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An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

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Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#161

Post by ctchocula »

throwaway3060 wrote: post #19

I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review. Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition…

[1] is a nice intro into what the current scientific consensus in what caused the Bronze Age collapse is, written by historian Bret Devereaux. The view he paints pretty much aligns with what Wilson wrote about there being no such thing as the "sea people".

[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#162

Post by globular-toast »

Marsymars wrote: post #151
globular-toast wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the 48fps release of The Hobbit is it was only available in 3D (and digital). I don't like 3D, not least because it gives me a headache after about 30 minutes, so watching a 3 hour film was not enjoyable at all (I hadn't internalised the sunken cost fallacy at the time; I shouldn't have stayed for the whole thing). IMAX shows that 3D is completely unnecessary. Gravity is the only 3D film worth seeing…

> I don't like 3D, not least because it gives me a headache after about 30 minutes FWIW, I get this too, but it's not actually because of the 3D effect, it's just because I have a big head and the glasses at theatres press on the side of my head, giving me a headache.

Yes, I do think it's the glasses that do it too. But that's only one reason. Even if I didn't feel like I'm watching the film through uncomfortable, bulky sunglasses, I still don't like the 3D effect. It only really works in a film like Gravity where the background is infinitely far away.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#163

Post by watwut »

antonvs wrote: post #86
warrenmiller wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are “ Nevertheless, Wilson acknowledged the impact the film is already having on cultural awareness of ancient Greek literature as well as cinema itself. Saying “the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate,” she suggests: “This epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas … translations of Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves … [and] perhaps the film will persuade a few college adminis…

It reminds me of the recent claim about how AI is resulting in a booming job market for philosophers. Then when you look at it, it turns out single-digit numbers have been hired at Anthropic and OpenAI, and that’s about it. The point is it’s unlikely to have some sort of significantly or lasting cultural impact, any more than say “The 300” or “Beowulf” or “Gods of Egypt” or any of the other quite long list of such mo…

It is actually fun to read translation. It is written as if human wrote it, so it is entirely believable some movie watchers would read it.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#164

Post by watwut »

modo_mario wrote: post #111
watwut wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The culture war does not speeps into the translation itself. There is literally no culture war in the book itself. Not even a hint of it. What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war. You know, that black actor being in the movie is a great offense to the classic argument. It is ok to respond to it once that argument was made by…

>Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? No the underlying assumption is that there's no one side to such a thing named a culture war regardless of how much of an idiot musk is. Whitaker and the like criticised her for changing from the original according to personal biases and from her responses she quite alignes with those. There's a progressive perspective there that she does no…

I read Whitaker article. And I completely stand by what I said. He was offended over the world "slave" to be used, by using contemporary language and so on.

That part she wrote there was response to the outrage Musk was creating. It is clearly said in the text and you need a whole dose of bad faith to pretend it is reaction to the movie only. And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everything else is an insult to people like him.

> The same with clamouring for pushing female characters forward in a deeply patriarchical tale or calling anything other than raceswapping the main character of greek mythos not progressive all point in that direction.

By pushing you mean "not suppressing". Fun fact: deeply patriarchal societies do in fact use female characters and write about women. I know, because I read old books. The need to not have them in stories is specific to just some patriarchal societies. The need to write them out of history and out of old books is also specific to certain patriarchal wanna be branches.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#165

Post by ButlerianJihad »

adrian_b wrote: post #156
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may blow your mind, but what if the "People From the Sea" are Odysseus, his family, and his crew? * It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group? * Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experien…

They were not hypothesized. The term "Sea People" or "People of the Sea" has been taken from Egyptian documents that described a series of battles for defending Egypt against them. Egypt succeeded to repel them, but other regions were not so lucky, because around the same time a lot of cities were destroyed. Because of the coincidence in time, it is assumed that the Egyptians have fought against the same people who d…

So they were polytropized

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#166

Post by gabriel666smith »

runarberg wrote: post #134
gabriel666smith wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d agree, but would argue that Nolan has a unique (almost Delphic) talent - for better or worse - amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations, and this alone makes his work more interesting, and worthy of critical attention, than your comment seems to imply if I have interpreted it correctly. I think that’s just as true of his lesser…

> Nolan has a unique talent [...] amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations. Just to be clear. This is the same director who interpreted Occupy Wall Street as Batman’s Bane. I don‘t dispute his talent, but this talent of his speaks to conservative, pro-establishment, values. If you don‘t share his conservative values, it is very easy…

My personal politics are very economically leftist - I’m closest to a Luxemburgist.

I find this (Nolan as conservative; Bane as Occupy) interpretation a bit tired, to be honest. It’s often repeated but I think it has aged badly.

Bane has ‘Occupy Wall Street’ elements for sure. But he’s also a strongman - visually, he’s a steroid populist. He doesn’t look like an Occupy guy at all. He looks like he should be on Rogan talking about MMA.

Isn’t the much more apt reading of the image in 2026 - ignoring Nolan’s intention, for a moment - that Bane is the face of what happens when the institutional mistrust of the Occupy movement (a trait that is not specifically left wing or right wing) goes ignored, festers, and musters behind basically whoever is loudest?

Bane is even pitted against an explicitly deep state-like surveillance apparatus run by Batman-as-Palantir.

It feels much more prescient to me of Trumpian chaos-populism (whose efficacy lies in its absorption of traditionally leftist sentiments and demographics) than it has been given credit for.

Neither Batman nor Bane (nor the failing state) is shown as good or ideal by Nolan, and Nolan doesn’t speak about his personal politics. Oppenheimer was about how observation and time changes interpretation - specifically the meaning of an individual’s politics when they are observed.

I guess you could argue that refusing to state a position renders you de-facto conservative, as it implies satisfaction with the status quo - but maybe Nolan is simply requesting more nuance from the observers of his work than interpreting it based on the author’s politics would allow.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#167

Post by modo_mario »

watwut wrote: post #164
modo_mario wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? No the underlying assumption is that there's no one side to such a thing named a culture war regardless of how much of an idiot musk is. Whitaker and the like criticised her for changing from the original according to personal biases and from her responses she quite alignes with those. There's a progressive perspective there that she does no…

I read Whitaker article. And I completely stand by what I said. He was offended over the world "slave" to be used, by using contemporary language and so on. That part she wrote there was response to the outrage Musk was creating. It is clearly said in the text and you need a whole dose of bad faith to pretend it is reaction to the movie only. And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everythin…

>That part she wrote there was response to the outrage Musk was creating. It is clearly said in the text and you need a whole dose of bad faith to pretend it is reaction to the movie only

I was referencing the text as a whole with more varied examples there including the bit about making the main character black.

>And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everything else is an insult to people like him.

Honestly I think an movie on asian mythology or medieval china or japan with american demographic inserts would draw criticism as well. And there's a reason we don't see it in the woman king or the like (which twists extremely in other ways some may deem progressive or woke)

>By pushing you mean "not suppressing". Fun fact: deeply patriarchal societies do in fact use female characters and write about women.

Yes they do. It's right there in the odessey. What was written out of the movie for example? Most of the maidservants being killed on oddyseus's return because of their disloyalty because Nolan said it was misogynistic. And in that bit about the backwards archaic values Emily points it out herself how to make it less 'backwards' nolan distorts the story without mending it in a sensible way. Beyond that he condenses in a way that doesn't favour focusing on these individual women (and various other characters which she cares less about) in a way that Emily would like according to her sensibilities. Same with not ommiting other bits so he can lay bare and focus on the victims of war rather makign them just opponents to the protagonist.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#168

Post by bennettnate5 »

> The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp –

Hey, she forgot to include O Brother, Where Art Thou!

\s

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#169

Post by throwaway3060 »

ctchocula wrote: post #161
throwaway3060 wrote: post #19

I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review. Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition…

[1] is a nice intro into what the current scientific consensus in what caused the Bronze Age collapse is, written by historian Bret Devereaux. The view he paints pretty much aligns with what Wilson wrote about there being no such thing as the "sea people". [1] https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...

I've read that article too, and never got the impression it quite went that far. That there wasn't some unified group, sure, but I never heard anyone claim that (maybe reflecting when I first learned about them?). Maybe that's what Wilson meant, but if so it isn't very clear - it sounded to me like she's claiming that all those constituent groups the Egyptians wrote about, that Bret Devereaux touched upon, didn't actually exist (and worse, that this is the consensus position).

Edit: It occured to me, perhaps Wilson is thinking about this subject primarily from the Greek perspective, when most of what we know comes from others.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#170

Post by stasomatic »

seabombs wrote: post #155
stasomatic wrote: post #115

In a movie involving a few archery scenes, a movie with a gargantuan budget - hire an archery instructor. As an advanced amateur archer, the glaring mistakes, from stringing a bow to the draw form and release, it's hard to suspend disbelief and continue watching. Yes, it's a movie based on a myth, but it would have been that much better for me, only if they threw a couple of $Ks to an archery coach. Same thing with m…

I have almost no experience of archery and this annoyed me. So many close shots of Odysseus or other soldiers limply firing arrows that look like they'd barely make it five feet. But the next shot is a soldier getting barrelled off his feet by the force of it...

If anyone is at all interested, "War of the Arrows" [0], while taking some liberties (string twisting for trick shots, ex), as it's a movie, is a pretty accurate portrayal of warbow archery. The plot is shallow - boy saves girl - but I enjoyed it. It's in Korean, but very watchable with subs.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2025526/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov...

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