings films are certainly
00:43:51.260superior to nolan's odyssey in every imaginable way too now truthfully i have to search very hard
00:43:56.260to give nolan credit for anything beyond the visual effects as it relates to this movie but
00:43:59.980there was one point where the conservative critics some of them at least were wrong uh the movie is
00:44:07.500not a flop. And not all conservative critics predicted that it would be, but to any that did,
00:44:14.040it was not a flop. It's a hit. It's a massive hit. Christopher Nolan is a cultural force,
00:44:19.540the likes of which does not exist on the right at all. And we have to grapple with that fact.
00:44:26.100We have to do something about it besides complaining. Otherwise, we're going to watch
00:44:29.200as guys like Nolan continue to defile and defame the great works of Western civilization
00:44:33.500in front of an audience of tens of millions of people it's not entirely a lost cause by the way
00:44:38.440on tuesday somebody named john carter wrote the following post on x i want elom us to give mel
00:44:42.700gibson 100 million dollars to film an odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically
00:44:46.700accurate ships armor weapons and casting with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem
00:44:51.960and delivered in homeric greek and just 24 hours later musk replied i'm down
00:44:57.800now this is the legacy of nolan's odyssey if it actually leads to the creation of art that
00:45:03.300honors Western tradition and literature, then and only then can you make the case the film served
00:45:08.060some useful purpose. Otherwise, the film is precisely what we thought it would be. It's a
00:45:11.620mockery of the men who built civilization, an incoherent mess, wearing the skin suit of a1.00
00:45:16.080foundational text. The film is not the Odyssey at all. In truth, it's an attempt to transform a1.00
00:45:20.980distinct literary work into yet another tedious celebration of multiculturalism and leftist guilt
00:45:26.500tripping. And rather than pretending ridiculously that the film is secretly based or whatever,
00:45:32.620we have to admit that Nolan succeeded. He accomplished all of the goals he was trying
00:45:39.220to achieve. And in the process, he has created one of the most successful pieces of propaganda
00:45:45.220in the entire history of Hollywood. The fact that even conservative critics are strenuously
00:45:50.840defending a movie featuring a trans-identified female with top surgery in a pivotal role only
00:45:56.360proves that fact. And that's why we need to get to work. By the time Christopher Nolan is delivering
00:46:02.340his Oscar acceptance speech about his brave casting of Ellen Page as a Greek warrior or the
00:46:07.700many nuances of Zeus's law, we should have our own faithful production in the works.
00:46:12.420The only coherent message of Nolan's film is that conservatives have become far too complacent.
00:46:18.540And unlike everything else in this film, it's a message we should take seriously before these
00:46:24.100people destroy any other great works of literature they didn't create, and which they apparently