Transcription
All I want to do is put Hollywood in the bin. Hi, my name is Sydney. Welcome back to hell.
As you can probably guess, this is one of those videos that took me a hot second to write because I have so much to say and there's so many things that I want to cover and sometimes I don't know how to do that. So, big apologies for being so late to this party, but better late than never, I guess.
And at this point too, basically everybody on the internet has made a video talking about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, but I needed some time to marinate, and I've done just that. So now I have some things to say and more opinions to vomit into your little baby bird mouths. Also, pretty obviously, this video is going to have a bunch of spoilers. So if you don't want to have things spoiled, then this this is not the video for you. Sorry.
Since this movie was announced back in 2024, it has of course dominated discussion all around the internet for the race swaps and the genderish swaps, then the modern dialogue and then the rap and the Viking ship in ancient Greece, the absolutely ridiculous costumes. Since it hit theaters on July 17, the response has been pretty fiery and pretty split. I've seen numerous right-wing figures saying how great it was in spite of the diverse casting. I've also seen people say that it was functionally the worst movie that they've ever seen. And then there's this group of people who are mad at anyone who pays to watch this, which honestly is fair enough. I did not because I am a pirate.
There are reports that this movie is already smashing it out of the water. And then there are other reports that say it's all overinflated. People are even suggesting that Rotten Tomatoes is doing some shady things because what do you mean this film ranks higher than Lord of the Rings? In addition to all of that, of course, we have more weird interviews. I particularly like this one with Lupita Nyongo, who seems to be a little bit drunky drunk.
>> Favorite one?
>> Yeah, it's a it's a shot in the dark.
>> Favorite person or what?
People are also dunking on Nolan for saying that the Odyssey is ultimately about the idea that a society can only function through respect for strangers.
>> You have this concept of Zenia. We don't refer to as in film because I think that would be confusing. So we we just refer to it as Zeus law but it's that idea that you know you might look like a humble beggar but you could be a god in disguise and that becomes the theological underpinning for a society that saw gods everywhere. Gods walked amongst us back then in in everybody's estimation. It becomes the theological underpinning of the golden rule of the idea that you know treat others as you would be treated and that being the the glue that that binds society together. The more I thought about it, the more that became important to to the project because the more you realize that yeah, back then leaving the house more than, you know, a day or two, you're by definition of throwing yourself at the mercy of strangers and society can only function with respect for strangers.
This is especially hilarious when you consider that the Odyssey basically ends with Odysius murdering a bunch of strangers in his own house. But sure.
Oh, and we had this ripoff of an article from Variety that praes the newest Moana liveaction film for honoring Polynesian culture and traditions, arguing why representation really matters in film. Unless, of course, that representation comes from anywhere that happens to be in Europe. Yeah, the very same people who have been screaming for months that the Odyssey isn't even real, so why do you care? are now bending over backwards to explain to all of us why proper representation of Polynesian culture is so important and respectful in Moana. I basically never stop hating it here.
But over the last couple days, I have seen this article crop up again and again that has really hit on one of the central things that I fundamentally hated about this movie. And that is more or less the assassination of Odicius's character, but also the overall assassination of Homer's story and its morals and meanings. Entertainment Weekly published this piece titled Whoopi Goldberg calls out the stupidity of men during the Odyssey analysis. The piece basically quotes Goldberg from a recent view episode where she said that the men in the film aren't terribly smart. And the thing about this for me is it represents it it gave me a lot of today because it represents and please don't get annoyed with me men. It does represent the stupidity of men because men are told in this movie don't do this because this is going to happen >> and every time >> and every time they go and do that and then they're surprised that that IT'S GONE THE OTHER WAY. SO THAT'S THE first thing I got. The second thing I got >> was the reason we have to be reminded why war doesn't really work for anybody. It does. No one wins in a war.
She goes on to say that we have to be reminded why war doesn't really work for anybody. No one wins in a war. There are no winners. And I got that. And while this might be what Christopher Nolan's Odyssey was trying to say, Homer's Odyssey took the view that war is complex and nuanced and reflective of the epic tradition of the time. War is glorious and necessary, but also tragic and costly. So given that Christopher Nolan assumed this no winner's view of war and then put that forward in the film and Odysius of course is part of that war, it actually makes complete sense to me why he'd then go ahead and assassinate Odysius's character, changing him from a man full of pride and glory and wit to one who has PTSD and is very guiltridden. Everything else that I hated about this movie outside of the obvious race swapping and Elliot Page swapping and the horrible accents, dialogue, and costumes is actually firmly attached to this principle. And it's why my argument here is really that this film isn't the Odyssey. It's Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, but I'll expand on that bit a little later.
One of the key differences between Homer's Odyssey and Nolan's film is how they treat the idea of male folly and the cost of war. The poem doesn't condemn war as pointless or evil. It shows it as a harsh but inevitable part of the heroic world. Yes, of course, it is full of suffering and loss, but it's also full of courage and fame. And yes, the victors don't go back to their unscathed happy lives. War absolutely leaves a mark on them as well. But it isn't all or nothing. You know, sometimes you just you end up getting killed because of a giant horse. It's this is just sometimes the way it goes. The Odyssey is ultimately about the painful, complicated longing to come home after war. It values peace at home and the restoration of order, but it never suggests that the Trojan War itself was a stupid mistake that never should have happened.
So, with that said, Whoopi Goldberg's comments are actually a pretty fair reaction to Nolan's version of this story because Nolan paints War as ultimately extremely traumatic and gives us all the folly of man without the followup of wit and cunning that Homer does. And to me at least, this feels distinctly anti-male. And that might sound quite extreme to some of you, especially those of you who may have interpreted all of this completely differently. But please just hear me out. hear my argument here. And listen, if you're going to hear my argument about that, you should probably first hear my argument about why you shouldn't let data brokers steal and sell your information. And you can stop them. Thanks to the sponsor of today's video, Incogn Sydney, we need we need to find a surgeon to change my face. Oh yeah? Are you trying to hide from a drug syndicate or something? Are you trying to hide from a drug syndicate? What? No, that's crazy. I just I don't like the fact that someone could pretend to be me and steal my identity. Someone get me a scalpel. Would you calm down? Who is trying to steal your identity? It happens all the time. Scammers get a hold of someone's entire information on the internet, their private information, and can run up debt in their name, take out credit cards. It happens all the time because of data broker websites. Maybe I could get a mask. Sydney, just stop doing what you're doing. This isn't a big deal at all. You can protect yourself with Incogn because they actually delete your information off of those data broker websites. Look, I made an account here that you can see back in 2024, I gave incogn websites and saved me literally thousands of hours. It's also insanely easy to use. You make your account, you give incogn to work for you, and they go right ahead knocking down your data. They also continually rescan these sites and issue takedown notices if your information pops back up, which unfortunately it can do. Surely, the beard is not necessary. It isn't. No. No, it's not. Champ incogn even has this incredibly powerful feature where you can submit links to them for takedown using their custom removals process. Here you can see on my account they actually found a few links that look like me that I can approve for takedown if I want if the information matches my information. So nobody's trying to steal my face. No, nobody is trying to steal your face. Organ harvesting on the other hand. So, if you are creeped out like I am by data brokers and their immense sharing of all of your private information online, then click the link in the description or go to incogn.com/sydney. And of course, make sure that you use code sydney at checkout to get 60% off an incogn plan.
Nolan's film leans very hard into guilt and trauma and the consequences of hubris, especially around the Trojan horse and the decisions that doom Odysius's crew. For example, the film frequently flashes back to the sacking of Troy, portraying the Trojan horse, which by the way was Odysius's idea, not as a strategic triumph, but a morally catastrophic act. Nolan's Odysius wrestles with deep guilt over these civilian deaths and the destruction that his idea brought about. And we see this in the sacking of Troy itself and the way he remembers it, but also in a conversation that Odysius had with Cinnon, Elliot Pageige, in the underworld, where he feels so much guilt for having deceived Sinnon about the true role of the horse and his role in basically getting Sinnon killed by the Trojans. This is your time to remember that Sinnon did not exist in the original Odyssey. this role was made that did not exist and then they filled it with Elliot Page. Never forget.
As a total aside, if Nolan actually wanted to explore the tragedy of war, which you know, like lots of other people have done with relation to the Odyssey, he should have included Achilles, who's actually in the Odyssey. Uh well, Achilles is in the underworld, because Achilles basically says to Odysius that he would rather live as the lowliest slave on earth than rule as a hero among the dead. And I think that's such an interesting thing for a Greek hero to say and think, particularly in this context. Anyway, in Nolan's Odyssey, cuz we're talking about the film still, Odysius sees all of this as a violation of sorts of Zeus's law, which the film frequently references and brings up, which sets off a chain reaction of moral reckoning, I guess, and divine punishment. We never actually see the gods in this film despite them playing a massive massive role in the Odyssey, but they're referenced throughout as like rough storms and foroding clouds and things happening on the planet with that's like weather. Athena, who genuinely helps Odysius in Homer's epic, is presented in Nolan's film as his externalized guilt instead of a real person who does things to guide and counsel him. We learn this definitively at the end of the movie when Nolan shows us that Athena's face is actually that of a young priestess who was murdered when Troy was sacked. Athena kind of operates in this movie like Odicius's Jiminy Cricket. You know, the little cricket guy that's uh that's Pinocchio's conscience except that the cricket is actually real. And the way that we actually learn about all of these things and many of Odysius's feelings is actually when he tries to remember his life and start sharing that story with the demi goddess Calypso, who the film never actually explains. Like there's no point where they're like, "This is who this is and this is what she does." She's sort of just there in her ripped up little clothes on the beach. I don't know. Knowing how traumatized film Odysius is as a result of his past actions, she drugs him with lotus flowers during their seven years together. In an effort to help his body heal and I guess uh protect his mind from not getting more broken. Worth noting this never actually happened in the original. You know, Calypso was in the original. That's yes, she was there, but she wasn't she wasn't, you know, acting as like a nursemaid and drugging Odysius with leaves or flowers or a plant. It's that didn't happen. So, in a way, she sort of functions as a therapist of sorts for a very very traumatized war veteran. And actually, towards the end of the Odyssey, Odysius refers to himself as a veteran of the Trojan War. So, do with that what you will. And hilariously, I just saw the other day that Emily Wilson, the very same woman who wrote the Odyssey translation that Nolan apparently used here, also made this observation in a recent interview. I'm not sure if I see it as an entirely anti-war film, but it certainly presents us with an Adysius who feels very bad about certain things that he's done in war and is is >> struggling to process them in a in a very um I would say very modern psychiatized way and he's struggling to process them and needs drugs to do so in for help with his recovery, right? um and he seems to feel bad about being a warrior and we never actually get to see him doing much warrioring.
She basically goes on to say that Odysius isn't really motivated by the regular all-American things that Americans can relate to and is actually motivated by wanting glory. And I will caveat to that as well that he's also very much motivated by homecoming. He wants to go home to his wife and child. And yeah, I mean like it's the glory thing and it's the homecoming thing and that's exactly it. He wants glory and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city which is you'll see what Nolan does with all of that. But it's different things from what Homer does, right? I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a a film about glory. I think it's a film that has some interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory. So, when even Emily Wilson is saying that you basically didn't do the story justice after she butchered it herself. And by the way, you can tell that she is not impressed here at all. You can just tell it just it just feels like butchering Inception. It's not good. And I need you guys to understand this. This criticism is coming from a woman who at least in this respect I mostly agree with. This criticism is coming from a woman who referred to Odysius as a lord of lies and a colonial invader. So once again, do it that what you will.
Anyway, as far as the crew goes, the film really exemplifies everybody's reckless choices like eating the sacred cattle and taking their earwax plugs out to hear the siren song and then jumping overboard and going into strange cottages with ugly women getting themselves turned into pigs. When the men suffer the consequences of their own actions, Odysius reacts with visible anguish and self-lame, reinforcing the theme that their collective stupidity, quote unquote, leads to unnecessary death and suffering. And most of these events serve as moments that sort of just compound Odysius's moral burden and trauma. The problem is Homer wasn't writing an anti-war story or a commentary on generic male stupidity. In the original epic, the men do make foolish choices. Odysius's crew opens the bag of winds and eats the sun god's cattle, despite clear warnings that these are terrible choices and will have definitely terrible impacts. Odysius himself can't resist taunting the Cyclops after they escape his cave, which brings Poseidon's wrath down on him for the rest of the journey and ultimately delays him constantly from making his way home. The suitors, I guess through the whole story, are arrogant and greedy and disrespectful. And these moments show recklessness and pride and sometimes poor leadership. But unlike the film, Homer doesn't use these moments and these events to say men are dumb. Instead, they explore deeper Greek ideas like excessive pride and the importance of self-control and the very real consequences of ignoring the gods, warnings, and the rules of hospitality. Even the greatest heroes are flawed and that is what makes them relatable then and what makes them relatable now. At the same time, Homer celebrates male excellence in a way that Nolan simply doesn't. Homer's Odysius, while obviously making some very flawed choices, is still very clever and resilient. Nolan, on the other hand, only shows us the flawed part.
A great example of this is Odysius and the Cyclops Polyphimis, which I am certain I'm going to say wrong repeatedly, so we're just going to call him Polly. Okay, that's easier for me to say. Both the poem and the film show Odysius and his men happening upon Paulie's cave. And while the men are hesitant to stay there, Odysius insists that they should. Paulie finds them and ends up eating some of the crew before trapping them all inside. This is the foolish and pride part of the story. Nolan unfortunately leaves out the cleverness part that Homer describes and the redeeming part where Odysius gets Polly drunk on wine. And when Polly asks Odicius for his name, Odysius says his name is Nobody. Later when Odysius stabs Polly in the eye and facilitates everyone's escape, Polly cries out in pain. And then when the other Cyclops are like, "Hey man, what's going on?" he says, "Nobody is killing me." So the other Cyclops are like, "Oh, I guess everything is fine." and they don't do anything to help because maybe this guy has a habit of being a giant drama queen. We don't know. Nolan's version treats the Cyclops like a big dumb monster, which I think is a huge mistake and in doing so doesn't really even properly tell us that this is the son of Poseidon and that's why Odysius and crew have a terrible time going forward. But importantly, it doesn't give us the chance to see Odysius being smart and thinking his way out of the situation. It only shows us that he leads his men into ruin. And I think I think that really sucks and I think that's a really dishonest way of presenting this character. And this actually happens repeatedly when the men are passing the sirens, who just by the way we don't really see in the film at all. And uh if you don't know what sirens are, they're these sort of weird lady sea creatures who uh I'm actually pretty sure like part eagle. They're part bird in some way. I don't I just don't know which one. Anyway, they sing they sing a beautiful song and lure men to their deaths. Odysius, true to form, wants to hear that song for himself because he's a curious boy, but without doing a selfdelete, you know. So, in Homer's story, he cleverly orders his men to plug their ears with wax so they don't have to hear the siren song and, you know, do bad things. And then he has them tie him tightly to the mast of their ship and orders them to keep him tied up no matter how much he protests because, you know, of the afro mentioned wanting to do bad things. Odysius is overwhelmed by the siren song, given it promises him many things, including wisdom and to know what will happen the world over. Odysius struggles against the ropes, of course, but the crew follow his instructions and the ship passes safely. It's a brilliant display of self-nowledge and pre-planned discipline on his part. As with a lot of sequences in pretty well-known and old literature, this sequence has been interpreted in a bunch of different ways. I personally think it's about temptation and resisting that which promises too much. Now, Mr. Chrissy Nolan Boy does give us this scene more or less, but it definitely felt rushed and kind of shoved into the middle of the story, and I wasn't a fan. Although, I've seen people on the internet being like, "Oh my god, it's the greatest thing I've ever seen." You guys need to have higher expectations. I don't I don't know how to help any of you. And as with his other bastardizations, the siren song in the film is basically one giant guilt trip. As it turns out, Odysius is taunted with his desire to return home and to be a hero, but he also can't be a hero because of the war crimes he committed. He is taunted with the things he wants but can't have. And because he can't square these conflicting thoughts within himself, it causes him immense anguish and pain. And that's why when he's tied to the master of the ship in the film, he's like crying and he's like, "Oh my god, this is so terrible." And it's weird, you know, because this sends a very different but very demoralizing message, which I don't love.
Interestingly though, on the other hand, one of the times where Nolan could have actually presented Odysius as a tragic figure and sort of made some commentary around that is when it comes to his men getting eaten by the six-headed monster called the Silla. in the poem when he encounters the enchantress Kirkhe and I'm just I know that's even probably a butchering of the way the Greeks say it but I feel I feel weird mispronouncing it even though this is not my language. I don't know. I'm sorry about that. She tells Odysius that he must make an impossible choice which is basically sail into this giant whirlpool over here and doom everybody or sail close to the siler's cliff over here saying that the siller will eat six of his men and there's absolutely nothing that he can do to stop it. As a result of this choice, and he does make a choice, he picks a second option. Odysius is then forced to witness the abject horror of his men being munched on without being able to actually intervene. And it strips away his usual resolve and shows the limits of even the cleverest man against fate and monsters. He is so deeply affected by what he sees that he says, "That was the most pitiable sight my eyes have ever seen in all my sufferings on the sea." Once again, unfortunately, Nolan's version of this awful event felt really rushed. And I think that's kind of disappointing because I do think this would have been quite a good opportunity to show how hard parts of this journey really had been, not just for Odysius, but for the crew as well. In the film, in Nolan's version, Odysius basically panics and grabs the ship's oes and is trying to help the men roll away. And I think rather than leaning into the helplessness that he feels in that moment and the grim acceptance that he feels in that moment, the scene instead feels really frantic and uh really chaotic. I think these changes really matter and they change the entire construction of who Odysius is. Homer wrote a hero who is clever enough to outsmart some threats and strong enough to endure the ones that he can't. Nolan's Odysius, on the other hand, feels so much more reactive and so much more overwhelmed and more defined by trauma than anything else, which makes him not a figure that you want to emulate and look up to, but rather someone who's incredibly sad. Yeah, he made him an incredibly sad figure.
Now, of course, as you can probably expect, Nolan made a bunch of other changes to parts of the Odyssey that I also don't really understand. He gave us twin sisters in Helen of Troy and her sister Clyde Nestra. He also disfigured Helen on one side of her face. Neither of these things happen in the original story. Uh so there's that. He made Sinnon, who remember isn't in the Odyssey, a central figure in his story, who Odysius really upholds and continues to talk about because reasons. He cut out parts of the journey such as the men ending up on the island of the Lotus Eaters where Odicius is basically like, "Stop eating those and get back on the damn ship." And I do have to say here that uh Nolan kind of meshed the lotus eaters part in with the Calypso part. And I think that's kind of why he gave us that even though Calypso never feeds uh Odicius lotus flowers. I guess he wanted to include the lotus but he didn't know where to put it. So that's where he put it even though it's h you get it. The film also cuts out the entire fiat episode, which is about a third of the book. And this part shows more of Odysius being witty and skillful and positive relationships between men and women. And it would have honestly just completely undercut Nolan's apocalyptic depiction of this non-hospity- based world. And that's probably why they didn't include it.
And I must add as an aside because I do think it matters that Nolan's film gave us a version of Kirk that feels like a tragic feministcoded figure. In Homer's Odyssey, Cersei Kirk is a beautiful enchantress. She turns Odysius's men into pigs after they eat her drugged food for reasons to be clear that aren't ever really explained in the Odyssey itself. But once Odicius confronts her, the two do reach an understanding and she becomes his love interest, an ally, an adviser to him for an entire year. And I did reference this and uh I made note of this in another video. I mentioned that I was talking about the Odyssey and I basically said, you know, like she helped him grow as a person. Their relationship was one of mutual respect and ultimately very helpful to him because, you know, in addition to the growth thing, she also gave him really important guidance about the rest of his journey. She's the one who actually warns him about the Silla and the sirens. Homer presents her as a dangerous but fascinating woman with very real agency and very very real power cuz she does magic stuff. Do you guys remember how Leita was basically trying to give Homer a hard time and saying that, "Oh, you didn't give the women in your story enough air time, but Christopher Nolan did." Okay. Yeah. Well, um, Christopher Nolan actually gave you three minutes and like 20 seconds or 50 seconds or something, Lupita. So, uh, I think, you know, Homer wrote a character here in this enchantress that was quite cool and did a lot of cool stuff and was a fullyfledged person and, uh, and you got nothing. You got like five lines. So, awesome work. Nolan's film does something very different. Samantha Morton's Kirk is portrayed as a somewhat unattractive older lady who is visibly scarred both emotionally and probably physically by men. When Odysius finds her, she delivers a pointed monologue about how men are basically evil. She suggests that his crew only came up to her cabin to hurt or assault her and therefore turning his men into pigs is something of a justified punishment for their male toxicity. A less charitable interpretation, depending on where you sit politically, is that Kirk is a feminist figure who has been victimized by patriarchal violence in the past and now lashes out by generalizing all men as threats. Samantha Morton actually was interviewed about her role here and she said that war is complicated. Men are complicated and our relationships with men as wives, sisters, and daughters are complicated. But she drew on that as well as the stories in her family of women being uh taken against their will in the physical capacity and just that in general. So what I am saying here is not my interpretation. This is how Nolan intended for this to be viewed. You get a lot about how a movie is meant to be portrayed from the people who are actually in it. So when they say these things and they do these things, I'm like, "Haha, I am not stupid. This is this is how this was supposed to play out." And of course, this still isn't good enough for the people he's trying to impress. Apparently, this film has a woman problem. Not not in the way that you might perceive that in the in the sense that the women didn't get enough out of the film, which is I just I just find these people really funny.
So, as with all of these kinds of topics, there is so much to say here, and I have left out a lot in this video for the sake of brevity. There's so many different components that I wanted to discuss, but I really wanted to focus on Odicius and general themes in the story because I find those to be the least talked about when I've watched other people's reviews and things. Uh, and there are obviously a ton of things that I've left out here like the Sudas and Penelope and Odysius's son and so on and so forth. But I would say that with relation to those components too, there are things that were wrong and that can be fairly criticized as well.
Anyway, all of this to say, coming back to my sort of original thesis here, this is not the Odyssey. It is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. And I think that these are two very distinct things. Adaptations are never perfect because some things do have to be sacrificed for the sake of time or other things need to be explained or expanded upon for the audience's benefit. Some things just don't translate so well when it comes to film. So, I am personally always okay with changes that add to or enhance a story. But that isn't what is taking place here. This is a film that promised accuracy and ended up changing the fundamentals of Herma's story in a way that made this film less interesting and made Odysius and crew less good. And as I pointed out in another video I made about this, a different kind of adaptation probably would have been fine if Nolan didn't say that he was going to tell the story of the Odyssey. Tell part of it, tell some of it. Give it a different name like the film Troy did. Don't say that you're going to tell us the Odyssey and then not tell us the Odyssey.
Just to reiterate, this movie did leave out a ton of things from the original story. But I do expect that at least in part because the Odyssey is big and there's a lot of things that take place and a lot of things that probably won't translate to a modern audience that would need to be explained and sometimes that can be challenging. So, like I said, a little bit of adaptation, okay, usually it's fine. But when you're completely changing the way that the story is built and the way that the characters are presented and all of this type of thing and then saying, "Hey, this is accurate and awesome and whatnot." And it's just not I find that really jarring and a bit of a pill.
And before we close out here, because I think I have kept you in my warm embrace for long enough at this point, uh I want to address something that I've seen around the internet quite a lot. And it's basically that, and people are on the right wing are saying this too, people are saying that this film isn't woke at all and that even if it is woke, it's okay because overall the film is quite enjoyable in spite of that. And here is where I diverge from most people in this respect, it seems. The choices made in this movie to race swap many characters or to carve out non-existent roles for a trans person, especially when many of these characters got such little screen time, really does feel like Oscar baiting. But it also feels very disrespectful. Of course, as per usual, you guys are welcome to disagree with me here if you don't see this similarly, but I think we see European cultures disrespected all the time, particularly when it comes to American cinema. And to my mind, that's all that we're seeing here once again is just more disrespect and particularly disrespect towards the Greeks who, from what I understand, really uphold their ancestry and their ancient traditions and stories and what have you. And don't get it twisted. This is happening deliberately. This is intentional. It's not accidental. It's not, you know, American creators being like, "Oh, I just don't want to have representation because representation is important." No, it's subversive. Uh we see race swaps happen all the time when it comes to important stories that uh have meaning in European cultures and traditions and mythologies and whatnot. And the reason that I know it's being done intentionally to be an undermining principle when it comes to European culture is because just take for example Moana. That had to have Pacific Islanders in it. People had to go through these rigorous tests to prove that they were islander enough to be in Moana. And that's a kids movie written by Disney. But one of Greece's most important pieces of literary art doesn't have to have accurate representation as far as its characters go because it's European, right? And I don't know how to say this without sort of having some fighting words, but if you are okay with things like this being race swapped because you ultimately like the outcome of the film or whatever it might be, that doesn't sit too well with me. sort of like people arguing I'm okay with cows and pigs being tortured in factory farms if it means that my bacon is cheaper. I don't I don't like that. That doesn't that does not that does not mesh with me. And I'm going to take this one step further and take aim at other commentators in this space too. If you are somebody who has complained and cried about race swapping at any point during your career and you are sitting here saying, "But I liked the movie and the race swapping's fine because we don't really see it that much in the movie." I don't think you get to complain about race swapping ever again. I'm sorry if you pick and choose where you think it's okay and it's predicated on whether you like the thing or not. Y'all are just some big hypocrite babies and I'm not okay with it. There was functionally no reason to make these casting choices. It would have been just as easy to put people in these roles who actually looked like the characters that were being described. There was no point during this movie where I was like, you know what? Yeah, we're watching a story that's about ancient Greece, told in Greece, and has been told in Greece for thousands of years, and that's exactly what we're seeing on screen. Hell yeah. That's that's exactly it. At no point did I feel like that. The movie starts with Travis Scott not even playing a role. He's just playing himself and doing his normal accent which sounds sort of a bonexy and and he's saying a thing and then you have another part of the movie that people made fun of on Twitter a lot where you have an Indian man walking up to a group of people and saying we the diverse cast the diverse crew we are Greeks from Ithaca. So if we accept this and we say, you know what, I'm okay with it. I'm okay with these components and these things that are objectively wrong because I like the outcome, you're just giving Hollywood license to keep doing this sort of thing and to keep stripping stories down and being disrespectful and being subversive and all that kind of stuff. You're just giving them license to keep doing it because you're going to bend over and basically say, "I'm fine with this." I mean, bend over and be like, "Uh, not the not the other, not the you." Okay.
Anyway, like I said, Christopher Nolan was never trying to make Homer's story. He was trying to do something else. And as I've said in the past, there is nothing wrong with taking that which already exists and using it as inspiration. If Nolan really wanted to tell an anti-war story with a PTSD survivor and he wanted to use Odysius to do that, I actually think that's perfectly fine and I think that there is a time and place to do so. But don't call it the Odyssey and don't try to sell it as something that will be a rival to the original text in creativity and spirit because that just didn't happen here. I think the Odyssey is amazing. I honestly think that a lot of uh literature like this is amazing because it's been interpreted and utilized in so many different ways over the years. It creates all sorts of conversation. It has people looking into different components and, you know, making arguments around it like I've done in this video. And I think that is incredibly cool and incredibly powerful. But to argue that this film is the Odyssey as Homer's Odyssey and that it's, you know, some accurate representation of it is just not true. Uh, and that's not accurate. In the end, it is disappointing to me to see a film like this that could have been taken in an honest direction, in a Homer orientated direction, and simply not have that happen because the story of the Odyssey is incredibly cool. And there's a lot of different components to it that make it such an enduring and interesting read. But as far as Christopher Nolan goes, I'm incredibly disappointed with what I watched and I'm incredibly disappointed with many of the choices that were made. And I don't agree at all with all of the people who were saying that this is some massive triumph because in my opinion it just simply isn't.
Now on that very happy and pleasant note and before I open the floor to all of you, this is just a reminder to check out Incogn using the link in the description. If you are scared of Zidata brokers like I am, they freak me out so weird. Then uh absolutely check Incogn and make sure to get your damn private information off the internet.
Now I open the floor to all of you. What do you all think? Have you seen this movie? Did you enjoy it? Did you not enjoy it? Are you going to give it a miss for the time being and see it when it comes out on streaming? If you have seen it, what do you think of my interpretation that it's sort of assassinating the story uh of the Odyssey and assassinating Odicius's character? Do you think that that's fair? Do you think that's unfair? Are you somebody who's familiar with the literature and you agree with my take? Are you familiar and you disagree with my take? What do you think of the many components that make the crew look like idiots in this story? Do you think that it's fair? Do you think that it's unfair? What do you think of the whole PTSD component that's taking place here? Is there a time and place to tell that story with relation to Odysius? Is this not the time and place? And what do you generally make of this issue overall?
As always, if you have made it this far in the video, baby birds, well, you deserve a medal. But more importantly, if you've made it this far, congratulations. since I always like having you along for the full ride. If you are new here, you're not subscribed already and you would like to see more of me and more of this kind of content, feel free to subscribe to the channel, as well as saving this video a like and a comment because I do read the majority of them and I like hearing your feedback. Like I always say, my wonderful little chickity people, I hope you stay safe and well and make very, very, very good choices and I will see your beautiful little faces in the next video.