The Odyssey Was EVEN WORSE Than I Expected. Here’s Everything Wrong With It | Ep. 1809

Now that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been released to near unanimous critical acclaim and significant box office success, we've been told that all the criticisms made against the film prior to its release, mostly by conservatives, have been proven baseless, even embarrassing. Those who raised concerns about the movie should now hang their heads in shame and crawl before Christopher Nolan on hands and knees, begging for forgiveness, offering gifts of supplication like an ancient Greek standing before the shrine of Apollo. This has been the basic inclusion of commentators on the left and even a fair number of commentators on the right. The wokeness allegations, they say, have been refuted. The movie is an artistic triumph, a masterpiece. And now it is our job to show that we are culturally in tune by joining in with the applause or at least ceasing our criticisms. That is the general consensus, as you've probably heard. And the general consensus is, as the general consensus so often tends to be, wrong.

Now that I've actually seen the movie, I can definitively say that every single criticism from conservatives was entirely correct on every point. We were not only correct in our prejudgment, but much more correct than we ever knew. You can judge a book by its cover most of the time, and the cover of this one had a gender-confused woman in a man costume and a race-swapped Helen of Troy. We judged those to be massive red flags, and turns out we were right. The Odyssey is indeed a three-hour-long middle finger to its source material, to Western civilization, to white people, to Greeks, to literature, and to movies in general. It contradicts itself to the point that every important aspect of the story, from the plot to the theme to the characterization, is reduced in coherence. The dialogue, in the rare moments where it's even intelligible, is often clunky and heavy-handed and wildly out of place. Most of all, the film does not feel like a story set in the ancient world, which is a fatal problem for a film set in the ancient world. It barely feels like a film at all. In fact, it has more the feel of a rough draft, a V1 that Nolan was contractually obligated to produce, which probably isn't far from the truth.

Everybody understands that with the rise of streaming services and the glut of content all over the internet, movie theater attendance has plummeted. Profit margins in the entertainment industry are lower than they've ever been. And at this point, now that Marvel has, uh, died, at least for now, there are only two reliable ways to fill theaters and generate significant profit, at least from the perspective of movie studios. And the first approach is to fund an existing IP, to include very recently viral meme IPs like Back Rooms. And the second approach is to produce an event film by, by somebody like Christopher Nolan, an epic that has enough set pieces and, and, and feels big enough that people will be compelled to get off their sofa and pay $20 to see it. And that's what we have here. Nolan is done making original, risky stories that might not go over well. The days when he made Memento are over for the simple reason that you don't need an IMAX theater to enjoy a film like Memento. You can watch it on your phone and get basically the same experience because it's a high-concept, dialogue-driven film with no reliance on giant monsters or 20 different A-list actors filling out the cast. Not that there's anything wrong with giant monsters, by the way. That's actually one of the only good points of Nolan's Odyssey, as we'll discuss. But in any case, with very few exceptions, films like Memento are no longer interesting to the big studios or to directors like Nolan. They're only interested in greenlighting films like this one. So, whether you like it or not, that's the economic reality of the industry right now. And there's nothing wrong with a film like this one, either, by the way. At least conceptually, an event film, an epic film based on an ancient foundational story of Western civilization could be, should be, a wonderful thing, which makes the failure of this film all the more tragic.

Now, to be sure, if any director could withstand those pressures, you'd think it would be Nolan. He's about as bankable as a director can possibly be. But you have to wonder, especially after the flop that was Tenet, if he's lost his will to do anything particularly novel or outside the box. Tenet lost something like $100 million for the studio, which was only partially because of, people didn't like the movie for the understandable reason that it made no sense. So now, after that catastrophe, maybe Nolan is more concerned with protecting his image, which is why he's increasingly relying on established stories and massive ensemble casts. Whatever the case, The Odyssey is a striking example of a director who, whether he's aware of it or not, is terrified of failing to meet expectations. He wants to give everybody, from audiences to the suits at Universal Pictures, exactly what they expect. And that means he must adhere to every norm in Hollywood, from DEI casting to one-dimensional characters and lots of sentimental nonsense. It also means that Nolan has to participate in Hollywood's larger objective, which is to subvert American culture by making everything gayer, more feminine, less patriotic, more depressing, and of course, less white.

Now, I've seen people desperately trying to describe this film as pathbreaking, awe-inspiring, even transgressive, almost as if they're trying to make it true by saying so. But infusing modern liberal values into an ancient story is pretty much the least transgressive thing a Hollywood director can do. It's utterly clichéed and expected, not the slightest bit challenging or interesting or bold. Nolan's not interested in telling transgressive stories. He's too afraid. And that's at least that's one theory. I mean, you can make up your own, uh, explanations for Nolan's motives. Whatever the motives are, the end result speaks for itself. And to begin with, yes, this movie was just as woke as we thought it would be. The DEI casting in particular is far worse than we knew. Far worse. Nolan's version of ancient Greece is a kind of multi-racial utopia. Well, perhaps not utopia. Actually, Nolan's ancient Greece is relentlessly drab and dreary and depressing and colorless. All the buildings look like ancient ruins, which, yes, it makes sense for those buildings to look like ancient ruins today, but they would not have all been ancient ruins in ancient times. So, this is not a utopia, but in Nolan's vision, it is nonetheless absurdly diverse and multi-racial. Blacks and Asians, Hispanics, somehow all coexisting in the Mediterranean 3,000 years ago.

Now, Nolan does not softly coax the audience into the DEI net, easing us into it slowly but surely. No, he cranks the diversity meter up to a thousand from the very first frame. The first character we see is the rapper Travis Scott, who somehow manages to turn in a bad performance despite appearing on screen for 12 seconds. He got 12 seconds, and he completely botched it, somehow. And then we see Ellen Page portrayed, uh, portraying a Greek warrior, waddling around the desert like a child with a soiled diaper, straining under her rubber armor, looking like she's about to die even before she gets shot through with arrows. The defenders of this film, especially on the right, have tried to claim that Page's appearance is not a huge problem because she only has a small role. You've probably heard that it's a very small role. Now, I don't want to ascribe sinister motives to anybody or accuse them of lying. So, I will generously assume that the conservative commentators making that claim must have fallen asleep 10 seconds into the movie, which would be totally understandable. Frankly, if they actually watched the entire thing in a state of full consciousness or at least half consciousness, then they would know that Ellen Page is not a minor character in this film at all. She is utterly pivotal to the plot. She's one of the most important characters in the entire film. She is more than that, and as Steve Dies has pointed out, the moral conscience of the story. Her 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. There is no doubt about that. If any director but Christopher Nolan had done this, he would have no conservative defenders at all. To claim that a movie is not woke when there's a trans-identified female actress pretending to be a male Greek warrior who serves as the linchpin of the plot and the film's moral conscience is just ridiculous. I mean, if we're going to rightly claim that it's woke to have a brown-skinned Hispanic Snow White, then how can we possibly argue that there's nothing woke about a trans female portraying an ancient Greek warrior?

Now, the argument from Nolan's conservative defenders seems to be rather explicitly that it's okay when Nolan does it. I find that argument to be unpersuasive, if not pathetic. Indeed, if you believe that Nolan is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, then the logical conclusion is that it's worse when he does it, not better. DEI casting in a crappy Snow White remake directed by random Disney director number 1242 is far less significant and culturally corrosive than DEI casting by one of the most influential and marketable filmmakers of all time, obviously. And that's not where the diversity casting ends. Not by a long shot. Odysseus's crew consists of, uh, many people of different races, multiple Asians, including a second in command. Now, this character, the second in command, played by the actor Himesh Patel, has a heavy presence in the film. He has a ton of screen time. And every minute he's visible on screen is another minute where total immersion in the story is impossible. I mean, at one point, this character says the line, "We're Greeks from Ithaca." And it's one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments in the movie. Now, there are no intentionally hilarious moments, as the movie, unlike Homer's original epic, is totally humorless, utterly devoid of charm or wit. But there are several moments where you can't help but laugh. And this is one of them. I mean, imagine a movie set in 12th century China where a white actor with a slight southern accent looks at the camera and says, "We're Chinese from the Chengdu province," and you'll get an idea of how totally ludicrous this spectacle is. All that to say, this is one of the most out-of-place characters I've seen in a major film in memory. And on top of that, his performance itself was flat and bland and uninspired. He brought nothing to the role. I mean, if you're not going to look the part, at least act the part, but he doesn't even do that. So, why is he there? Okay, anyone trying to rescue Nolan from wokeness allegations, answer me this: Why was that guy in that role? It was a bland, pointless performance. He wasn't there because of his acting chops. So, what was it? I wonder.

Now, as a side note, I'll mention that Patel was actually born in the UK. He's a, he has a British accent. Yet, in this movie, he affects an American accent. All the actors, even the British ones, use a contemporary American accent. This was a creative choice by Nolan, but it doesn't work. You know, I'm, I'm not saying that Nolan had to go full Mel Gibson and have the characters all speak in the original language of the source material, although I personally would have appreciated that. Uh, but I'm not saying you have to do that. I'm saying that if you're going to make a movie set in the ancient world, the characters should speak in a way that sounds and feels ancient. Having them speak in a modern accent, using modern slang and modern colloquialisms, interferes with the immersion into the film, which is a theme we'll return to frequently. So, put it another way, in a story set 3,000 years in the past, none of the characters should look or sound or act like someone who's ever been to a McDonald's. And yet, they all look and sound and act exactly like that.

But back to the DEI elements now. Even if you pretend that Himesh Patel is a good actor, the casting doesn't work. I mean, keep in mind, this is a movie about how difficult it was for Odysseus and his crew to travel just 560 nautical miles from Troy to Ithaca. This is a point that Steve Sailor made on his Substack. In ideal circumstances, with no interruptions, ancient boats could have made that trip in about a week. But the journey takes Odysseus many years with considerable interruptions along the way, of course. And that gives you an idea of how fraught it was to travel even short distances at that time. And yet, in defiance of all common sense and logistics, a bunch, a bunch of South Asians apparently managed to travel thousands of miles to Greece where they joined Odysseus's crew. In fact, in this version of the ancient world, people from all over the globe apparently travel and intermingle with each other with ease. And the problem here, one of the problems anyway, is that 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. In 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.

Now, Nolan was obviously aware of all these issues. You know, 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. It'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. And yeah, you'll hear some conservatives defending Nolan on this point. Their main argument, as best I can tell, is that the DEI casting is relatively minimal and doesn't take up much screen time. But 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. I 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. And they would be correct. If the movie was set in sub-Saharan Africa in the year 1100 and Chris Pratt showed up in tribal garb and said, "Howdy there, folks, I'm an African tribal chieftain. How do you do?" There wouldn't be a single soul on the planet who would defend that obviously preposterous casting choice. Yet, the same thing is done in reverse to a foundational text of Western civilization. And even conservatives line up to defend it. Again, the word that comes to mind is pathetic.

Now, if you're a conservative and you're unwilling to tell the truth about what's happening here for fear of being labeled a culture warrior or something, god forbid. We don't want to be culture. You wouldn't want to fight for the culture? Well, who would want to do that? That's silly. That's ridiculous. Uh, but if you have those reservations, you should know the left has no such reservations. They explicitly want future generations to see Western culture as a universal product, as the outgrowth of modern-day diversity with no distinct contribution from whites. There's no better way to undermine the future of Western civilization than to pretend Western civilization was invented by everybody as some kind of multi-racial democratic group effort. And that's why they're doing this. That's what they're going for, whether you want to pay attention or not.

Now, when I made this point on X, I was informed that actually white people are supposedly doing the exact same thing. I was told that there are plenty of films, uh, recent films where white actors are taking roles where they don't belong as an effort to stamp out other cultures. And as evidence of this proposition, I was informed about the existence of precisely one movie called Gods of Egypt. And this came into my feed a bunch of times because a lot, you know, I made this point about if this happened in reverse, everybody would be upset. This is the only movie anyone, all of a sudden everybody was a Gods of Egypt. Like no one's ever heard of that movie. Well, as you can see from the poster there, the, uh, film features Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Rush, who don't appear to be Egyptian, and yet they're starring in a film called Gods of Egypt. So, so there you have it. White people are, are trying to erase non-whites from Hollywood. I have to admit, it's amusing, if nothing else. People are desperately searching for an example of a modern movie that's been race-swapped like The Odyssey, but in the opposite direction. And the best they can do is some obscure film nobody's heard about from 10 years ago that nobody watched and has a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes that was, in fact, panned by everybody. So, if your intention was to prove my point, you succeeded. Like I said, these race swaps only go in one direction, and everybody knows it.

Now, if I had to play devil's advocate, I'd say that the conservatives, you know, are giving Nolan a pass on the casting because they think the overall message of the film is conservative. But that's not true either. Not even close. Okay. During the film, you'll get multiple lectures from women about how they're oppressed by the patriarchy. Late in the film, we're treated to a cartoonishly anachronistic speech from Odysseus's wife, Penelope, about how unfair it is that the suitors won't let her become king. In Odysseus's absence, she has, you know, all this knowledge and wisdom, but the patriarchy is keeping her down. And it's played completely straight, even though it's clearly a clumsy attempt to airdrop contemporary feminist attitudes into a story where it doesn't belong and into a time period where such attitudes did not exist. And certainly at no point in Homer's Odyssey did Penelope whine about how she could take over as king because it would have been, been totally absurd. But in this film, with a supposedly conservative message, we're supposed to be okay with the idea that Penelope has the exact same attitude you expect from a newly minted Women's Studies major in the Bronx.

Then there's the fact that the film goes out of its way to strip the story of divinity as much as possible. Nolan suggests that Odysseus's problems amount to bad luck rather than divine intervention. No gods show up at all. Zeus and Poseidon don't appear as characters. Only goddesses appear in the film, and then only as PTSD hallucinations, basically. Uh, Zenaida as Athena pops up incessantly, and again, just does nothing with the role. That's a theme here. You have these actors. The, the movie is chock-full of A-list actors. A lot of them doing nothing with the roles they're given. It's amazing. It's kind of amazing to watch. She's in this. She does nothing. She just kind of soberly, somberly stares at Odysseus. That's all that happens. But the point is that she isn't real within the context of the story. She's a kind of therapeutic coping mechanism for a man struggling with trauma. Nolan's Odyssey, unlike Homer's, is a story completely disenchanted, devoid of the supernatural, aside from like the odd witch or two that shows up. And now Nolan's apologists will say that, well, he did this because he was going for a more grounded film, right? That's what we keep hearing. Well, it's a grounded, it's a grounded film. Oh, okay, then. So, um, oh, grounded. Grounded is what we're doing. So, so then why does ancient Greece have the demographic makeup of Los Angeles circa 2026? Why is there a tiny little woman running around pretending to be a dude? Why is there an Asian guy delivering the line, "We're Greeks from Ithaca"? Grounded. Really? Grounded in what? So, the apologists are letting Nolan have his cake and eat it, too. Like always. I mean, you cannot argue that Nolan had to take the gods out of a story of Greek mythology in order to ground it and then also argue that Ellen Page's appearance isn't a major problem. In fact, Nolan himself has said that he expelled the gods from his films, uh, from this film because he preferred to handle the supernatural in a quote, "real-world way." Well, again, if he's worried about the real world of ancient Greece, then why does ancient Greece look absolutely nothing like ancient Greece?

Now, to the extent that Zeus does play a role in Nolan's film, it's because he's mentioned about 500 times in the context of "Zeus's law," uh, quote unquote. Again, this is a concept that doesn't exist, at least in the way Nolan portrays it in Homer's Odyssey. The idea of Zeus's law, uh, as the characters tell you to your face, and one of the many examples of on-the-nose exposition that that treats the audience like it has a collective IQ of 45, is that Greeks should treat strangers as they'd like to be treated. Now, more broadly, Zeus's law is Nolan's spin on the Greek's concept of xenia, or hospitality, which, uh, does play an important role in Homer's poem. But contrary to what Nolan seems to think, his idea of Zeus's law is very different from the Greek concept of hospitality as outlined in Homer. I mean, and you don't have to squint very hard to see how Nolan is trying to twist this concept into a not-very-subtle sermon about modern-day immigration policy. And in Nolan's film, Odysseus spends a significant amount of time moping around, sullen and depressed, after enabling the destruction of Troy by using the Trojan horse. And for those who somehow aren't familiar, the Greeks presented the horse as a gift, but they had filled it with soldiers, and at night, the soldiers opened the gates of Troy, enabling the Greek army to invade. So, this was a massive and unlikely victory which was brought about because of the Greeks' trickery and cunning. And in Homer, it was a heroic maneuver. Odysseus had outsmarted his enemies, which was a virtue. It was not portrayed in Homer as a violation of xenia or hospitality or anything like that. There was no sense that Odysseus, Odysseus had committed some grave crime. Odysseus was very, uh, confident, but, but he was also effective in crushing his enemies. In Homer, xenia didn't mean that you would never trick your enemy in a war. It was about hospitality, a very different concept that applied to your dealings with strangers.

And on the other hand, in Nolan's film, uh, Zeus's law works very differently. Zeus's law, as Odysseus explains it, means that you're not supposed to use gifts like the Trojan horse as a trick in order to enable a ground invasion. So, in other words, whether Nolan realizes it or not, he's completely bastardized a central concept in the poem. And in the name of this bastardization, Nolan transforms Odysseus into a whiny, sullen shell of a man plagued by trauma and guilt because he violated some fake idea of Zeus's law by destroying Troy. Of course, the idea of an ancient warrior feeling really bad about a glorious victory is absurd on its face. And the more you think about it, the worse it gets. I mean, if you have any familiarity at all with the source material, it's actually kind of incredible that Nolan would even try this. First, the Trojan horse wasn't the start of the conflict. You know, it, it's not as though Odysseus started the war by defying some sacred norm. The film suggests the war actually started over trade routes, and Helen was basically a pretext and was not, in fact, the most beautiful woman in the world. So, it's not clear why it's some grave sin to end a war that's been going on for 10 years with all the brutality that war entails. I mean, is the implication that it would also be unethical to execute a clever flanking maneuver that tricked an enemy general? Would the Battle of Chancellorsville be a violation of Zeus's law? Who knows? The other problem is that in the film, Odysseus is so weepy and sad about his violation of Zeus's law that he decides to go into exile. But first, he has to kill a bunch of suitors who are trying to marry his wife. Specifically, he has to pretend to be a beggar in order to infiltrate the palace, at which point he'll launch a surprise attack where he brutally murders the suitors. So, in other words, in order to rectify his violation of Zeus's law during the Trojan War that he feels really bad about in the movie, Odysseus violates Zeus's law again by killing the suitors using trickery, uh, you know, to get into the palace. But he thinks it's partially okay, I guess, because the suitors themselves were taking advantage of Penelope's hospitality by getting drunk in the palace and hitting on Penelope while Odysseus was away. And then after this massacre, Odysseus decides that he's tired of violating Zeus's law and sails away with Penelope. So, spoiler alert. Yeah, a little late. So, uh, he, he does not in this movie, he does not reclaim the throne in glory. He also doesn't die for his sins. Both of those would have been decisive choices that clarified the themes and concluded the story. But Nolan chooses the third and most indecisive route, having Odysseus, uh, leave and hand the throne to his son, who, portrayed by Tom Holland, will presumably bore all of his subjects to death, as he'd done to the audience for three hours with his insipid, dull performance.

So, part of the problem when you create a new interpretation of this, quote unquote, law is that your characters have to interact with that. And in this case, the characters interact with the law in ways that don't make much sense. This is a problem Nolan creates that didn't exist in Homer. He made the central character of the story become depressed over violating some law that doesn't make sense, which derails the entire story and makes everybody's motivations murky and uncertain. And in fact, this is a catastrophic error so severe that even Emily Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania feminist who, who wrote a woke translation of the Odyssey that Nolan relied on for the film, is now publicly calling out the film's portrayal of Odysseus. This is one of the more amusing developments of this whole saga. I mean, even the woke translator can't take it anymore. She's siding with the crazy right-wingers. Watch.

>> What did you think about the film in terms of this notion of the Odyssey as an anti-war text?

>> I mean, I thought it, I want to, you know, not spoil anything about the film because I know the majority of people haven't seen the film. Um, I mean, the, the film has these flashbacks to the Trojan War. I'm not sure if I see it as an entirely anti-war film, but it certainly presents us with an Odysseus 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 psychiatrist way. And he's struggling to process them and needs drugs to do so and 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 warriroring, which I thought in a way was a bit of a shame. I mean, we, we do get to see the boat, which is lovely, but I think in some ways, I mean, I was realizing having thinking about the, the film. There's a tolerance for ambiguity in the world of the Odyssey, which I don't think there exactly is in the world of Hollywood blockbuster action films, right? And I think that's one of the big challenges for Nolan, right? Is that he >> has to make the protagonist >> a likable all-American hero, right? Which is a real challenge if you're, if you're basing this on a poem where the hero is not necessarily motiv, motiv, motivated by romantic love or being a nice suburban parent, but actually by, 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.

Well, she's right. I never thought I'd say that about someone that looks like that. But, and when she says that, uh, by the way, that that Odysseus uses drugs to deal with his trauma, that is also in the movie. He, he essentially, he's essentially taking like the ancient equivalent of SSRIs to, uh, help deal with his depression. I mean, that's that's what's in this movie. I'm not making this up. And this is the same woman, by the way, that we just saw who suggested that Odysseus was a problematic hero who, who says he's complicated in her translation. She routinely chose words to make Odysseus seem less heroic and noble. So, she clearly is coming at the story from a feminist, modern perspective. And even for her, Nolan's film was a little too weepy, you know, a little too morose. Nolan took a story about an epic hero, as she said, that's about glory, and made him peevish and insecure. All because Odysseus violated some fake law Nolan invented, which apparently says you're not supposed to use clever strategies to win wars. It's reminiscent of Oppenheimer, where Nolan made it clear he had a similar attitude, of course, about the atomic bomb. And this is just rehearsing, rehashing, I should say, those, those exact same themes in this story.

Now, um, 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. And more importantly, it all points to the film's greatest fundamental flaw, which was Nolan's decision to infuse modern psychology and therapy speak into a story about an ancient warrior three millennia ago. Okay. In the ancient world, to triumph in battle was the greatest virtue. It would not be a source of shame. That is a modern attitude. It is not an ancient one. Now, if Nolan wanted to make a modernized version of the Odyssey that imposes modern psychology and modern preoccupations, not to mention racial demographics, onto an ancient epic. Well, he could have done an interpretation set in the current day. There are many examples of that kind of thing, and some of them are pretty good. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? set in 1930s America comes to mind. But transposing the modern mindset and worldview into the ancient world turns the whole thing into a farce, which is why a number of scenes look and feel kind of like a Mel Brooks movie with better cinematography. I mean, it's it's totally absurd. What's the point of a story set in ancient times that doesn't even try to actually capture the look and feel and perspective, most importantly, of ancient times? The best films set in the ancient past are able to transport you to that world and crucially show you the world through the eyes of those people. That is the magic of film, at least good films. And Nolan never achieves this. He never comes close to achieving it. He never even tries. It seems in Apocalypto, Mel Gibson transports you into the mind of a Mayan 500 years ago. In The Northman, Robert Eggers transports you into the mind of a Viking a thousand years ago. And in The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan transports you into the mind of a liberal woman in 2017. At no point in the story does Nolan ever actually take the audience to the ancient world. You never feel like you're 3,000 years in the past. You feel like you're watching modern liberal Westerners put on a pageant because you are. Nobody would be calling this thing a masterpiece if it was made by a director not named Christopher Nolan. There's a difference between buying something because it looks cool and buying something because it's built well. You know, one goes out of style while the other just gets better with age. And that's the reason I appreciate Tokovos. A good pair of boots isn't supposed to be complicated. They should fit well, hold up, and feel like they've been yours for years the first time you put them on. Tokovos has mastered that feeling. 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Now, 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. I just want to see a well-constructed movie on a technical level. Well, 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. For the most part, it's disjointed, dull, self-serious, convoluted, somehow feeling both verbose and overly rushed at the same time. The dialogue is some of the worst I've ever heard in a critically acclaimed film. On-the-nose and clunky are descriptions that can't even begin to describe the script. The Odyssey is the kind of movie where a character in the Bronze Age actually says, "I'm not making this up, the Age of Bronze is collapsing." And the dialogue is like that throughout. I mean, you cannot have genuinely subpar, sometimes bafflingly stupid dialogue in a masterpiece film. One can only imagine a character in a Christopher Nolan movie set in the Middle Ages: "Gez, you know, hey guys, the Middle Ages are pretty tough. Hey, how are you guys all feeling in in these here Middle Ages? Pretty tough, huh?" Or maybe in in 1917, a character might say, "Well, thank God World War I is coming to an end."

On top of the bad writing, the dialogue itself is often difficult to hear. The score routinely drowns out the words, which is a recurring problem for Nolan. It's, and it's kind of an inexcusable problem. I mean, people always say that about Nolan films, like, "Oh, yeah, you know, Nolan films, you can't understand the dialogue." Well, I don't know. That seems like a kind of a serious problem, especially if we're talking with the greatest director of all time. Like, you should be able to understand the dialogue at least. But as the film passes the two-hour mark, you start to think of the problem as more of a blessing. I mean, if you're missing any lines of dialogue, then you can console yourself with the fact that you really aren't missing much. The film does not capture the grandeur and scope of the original epic. That's why it feels truncated and drawn out simultaneously. None of the scenes are given any time to breathe. You know, we check in and check out quickly. And of course, one of the great challenges of adapting an ancient epic like the Odyssey is turning it into a coherent, propulsive film that tells a story in three hours, preferably two or two and a half actually, without feeling like a series of vignettes loosely connected to each other. And that means that you need to find the narrative throughline. You need to find the core of the story. So, in other words, any filmmaker taking on this source material will need to narrow it down, in effect, and streamline it because of the nature of the medium that he's working with. But Nolan never figures out how to do that. He can't narrow it down, or if he does, he narrows it around the wrong things. And so the movie, from a pure storytelling perspective, is a failure. Now, it's an understandable failure, perhaps in some ways, uh, maybe even an inevitable one, you might argue, but it's a failure nonetheless.

From a structural perspective, the story has a lot of inherent problems as well. Homer's poem is modular in many respects. Bards could tell specific tales, like the encounter with the Cyclops, and it would work really well. But when you crunch all these tales together in a three-hour-long movie, some cracks begin to emerge. And in The Odyssey, in the first half of the film, all of Odysseus's adventures seem to end the same way. It's kind of like the same thing. He'll land on some shoreline with his men. Uh, they'll encounter something promising, like a child who could offer them food or a sheep or whatever, and then they'll be ambushed by some horrible monster. Many of them will die, and, and Odysseus will order a full retreat to the boat. And we just kind of repeat this over and over again. It's like that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, basically playing again and again. Yeah. So, it's basically that over and over again. And, and you might, now 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, uh, when you're trying to adapt this source material. But avoiding that is part of the challenge if you're supposed to be a great filmmaker, right? That's, that's part of the whole, that's your job is, is to figure out a way to handle that. Um, there's one encounter like this in The Odyssey where Odysseus and his men come across a bunch of giants wearing armor, and the giants end up attacking them and damaging their boat and killing a bunch of them. As far as I can tell, the point of the sequence is to show, kind of show off the costume design of the giants so that the giants can be featured on marketing materials like this one, as you can see. And it looks really cool. I mean, it does look cool. They can put it on posters and blast it all over Reddit, and that's kind of it. The scene doesn't really serve in Nolan's story any purpose beyond that. Uh, it doesn't advance the story that Nolan is telling. They just immediately run from the giants like it's a Monty Python movie.

Now, that said, I will praise, uh, the visuals of the film, and particularly in one respect. They, they kind of mark a return to Jurassic Park style effects rather than CGI. And you can see how they built the Cyclops here, for example. And in general, throughout the film, the practical effects are impressive. I mean, they're easily the best part of the entire project. Better than the acting, the plot, the dialogue, the score, everything. Nolan absolutely deserves an Oscar for visual effects. Not for any other category, although he surely will win every other category, too. But, but even the Cyclops scene, despite being one of the best sequences in the film, feels abbreviated and ultimately kind of empty in Nolan's telling. It's, it's missing something. Even the good scenes in the movie, when they come up, it's, there's something missing here. And what's missing in the case of the Cyclops scene is the wit and humor of the original because Christopher Nolan has an apparent religious objection to including anything witty or humorous in his films. Everything, everything must be approached with this kind of reverent, ominous, self-seriousness all the time. That's the only tone that he's capable of. Even scenarios that are meant to be absurd. A bunch of guys trapped in a cave with a giant cyclops and a herd of sheep. That's absurd. There's something quite silly about that. And it's meant to be. But Nolan isn't capable of juggling two tones at once. In this case, absurdity and tension. That scene should be tense, yes, because you're trapped in the cave, but also absurd. And, and he can't do both. So he always just chooses tension, and so the whole movie is one-note for this reason. Now compare this to say, the Coen brothers, uh, just for example, who are able to write scenes in pretty much all their movies that are both hilarious and suspenseful and disturbing at the same time. And it, much of this movie needed that kind of touch. It needed that kind of tone where we can do two things at once. I would have loved to see what the Coen brothers could have done with the Cyclops sequence, for example. And actually, come to think of it, we did see that with John Goodman's Bible Salesman character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? And, uh, and this movie and the Cyclops scene in particular called again for that kind of artistic touch, for that kind of tonal nuance. But Nolan, at least in this movie, was incapable of that.

Now, 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. You know, you could watch Master and Commander, or Apocalypto, The Northman, Gladiator, just to name the some of the best from this century. The Odyssey is well below those films on the list of historical epics. And 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, whether based on true events or entirely mythological. So, I wouldn't include, for example, like The Lord of the Rings on that list. Although those films, Lord of the Rings films are certainly superior to Nolan's Odyssey in every imaginable way, too. Now, truthfully, I have to search very hard to give Nolan credit for anything beyond the visual effects as it relates.

to this movie. But there was one point where the conservative critics, some of them at least, were wrong. Uh, the movie is not a flop. And not all conservative critics predicted that it would be, but uh, but to any that did, it was not a flop. It's a hit. It's a massive hit. Christopher Nolan is a cultural force the likes of which does not exist on the right at all. And we have to grapple with that fact. We have to do something about it besides complaining. Otherwise, we're going to watch as guys like Nolan continue to defile and defame the great works of Western civilization in front of an audience of tens of millions of people.

It's not entirely a lost cause, by the way. On Tuesday, somebody named John Carter wrote the following post on X. I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armor, weapons, and casting with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek. And just 24 hours later, Musk replied, "I'm down."

Now, this is the legacy of Nolan's Odyssey. If it actually leads to the creation of art that honors Western tradition and literature, then and only then can you make the case the film served some useful purpose. Otherwise, the film is precisely what we thought it would be. It's a mockery of the men who built civilization, an incoherent mess, wearing the skin suit of a foundational text. The film is not the Odyssey at all. In truth, it's an attempt to transform a distinct literary work into yet another tedious celebration of multiculturalism and leftist guilt tripping. And rather than pretending ridiculously that the film is secretly based or whatever, we have to admit that Nolan succeeded. He accomplished all of the goals he was trying to achieve. And in the process, he has created one of the most successful pieces of propaganda in the entire history of Hollywood. The fact that even conservative critics are strenuously defending a movie featuring a trans-identified female with top surgery in a pivotal role only proves that fact. And that's why we need to get to work. By the time Christopher Nolan is delivering his Oscar acceptance speech about his brave casting of Ellen Page as a Greek warrior or the many nuances of Zeus's law, we should have our own faithful production in the works. The only coherent message of Nolan's film is that conservatives have become far too complacent. And unlike everything else in this film, it's a message we should take seriously before these people destroy any other great works of literature they didn't create and which they apparently can't possibly understand.

That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed.

Once upon a time there was a country. Not just a country but a big one. An empire. And in that empire there was an upper middle class family who had two boys who were raised by their mother who loved books. Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Bible. Their father admired the country's leaders were patriotic and happy. Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized. One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader. He was hanged. The other brother read the same books but decided to lead a movement. First they came for the universities and no one seemed to care. Then they took over the unions and again no one seemed to care. Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities and again most people just ignored it. Change after all was something they could believe in until it was too late. Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism of the Russian Revolution.