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Cultural war and cultural revolution continues, as it should.
Revolution has a beginning, but it has no end.
And the newest battle is the most ancient, Homer's - and Christopher Nolan’s - Odyssey.
Many are happy, many are unhappy, and among the latter is world's richest man, as expected.
Elon was unhappy so much that he promised to rifle through his pockets for some spare change and give Mel Gibson $100 million to remake Odyssey in fully authentic and historically accurate way, with Greek actors and spoken in proper Homeric Greek.
Then, the next day, he changed his mind. Directors - and actors - are as obsolete as draft horses, Grok can do it all alone and cheaper.
If it happens, would it make a difference? Elite Mottizen human capital had been talking and daydreaming for a long time about potential of money to change the world. If only we were rich men!
The real life billionaire and centi millionaire activism is not encouraging but we can always dream how we will do it right!
edit: links
My hot take is that The Iliad and The Odyssey just aren't very good. I'm sure they were great works for their time, but we are so much better at storytelling nowadays. Not to mention that poetry in translation is uniformly awful.
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One thing about the casting that I have seen very few people commenting on is just how weird the ages of all the actors are. I understand there are 10 years of war, then 10 more years of travel, but Matt Damon as a 40 year old at the beginning is not plausible, he only seems aptly cast for the end of the movie. Also why is he older than Agamemnon? Why is his wife so much younger than him? Did he have a child bride, knock her up then go off to war?
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i hope he follows though and I hope it's good. I hope it makes a lot of money and more people start doing stuff like this. While I don't expect AI films to fully replace Hollywood (at least not in the near future), I expect them to seriously increase competition and offer a great indie alternative.
I do expect AI to mostly take over for adding CGI effects in actual Hollywood though. CGI is just too prevalent and too expensive for them not to do this once the tech is good enough.
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I'm convinced that half of movie watchers must carry around a blindfold and earmuffs because holy shit Grok absolutely can not do it. Literally just freeze frame 11-12 seconds in and it is awful. The rowers in the back are all facing the wrong direction and the oars don't even touch the water. He's presumbly at the front of the ship and yet the sail is being blown in the other way, unless he's at the back of the ship in which case the wake is in front. I've also seen claims that the wheel type is achronistic and the armor is a mix of Greek/roman designs but can't confirm those. Although of course it shouldn't be of question anyway here because why is he wearing his armor on the boat?
Either way take almost any complex scene and you can spot these basic and obvious problems. No movie is perfect but if someone is talking about historical accuracy as their goal, it should actually have basic details right.
Low effort trolling even by your standards. AI can be more directionally on vibe than the 'real movie' even if having AI hallmarks
No piece of media is perfect, and that's often not the point anyway. Writers simply don't care about accuracy that much, and they never have, there's a reason why Artistic License is a very common trope on tvtropes. Even things that try to be more realistic feeling often compromise for better story/visuals/gameplay/etc depending on the genre, like Kingdom Come Deliverance. Sometimes even because true historical accuracy feels wrong to the average person.
For example from the KCD tvtropes page itself
But that's ok, because Nolan's The Odyssey is aiming to be a movie you want to watch first and foremost. KCD is aiming to be a game I want to play first and foremost, just like the consultant apparently said.
If your goal however isn't the entertainment or sales, but historical accuracy? Then you're gonna get graded way harsher on your mistakes there.
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I'd love for an Iliad or Odyssey film made by Robert Eggers in the same style as the Northman. With an attention to detail on historical and mythological realism, and a healthy mix of supernatural occurrence/doubt of the supernatural mixed in.
In retrospect I think a lot of the discourse and disappointment is just people confusing Nolan's autistic focus on "realism" in the sense of shooting everything he can with practical effects for an Eggers-style autism about capturing the vibe/mentality behind historical stories.
I have to wonder if I just disappointed myself here by assuming Nolan was ever going to do something like The Northman. Where was the evidence for that?
Some scenes of the Odyssey did seem to deliberately pay homage to Northman IMO, then immediately zigged back towards the milquetoast modern stuff.
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I would not care if the ghost of Roger Corman rose out of his unquiet grave to make a schlocky version of the Iliad or Odyssey, just somebody please give me a movie full of the burning Mediterranean sun and bright colours, and armour that looks like armour not "the costume department bought in a job-lot of black leather-type material from a closing down sale of fabrics manufacturer" or "soldered together a load of tin cans".
You can make the script as modern-day relevant as you like with Menelaus going to therapy over his PTSD and Clytemnestra being a Strong Independent Woman, I don't care, just no more "everybody schlubs around in unbleached fabrics and earth tones in the cloudy grey rocky nowhere". Give me colour, embroidery, jewellery, armour, brightness, dazzle, the golden world of the past in mythology!
I don't care if they cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, but let her appear as this Helen:
Worst part to me was taking out the Nobody dialogue with Polyphemus. One of the big Odysseus highlights gone for no reason
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So the Brad Pitt Troy, basically.
Haven't seen that one because I can't take Brad Pitt as Achilles seriously, but that at least does seem to have tried to stick to the story. I'm more interested in Hector as a lead character in the Iliad anyway, because he's not a psycho like Achilles (could be read as) and he's a decent guy caught in a trap because of his no-good younger brother.
I strongly recommend the book Song of Achilles, which focuses on the Achilles x Patroclus relationship. I found the book so compelling on an artistic level that I consider it canon.
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Not sure I'd agree. It completely cuts out any of the supernatural/divine elements, condenses the Trojan War into like two weeks (most of which is Hector's funeral), kills like half the cast in the opening engagement (IIRC Menelaus and Ajax die almost immediately), and takes sides much more overtly than the Homeric narrative. It is explicit that the war is a power play by Agamemnon, with Helen's abduction merely as an excuse, and there is not a whiff of the extensive honor culture that pervades the Iliad. Also, the dialog is terrible - apparently written by Benioff of Game of Thrones fame - and the all-star cast can't save it.
(Hilariously, Nolan was tapped at one point to direct Troy, but was passed over.)
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Hector (played by Eric Bana) basically is the main character for any parts shown from the Trojan perspective. The movie isn't high art or anything, and it takes some liberties with the story, but it seems better than what Nolan just put out at least. Also Peter O'Toole is great as King Priam.
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Related to this topic: Rotten Tomatoes manipulating review scores.
There's now a website account for the change the website made in around 2019, where it started weighing the scores towards ticket buyers through a phone app.
Odyssey was heavily featured as having a 97% Audience score on RT, but a 60% score when adjusted for the 2019 changes. More specific info can be found in the 'More Info' tab.
It's kind of crazy to me that this is spawned from /r/KotakuInAction . Old dogs continue to bark.
Would be a big deal if true, let's see what the alleged manipulation is.
"Before 2019, RT made you work to rate a film. You logged in, found the page, and submitted. So only motivated fans bothered.
After 2019, RT switched to a "PUSH" system. Ticket apps like Fandango ping you after the show. ONE TAP on 1–5 ⭐, and you're done"
That doesn't sound like manipulation, that actually sounds like a better system. You want to get an idea of what the general public believes, you poll the general public. Push notifications with easy reviews is how you get the casuals to tell you their opinion. Plus it being from the ticket apps means they're all inherently confirmed viewers too which helps to mitigate culture war shenanigans and review bombing.
Most movies having a negative "popcorn gap" should be expected, we know with all sorts of feedback systems that they skew away from normal users and towards complainers and the more friction there is the more the skew tends to be.
How do you explain a positive “popcorn gap?”
Rare occurances where for some reason the selection effect of "people who bother to write a review" are more positive than the casual viewer. I imagine it'll be heavily correlated with preexisting large fanbases.
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Why? Few would notice, and those that noticed would be ignored. To they extent they're not ignored, you'd have a good chunk of people coming up with arguments for why it's not true. Even if it somehow came out that it definitely is true, people would just shrug, like they did with the "far right conspiracy theory" of shadowbanninf on other social media.
Doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
It would be a big deal if actual manipulation could be shown and proven, particularly if it happened constantly and wasn't just a one off like "oh this reviewer got caught in a bribery scandal".
The big issue is that most of the time when people claim to find something like that they're wrong and everyone knows it's wrong and stupid so they get ignored. Like this right here, where the site is alleging manipulation as the bailey and then retreating to "it's just that they're polling the normies now instead of self selected users on the website" as the motte is not going to win anyone over.
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If it turns out that a rather banal culture war event about a mainstream Christopher Nolan film is what compels the creation of the techniques and tools to generate feature-length Hollywood-quality (in the sense that someone presented with that film and an actual Hollywood film has no better shot than a coin flip at guessing which one was the actual Hollywood film) films using AI tools, it would be a pretty hilarious result. Like how Will Smith's name will be forever immortalized in the annals of history as the guy whose depiction of eating spaghetti became a de facto standard AI video generation benchmark.
Speaking of which, back in ye earlye dayes of Stable Diffusion in 2022, Emma Watson had become a de facto standard benchmark for AI photo-like image generation, but I think that was abandoned a long time ago, to the extent that I think she won't be remembered for this. I haven't heard much about Watson recently or really, after Beauty and the Beast live-action remake, which is like a decade old now, and so perhaps 2022 was getting close to the end of her run of popularity, riding off the Harry Potter wave.
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I hope he does both. The Matter of Troy offers an infinite canvas for reinterpretation, and I'd love to see a firm effort from a Grok lead AI team to build a new version. Every work on the Matter of Troy, including Homer, is an interpretation, a new artistic spin on a series of events. The Greeks and Romans fought endlessly about Agamemnon: heroic leader or jackass who would get cucked while he was away and murked upon his return? Odysseus, charming trickster hero, or villain set for the inner circles of hell? Paris, romantic hero or kidnapper?
Dante puts him in Hell, no questions asked. I think he is an interesting character; he's clever, and he wins the war for the Greeks through stratagems not the heroic epic battle prowess of Achilles (whose end is to die young in a blaze of glory, more or less, but only for personal glory).
He doesn't want to go to the war in the first place, and is entangled in it by an ironic twist of fate (or karma coming to get him) because of his ploy back at the start to keep the peace between the warring suitors of Helen and make them all swear to come to the defence of her husband, whichever of them got picked as her husband. He wins the war by a series of shady to dishonourable tactics, and really does only want to get back home (he spends seven years as the sex toy of Calypso, weeping on the beach by day longing to get away before being dragged to the bedchamber at night).
When he does get home, it's not the triumphant return of Agamemnon (which got him killed in revenge), it's another trickster move and finally he kills all the suitors in the proper, heroic warrior, style (though very blood-soaked, and his hanging of the maidservants reads uncomfortably to modern eyes).
Some of his troubles he undoubtedly brought upon himself by being too clever for his own good (or not taking the long-term consequences of his deeds seriously enough, at times he's really just "get out of this immediate pickle and deal with the fall-out later") and it was only by having the patronage of Athena that he survived at all.
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Do it, make a realistic Odyssey. I want more conservative-morality, gritty media.
Complaining about a problem without advancing a solution just wastes your and audiences’ time and emotion.
Conservative morality of Late Bronze/Early Iron Age? Why not, if you want to retvrn, retvrn all the way back!
Any and all kinds of morality. I want more diverse media in the real sense of "diversity".
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In St. Johnsbury, Vermont, a town of 7k, there is the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. It was founded by an industrialist who was part of a family who got wealthy thanks to industrial weighing scales and I imagine 0% of the public in the US has heard of the guy (his brother also founded a museum that is in St. Johnsbury). Even so, the place is astounding. It has so many collections and so much stuff that it's impossible to process it all in a day. It would take many trips to really grasp everything that the Athenaeum has. You could spend hours just staring at this Bierstadt painting of Yosemite (it's 10' by 15'). These brothers were not wealthy to the level of Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, etc. and yet they spent money to build museums and collections that are still amazing 150 years later.
In contrast, the current richest man spends his time complaining about stuff on Xitter and proposing to have a computer make a movie.
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