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Notes -
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
I think it's funny that Emily Wilson and Ben Shapiro ended up having the same take: that Nolan's movie is therapeutic modernist post-christian hollywood slop that has no understanding of, respect for or even engagement with Homer's values. Ulysses without guile is pointless.
I never intended to see it and I'm comforted in my conviction. Why entertain art that has nothing to say? Why spend millions on IMAX cameras to make something with less spiritual content than an AI clip? I move that we separate Hollywood from the continent and turn it into a maximum security prison.
That would be the 1996 film Escape from LA. I endorse this policy proposal.
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I wouldn't say that it has nothing to say, whether it is a good movie or a good adaptation.
Nolan's Odyssey is a little-c conservative movie, about how civilization is a result of maintaining a tradition of law and order that people can believe in, and what happens when you undermine that belief and destroy your civilization as a result.
While I do think guilt has largely replaced hubris in the movie, I think a lot of the threads Nolan is pulling on are actually in the original epic in some form. Whether it is the Cretan Lie that Odysseus tells the loyal swineherd inspiring the Sea Peoples plotline, or Achilles speech in the Underworld (sadly ommitted in the movie), where he says he would rather be alive and a nobody than be the glorious dead warrior that he is, inspiring some of the anti-war (or anti-norm-violations-in-war) storyline of this movie. (And this is more of an Illiad thing, but Homer did a lot more to humanize the Trojans than many war movies do today. He gives the scene of Hector with his infant son, and often will give a short biography of a Trojan as he is cut down. Imagine a modern war movie showing a mini montage of a person's life every time an enemy soldier was killed!)
I liked the movie overall, and while there are scenes and episodes I wish that had been kept ("nobody", and the Phaeacians were sorely missed), I thought it was a fine retelling of the story. When the medieval world gave us things like Sir Orpheo (a retelling of Orpheus and Euridice, were she is kidnapped and taken to the Celtic Otherworld instead of the Greek Underworld, and it has a happy ending where they actually leave the Otherworld together), I don't really mind if an adaptation is unfaithful. We'll always have the original.
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