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Just got back from The Odyssey. What did you guys think of it apart from culture-war implications?
I'm glad that there were no gratuitous sex scenes. I guess I'm one of those sexless zoomers. I actually think they went too far in this regard. They could have gotten some topless models as sirens or had Calypso be thirstier.
Lupita Nyong'o, E. Page, and Zendaya really are miscast. It's not a meme. Charlize Theron should have been Athena.
It was pretty cool how they tied in the establishment of the oral mythic history of the Trojan War and forshadowed the collapse of the bronze age (spoiler alert: the Greeks are the sea peoples).
I'd say it's better than Dunkirk and Batman Begins but worse than all of Nolan's other films (I've never seen Tenet or Insomnia).
I just saw it and thought that it was what Nolan does well, which is do a popcorn flick that gives you enough of a "it's not just a popcorn flick, there's something greater there" while you're watching it to sufficiently give you an illusion of a deeper experience than it is, contributing to the enjoyment (for the duration of the flick). The incongruous aspects were there, but in the end the silliest stuff were the constant "people of the sea" / "age of bronze is over" style "historical" callbacks.
One thing I've seen people comment on is that it goes against the myth to cast Odysseus as a traumatized war veteran from the sack of Troy and that this, too, is a woke modernist intervention, but I think it mostly just tries to answer one of the central actual problems of Odyssey from a modern view; that we're constantly told that Odysseus is the smartest of the Greeks, but he also continously behaves like a moron, like taunting the Cyclops while escaping from it, wanting to listen to the sirens (sure, nothing happens, but it's still stupid and impulsive!) and so on. Sure, in the original culture he's smart because he comes up with clever tactics and stratagems while still being a standard Bronze Age warrior leader in other ways, but in modern storytelling a smart character needs a special reason if he's continuously behaving stupidly, and Nolan attemps to give him one. Could this have been handled better? Perhaps, but it's one way to do it.
Incidentally, when it comes to Zendaya as Athena, I think the movie very strongly suggests that "actual" goddess Athena is not actually really talking to Odysseus at all and Odysseus is just hallucinating the priestess he saw getting killed at the temple in Troy as Athena. They make sure to contrast the white, European-featured Athena statue at the temple with Zendaya-as-priestess in that scene, and no-one else seems to be seeing Athena anyhow, and the discussions are centered on Odysseus's attempts to handle that trauma.
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I haven't watched the film and the only version I read was a novelization for 5th graders, but those strike me less as stupid (though they are) than as conceited, arrogant, and hubristic. Intelligence and cleverness is one of those things that's jagged enough and not sufficiently anti-correlated with negative personality traits that very intelligent, high performing people being bumbling idiots in certain contexts such as things regarding their egos which are sometimes way overinflated even beyond what they deserve to be is a common cliche among humans IRL and in fiction today.
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