I'd like a comedy version of The Odyssey, directed by Noah Baumbach or Woody Allen or Albert Brooks that takes place after The Odyssey, wherein Odysseus is nervously explaining his absence to an increasingly incredulous Penelope.
O: Why do we have to keep going through this? I told you a million times, Calypso wouldn't let me leave her island and she forced me to be her lover!
P: She forced you? How could she force you? Was she holding you down? You were able to defeat the big strong Cyclops in battle, but you couldn't get away from Calypso?
O: She's a nymph!
P: Yeah, I bet she is...
O: I mean, she's part-god. Whaddya want me to do, defy her? Defying gods is what got me into this mess in the first place!
P: No, the last thing I would ever want you to do is to not have 7 years of sex with a hot Nymph all over her sex island.
O: Well what about you? You expect me to believe you spent the last 10 years just weaving and unweaving a shroud and never once banged any of the 108 suitors I murdered yesterday?
P: Am I as pretty as Helen?
O: Oh, Zeus, here we go again...
P: If I was as pretty as Helen you wouldn't have launched your ship, would you, huh?! I bet you and Achilles agreed to fight with Agamemnon because of how hot Helen is, you'd do anything for Helen, wouldn't you, admit it!
A bit reminiscent of this happens on “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” where Larry David, as Meriwether Lewis, is telling his wife that doesn’t WANT to leave her to go on a trip across the continent with his fishing buddy Clark (played by Seinfeld) and a group of young native women, it’s just that Jefferson insists!
It could also be a sitcom like Mad About You. Ody & Pene kvetching over something and then Cousin Ira shows up with another one of his wacky schemes...
"hyper-realism was never at play. After all: There’s a cyclops in this movie."
I haven't seen the movie yet and have no strong opinions on casting, but this is the wrong frame. A movie doesn't need to be realistic, but it needs to be grounded. It's fine if there's a cyclops battling a transformer, if you have an in universe explanation for it.
It's too much of a fully generalisable defence. If "there's a Cyclops in it/it's based on a fantasy novel/there are dragons/this isn't real world" works, then why are there no white, Asian, and Latinx folx in Wakanda, huh? Where's the diversity there? Wakanda ain't real, it's a comic book, it should be every bit as Diverse and Inclusive as 8th century BC Greece!
Granted, the roles were "blink and you'll miss them" for the DEI characters, so in the end they didn't really matter, but it's not nothing when they swap out Spartan Helen for a Kenyan-Mexican actress.
I look forward to the race-swapped version of Mulan set in Atlanta coming to our screens never.
Fully generalizable against *any* lazy writing, plot holes, etc too. Which is why the “it has magical creatures, why are you complaining” argument has always been a peeve of mine. Worldbuilding and narrative consistency still matter even (perhaps especially) in stories about fantastical worlds.
World building is extra important for fantasy worlds, because you need to explain how your fantasy beasts work (if you're going to be George R.R. Martin and throw off a line about Aragorn's tax policy; so, uh, how do dragons work then, George?) Anne McCaffrey had a whole rationale for her world building based on science fiction, though Pern is more science fantasy in the end. If it's high fantasy then dragons are part of the fabric and can be grandfathered in, but if you're doing whatever Martin is doing, then you need to either fudge up a sci-fi explanation for their evolution or shut your mouth.
Saw a reel the other day that napkin-mathed that the big 300 foot long dragon would need to eat 8000 sheep a day (plus whatever calories it takes to breathe fire)
To be clear “we have dragons, they are magic” is fine, but you want the rest of the world to make sense and if it is made up of feudal-age humans, they should react to dragons like feudal age humans would.
It's about verisimilitude. You could probably swap a Chinese guy for a Mongolian guy to play Genghis Khan, but a white cowboy would be jarring and out of place.
Yeah, but the story is not set in "a galaxy far, far away", it's set in the ancient Greece of our world, where the audience for Homer's poem might be agnostic about did sirens exist on some island out there, but they dang well knew who was living up north in Sparta and it was not the children of Memnon, king of Aethiopia.
There's a version of this that works but it isn't the Cyclops. It's that the movie clearly takes place nowhere and at no time in particular, like Tenet or Inception (or Batman Begins?) and unlike Oppenheimer and Dunkirk (and The Dark Knight).
"Look at this long list of non Greek presenting people" is the evidence, as is the complete disinterest in accurate armor and boating. "This single element is defensible because there are magical monsters too" is the weakest form of the argument.
Sure, but there's basically no real explanation given for almost anything in it. They land on an island with a race of faceless armored giants and then just have to run away again. Nobody explains what their deal is, where they came from, what their society is like etc. So I don't really see why there would need to be a good explanation given for why some people in this world have darker skin than others.
In this version of the fictional world imagined by Homer, the characters look like famous film actors. It is what it is. Not sure what the big deal is.
"It's fine if there's a cyclops battling a transformer, if you have an in universe explanation for it."
You don't need an in-universe explanation so much as a consistent vibe. That vibe can easily follow the Purely Aesthetic Era trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticEra), where the general look roughly comes from some historical era, but there's no intent to be fully accurate to it, and it's understood that liberties may be taken for the sake of story, practicality, or just because it looks cool.
"Batman: The Animated Series" and "Batman: Caped Crusader" are examples of this.
I don't think I've heard the word "honky' since it fell out of George Jefferson's mouth. Thanks for reviving it, Jeff, and in service of ancient Greek mythology.
This review has me intrigued enough to get into a theater for the third time since Covid. Thank you for your service to this country and its movie making business.
Hamish Patel is probably the only one who looks Greek enough. You are spot on that if the product sucks, screeching about it being woke “works”; but more importantly Nolan is the spectacle blockbuster director of our time, he’s James Cameron or Spielberg. Comic book movies and live action Disney fairy tale remakes are released to all the enthusiasm of a wet fart
I think the screeching about the screeching about it being woke was a 'get your defence in place' move by the studio in case this flopped, big budget epics aren't doing that well recently, and being able to trot out the tried and trusted "it was the fault of racist bigots who hate Strong Women and Minorities" line was covering their asses.
But it seems like it will be a success not a flop, so they don't need that anymore.
Swapping out Sinon for Achilles was a definite choice on Nolan's part, particularly with the visit to the Underworld; he obviously had A Message he wanted to convey by slipping in a character from the Aeneid instead of the source meeting of Odysseus with Achilles where Achilles says he'd rather be the meanest slave on earth but alive than a king amongst the dead. "You deceived and betrayed me!" message of how Odysseus is indeed the bad guy whose fault this all is, is a choice as to what the director wants the audience to come away with.
It probably will be a good movie, I just wish he didn't have to chew up and spit out the Odyssey to do it but then I'm one of the lore nerds who wince at the (necessary at times) changes when literary media get adapted to the big screen.
He’s basically on a press tour for the movie though (he got to meet Tom Holland, the actor, for the memes) so I’m not sure we can take that entirely in good faith.
Plus historians are one of those professions where you can ask two and get three opinions so I don’t think any one opinion can ever be cited as definitive.
There isn’t a definitive answer, so of course people can reasonably disagree but as someone with some, but not detailed, knowledge of the source material I’m happy to outsource an opinion about the film’s relative authenticity to Holland. Listening to him explain the discrepancies between source and film was informative and interesting: And it all certainly seemed to be done in good faith
I agree Nolan's Odyssey is not unbearably woke in casting . . . but it also is not the Odyssey at all; it is a similar story in some respects that has been fitted into a modern moral standard. For a main instance, the Trojan horse, that greatest trick of all ages celebrated by Odysseus and Homer . . . but now which "Odysseus laments [because] the cleverness of his tactics destroyed the natural bonds between people. The people of Troy were trusting and grateful for the gift" and he now sorrows for his actions. It may be pretty and nice and progressive as all get out . . . but it ain't Homer. "It also turns Odysseus into a great modern hero, a universal figure whose journey can be adapted and understood by anyone, anywhere, because it is, after all, a sojourn to understand those common creeds that make us all human." The quotes are from an excellent review essay that mostly loves the film but notes the changes wrought by modern moral posturing: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/christopher-nolan-odyssey-mostly-pro
>notes the changes wrought by modern moral posturing
I would say the changes are wrought by modern morals, not moral posturing. I watched it last night and was struck by the fact that someone I consider a totally amoral guy today (Trump) is still a better person than a hero of antiquity (Odysseus). Would Trump string up the maidservants of the suitors the way Odysseus did at the end of Homer’s Odyssey? I do have gratitude that modern society’s moral baseline is a lot higher than the one of the past. And I appreciate Nolan making these updates to give the Odyssey a legible message that doesn’t pull us out of the story. I was immersed for three hours in it. I don’t think that would have been the case for a faithful depiction (reading it in high school was definitely a slog for me and I’m sure most other students).
"The gods could have protected the cows by not letting the sailors near them to begin with, but they would apparently rather coax the sailors into a rule violation so that they can dispense some Ancient World justice."
Just like Yahweh could have protected the tree in the Garden of Eden.
I dunno; "You can eat literally *any* fruit but this one" is a little different from "we're going to give you a choice between breaking the rules or starving to death."
One silver lining to all of the reflexive accusations of wokeness is they bait the hook for studios to telegraph how much faith they have in a film. If they lean into the controversy, that's because they know it's a turd and want to pre-emptively deflect criticism (see, e.g., Ghostbusters: Answer the Call), but if they ignore it, that's because they think it's good and don't want to alienate any potential audience they don't have to.
Bingo. When Millie Alcock was loudly complaining about sexism weeks before Supergirl was even released, it was a pretty obvious sign the movie was gonna suck.
Fully agree the anti-woke takes on this were overblown.
I do think the anti-anti-woke crowd is trying to have their cake and eat it too with their post-box office takes though.
I’ve seen both “haha you guys are dumb, this isn’t even woke” and “this proves that these online freakouts are toothless and ‘get woke, go broke’ is fake”. Which are of course, mutually exclusive - if it’s not woke, it never had a reason to go broke, and if it is woke, the online mob was justified in complaining about the casting and theme changes.
I’m with you, I think a bigger issue has been that a lot of the “woke” movies sucked for enough reasons that being “unwoke” would never have saved them.
But I don’t think Hollywood is quite willing to let go of the option to blame their failures on toxic racist fans, and they are still at heart more DSA than DNC, so I suspect they will lean more into the second explanation as more flattering to their preferences.
Which is unfortunate, because making every movie a Very Special Episode About Marginalized Identities does indeed suck and it would be good if that went away for awhile.
"A theory: The “IT’S WOKE!” play works best when the movie is a snow-capped mountain of shit in the first place."
I will co-sign these theory, if that's how theories work. I once watched a YouTube video which made the point that most of the time when people nitpick plot-holes in movies, it's because there was something bigger about the movie that ultimately didn't work, and the plot-hole is just a convenient thing to pick at. I think there's something similar with regards to WOKE, in that no one really cares if a movie has a message, and people are even willing to tolerate a message not being particularly subtle (especially if it's a message they agree with); they care when there's bigger problems with the movie that are preventing them from enjoying it, and the message is just something easy to pick at. Pretty much every story has a few little plot holes (because hey, story, doesn't work like real life) and some message the author wants to communicate (because hey, kind of the point of communicating in the first place); the problem is when both are not done well
Of course, the alternative that some people are bitter pedantic nerds who consider nitpicking fault with things that have been made by more talented, successful and creative people than they are to be a substitute for living a meaningful life cannot be wholly ruled out either.
I agree that complaints about Plot are generally just the easiest thing to grab in an already-unpleasant experience. Plot consistency is part of the craft of the whole, and like any part of the whole, it can be stronger and make the experience better or weaker and distract from the intended experience. What plot holes have going for them is they are nigh-inevitable given a broad enough understanding of "problem in the plot," and they can be spotted by anyone with a basic human knowledge of cause-effect. It's a lot harder for laymen like me to identify issues with lighting, audio, pacing, internal motivations, cinematography, editing, etc. that also can add or take away.
I've seen reviews by guys I generally agree with saying it's a great movie. I think it works best on the big screen because let's face it, the trailers were dogshit. I did find the anachronistic Viking ship and pseudo-mediaeval armour on the Laestrygonians (and Agamemnon's Batsuit) annoying, but what can you do with a director who says he's updating the material for the modern audience?
Venturing into spoiler territory here, but Odysseus blaming himself for the Bronze Age Collapse probably is the silliest thing in the movie. Wow, we broke the old customs of guest-right and introduced modern total war, the world has now changed? If that was Nolan's message, he should have set this movie in immediately post-First World War Britain: all the old verities are exploded, the Empire is now on its deathbed (though they don't know it yet), I am become Death Destroyer of Worlds - oops, sorry, that was his *last* movie.
If I go by the reviews, it seems to be a good Nolan movie if you like Nolan movies. I just hope the movie is visually better than the gloomy, grey, dull, dark, everyone wears black pleather armour trailers.
His message isn't that Odysseus literally caused an in-universe Bronze Age Collapse or that an individual choice to reject hospitality somehow gave people the idea of deception in warfare. That's why it's only ever whispers of sea/boat people. It's literal insofar as the rumors of a marauding band of sea warriors travels with Odysseus, but it's mostly about personal damage and consequences, not about broad nation-state movements.
I'd like a comedy version of The Odyssey, directed by Noah Baumbach or Woody Allen or Albert Brooks that takes place after The Odyssey, wherein Odysseus is nervously explaining his absence to an increasingly incredulous Penelope.
O: Why do we have to keep going through this? I told you a million times, Calypso wouldn't let me leave her island and she forced me to be her lover!
P: She forced you? How could she force you? Was she holding you down? You were able to defeat the big strong Cyclops in battle, but you couldn't get away from Calypso?
O: She's a nymph!
P: Yeah, I bet she is...
O: I mean, she's part-god. Whaddya want me to do, defy her? Defying gods is what got me into this mess in the first place!
P: No, the last thing I would ever want you to do is to not have 7 years of sex with a hot Nymph all over her sex island.
O: Well what about you? You expect me to believe you spent the last 10 years just weaving and unweaving a shroud and never once banged any of the 108 suitors I murdered yesterday?
P: Am I as pretty as Helen?
O: Oh, Zeus, here we go again...
P: If I was as pretty as Helen you wouldn't have launched your ship, would you, huh?! I bet you and Achilles agreed to fight with Agamemnon because of how hot Helen is, you'd do anything for Helen, wouldn't you, admit it!
A bit reminiscent of this happens on “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” where Larry David, as Meriwether Lewis, is telling his wife that doesn’t WANT to leave her to go on a trip across the continent with his fishing buddy Clark (played by Seinfeld) and a group of young native women, it’s just that Jefferson insists!
Wonderful job Dillason!
Dillon: I want to see this movie!
"When Ody met Pene."
It could also be a sitcom like Mad About You. Ody & Pene kvetching over something and then Cousin Ira shows up with another one of his wacky schemes...
LOL! Jeff, are you in on this?
"hyper-realism was never at play. After all: There’s a cyclops in this movie."
I haven't seen the movie yet and have no strong opinions on casting, but this is the wrong frame. A movie doesn't need to be realistic, but it needs to be grounded. It's fine if there's a cyclops battling a transformer, if you have an in universe explanation for it.
It's too much of a fully generalisable defence. If "there's a Cyclops in it/it's based on a fantasy novel/there are dragons/this isn't real world" works, then why are there no white, Asian, and Latinx folx in Wakanda, huh? Where's the diversity there? Wakanda ain't real, it's a comic book, it should be every bit as Diverse and Inclusive as 8th century BC Greece!
Granted, the roles were "blink and you'll miss them" for the DEI characters, so in the end they didn't really matter, but it's not nothing when they swap out Spartan Helen for a Kenyan-Mexican actress.
I look forward to the race-swapped version of Mulan set in Atlanta coming to our screens never.
Fully generalizable against *any* lazy writing, plot holes, etc too. Which is why the “it has magical creatures, why are you complaining” argument has always been a peeve of mine. Worldbuilding and narrative consistency still matter even (perhaps especially) in stories about fantastical worlds.
World building is extra important for fantasy worlds, because you need to explain how your fantasy beasts work (if you're going to be George R.R. Martin and throw off a line about Aragorn's tax policy; so, uh, how do dragons work then, George?) Anne McCaffrey had a whole rationale for her world building based on science fiction, though Pern is more science fantasy in the end. If it's high fantasy then dragons are part of the fabric and can be grandfathered in, but if you're doing whatever Martin is doing, then you need to either fudge up a sci-fi explanation for their evolution or shut your mouth.
Saw a reel the other day that napkin-mathed that the big 300 foot long dragon would need to eat 8000 sheep a day (plus whatever calories it takes to breathe fire)
To be clear “we have dragons, they are magic” is fine, but you want the rest of the world to make sense and if it is made up of feudal-age humans, they should react to dragons like feudal age humans would.
It's about verisimilitude. You could probably swap a Chinese guy for a Mongolian guy to play Genghis Khan, but a white cowboy would be jarring and out of place.
It's set in the Mediterranean, which provides a grounded reason for basically any race to exist there.
Plus it's the Bronze Age, so it's debatable whether they're even "Greek".
If “there are Cyclops in this world” is a good enough explanation then “there are black women in this world” is too.
You know that cyclops don't really exist, right?
Yes, I do. Do you?
And black women do exist?
Yeah, but the story is not set in "a galaxy far, far away", it's set in the ancient Greece of our world, where the audience for Homer's poem might be agnostic about did sirens exist on some island out there, but they dang well knew who was living up north in Sparta and it was not the children of Memnon, king of Aethiopia.
It’s not set in Ancient Greece of our world. It’s set in a mythical world imagined by Ancient Greeks.
There's a version of this that works but it isn't the Cyclops. It's that the movie clearly takes place nowhere and at no time in particular, like Tenet or Inception (or Batman Begins?) and unlike Oppenheimer and Dunkirk (and The Dark Knight).
"Look at this long list of non Greek presenting people" is the evidence, as is the complete disinterest in accurate armor and boating. "This single element is defensible because there are magical monsters too" is the weakest form of the argument.
Exactly. "There is magic, which isn't real, so there are no rules!" is lazy.
Agreed. And people bring to adaptations of their favorite stories a lot of expectations, some of them silly or relatively minor, others larger.
There's a scale upon which any kind of adaptational choice can fall, including race swaps, and that scale depends on different things-
https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/exactly-how-bad-is-race-swapping
Sure, but there's basically no real explanation given for almost anything in it. They land on an island with a race of faceless armored giants and then just have to run away again. Nobody explains what their deal is, where they came from, what their society is like etc. So I don't really see why there would need to be a good explanation given for why some people in this world have darker skin than others.
I didn't say anything about skin color. I'm saying "there are monsters so i don't have to explain anything" is a weak argument.
In this version of the fictional world imagined by Homer, the characters look like famous film actors. It is what it is. Not sure what the big deal is.
"It's fine if there's a cyclops battling a transformer, if you have an in universe explanation for it."
You don't need an in-universe explanation so much as a consistent vibe. That vibe can easily follow the Purely Aesthetic Era trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticEra), where the general look roughly comes from some historical era, but there's no intent to be fully accurate to it, and it's understood that liberties may be taken for the sake of story, practicality, or just because it looks cool.
"Batman: The Animated Series" and "Batman: Caped Crusader" are examples of this.
I don't think I've heard the word "honky' since it fell out of George Jefferson's mouth. Thanks for reviving it, Jeff, and in service of ancient Greek mythology.
This review has me intrigued enough to get into a theater for the third time since Covid. Thank you for your service to this country and its movie making business.
Hamish Patel is probably the only one who looks Greek enough. You are spot on that if the product sucks, screeching about it being woke “works”; but more importantly Nolan is the spectacle blockbuster director of our time, he’s James Cameron or Spielberg. Comic book movies and live action Disney fairy tale remakes are released to all the enthusiasm of a wet fart
I think the screeching about the screeching about it being woke was a 'get your defence in place' move by the studio in case this flopped, big budget epics aren't doing that well recently, and being able to trot out the tried and trusted "it was the fault of racist bigots who hate Strong Women and Minorities" line was covering their asses.
But it seems like it will be a success not a flop, so they don't need that anymore.
Swapping out Sinon for Achilles was a definite choice on Nolan's part, particularly with the visit to the Underworld; he obviously had A Message he wanted to convey by slipping in a character from the Aeneid instead of the source meeting of Odysseus with Achilles where Achilles says he'd rather be the meanest slave on earth but alive than a king amongst the dead. "You deceived and betrayed me!" message of how Odysseus is indeed the bad guy whose fault this all is, is a choice as to what the director wants the audience to come away with.
It probably will be a good movie, I just wish he didn't have to chew up and spit out the Odyssey to do it but then I'm one of the lore nerds who wince at the (necessary at times) changes when literary media get adapted to the big screen.
Tom Holland, the historian, is happy with the adaptations, which is good enough for me.
He’s basically on a press tour for the movie though (he got to meet Tom Holland, the actor, for the memes) so I’m not sure we can take that entirely in good faith.
Plus historians are one of those professions where you can ask two and get three opinions so I don’t think any one opinion can ever be cited as definitive.
There isn’t a definitive answer, so of course people can reasonably disagree but as someone with some, but not detailed, knowledge of the source material I’m happy to outsource an opinion about the film’s relative authenticity to Holland. Listening to him explain the discrepancies between source and film was informative and interesting: And it all certainly seemed to be done in good faith
I didn't think Nolan swapped out Sinon for Achilles. It seemed more like he was swapping out Elpenor and replacing him with Sinon.
I agree Nolan's Odyssey is not unbearably woke in casting . . . but it also is not the Odyssey at all; it is a similar story in some respects that has been fitted into a modern moral standard. For a main instance, the Trojan horse, that greatest trick of all ages celebrated by Odysseus and Homer . . . but now which "Odysseus laments [because] the cleverness of his tactics destroyed the natural bonds between people. The people of Troy were trusting and grateful for the gift" and he now sorrows for his actions. It may be pretty and nice and progressive as all get out . . . but it ain't Homer. "It also turns Odysseus into a great modern hero, a universal figure whose journey can be adapted and understood by anyone, anywhere, because it is, after all, a sojourn to understand those common creeds that make us all human." The quotes are from an excellent review essay that mostly loves the film but notes the changes wrought by modern moral posturing: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/christopher-nolan-odyssey-mostly-pro
>notes the changes wrought by modern moral posturing
I would say the changes are wrought by modern morals, not moral posturing. I watched it last night and was struck by the fact that someone I consider a totally amoral guy today (Trump) is still a better person than a hero of antiquity (Odysseus). Would Trump string up the maidservants of the suitors the way Odysseus did at the end of Homer’s Odyssey? I do have gratitude that modern society’s moral baseline is a lot higher than the one of the past. And I appreciate Nolan making these updates to give the Odyssey a legible message that doesn’t pull us out of the story. I was immersed for three hours in it. I don’t think that would have been the case for a faithful depiction (reading it in high school was definitely a slog for me and I’m sure most other students).
With this movie, Anti-woke just had its Icarus moment. Flew too close to the sun.
I'd watch a Porgy & Bess with Joe Pesci.
“It’s fuckin’ summertime and the living’s fuckin’ easy. You got these fuckin’ fish jumpin’ — look at those fuckin’ bastards!”
“Hey, Sportin’ Life. Do I fucking amuse you?”
I got plenty of fucking nuttin’ and fucking nuttin’s plenty for me.
"The gods could have protected the cows by not letting the sailors near them to begin with, but they would apparently rather coax the sailors into a rule violation so that they can dispense some Ancient World justice."
Just like Yahweh could have protected the tree in the Garden of Eden.
I dunno; "You can eat literally *any* fruit but this one" is a little different from "we're going to give you a choice between breaking the rules or starving to death."
Jeff has wise eyes, Athena's eyes. We should tell him this every 10 minutes after commenting on Zeus' law just like they did in the movie.
One silver lining to all of the reflexive accusations of wokeness is they bait the hook for studios to telegraph how much faith they have in a film. If they lean into the controversy, that's because they know it's a turd and want to pre-emptively deflect criticism (see, e.g., Ghostbusters: Answer the Call), but if they ignore it, that's because they think it's good and don't want to alienate any potential audience they don't have to.
Bingo. When Millie Alcock was loudly complaining about sexism weeks before Supergirl was even released, it was a pretty obvious sign the movie was gonna suck.
If they were really going for an anti-woke myth, they would have adapted the myth of Morpheus instead.
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Try the chicken.
Yes I would argue that that play did not work on those movies; it’s just that the play was deployed on movies that very few wanted to see anyway.
Liking just for the subtitle
Fully agree the anti-woke takes on this were overblown.
I do think the anti-anti-woke crowd is trying to have their cake and eat it too with their post-box office takes though.
I’ve seen both “haha you guys are dumb, this isn’t even woke” and “this proves that these online freakouts are toothless and ‘get woke, go broke’ is fake”. Which are of course, mutually exclusive - if it’s not woke, it never had a reason to go broke, and if it is woke, the online mob was justified in complaining about the casting and theme changes.
I’m with you, I think a bigger issue has been that a lot of the “woke” movies sucked for enough reasons that being “unwoke” would never have saved them.
But I don’t think Hollywood is quite willing to let go of the option to blame their failures on toxic racist fans, and they are still at heart more DSA than DNC, so I suspect they will lean more into the second explanation as more flattering to their preferences.
Which is unfortunate, because making every movie a Very Special Episode About Marginalized Identities does indeed suck and it would be good if that went away for awhile.
"A theory: The “IT’S WOKE!” play works best when the movie is a snow-capped mountain of shit in the first place."
I will co-sign these theory, if that's how theories work. I once watched a YouTube video which made the point that most of the time when people nitpick plot-holes in movies, it's because there was something bigger about the movie that ultimately didn't work, and the plot-hole is just a convenient thing to pick at. I think there's something similar with regards to WOKE, in that no one really cares if a movie has a message, and people are even willing to tolerate a message not being particularly subtle (especially if it's a message they agree with); they care when there's bigger problems with the movie that are preventing them from enjoying it, and the message is just something easy to pick at. Pretty much every story has a few little plot holes (because hey, story, doesn't work like real life) and some message the author wants to communicate (because hey, kind of the point of communicating in the first place); the problem is when both are not done well
Of course, the alternative that some people are bitter pedantic nerds who consider nitpicking fault with things that have been made by more talented, successful and creative people than they are to be a substitute for living a meaningful life cannot be wholly ruled out either.
I agree that complaints about Plot are generally just the easiest thing to grab in an already-unpleasant experience. Plot consistency is part of the craft of the whole, and like any part of the whole, it can be stronger and make the experience better or weaker and distract from the intended experience. What plot holes have going for them is they are nigh-inevitable given a broad enough understanding of "problem in the plot," and they can be spotted by anyone with a basic human knowledge of cause-effect. It's a lot harder for laymen like me to identify issues with lighting, audio, pacing, internal motivations, cinematography, editing, etc. that also can add or take away.
I've seen reviews by guys I generally agree with saying it's a great movie. I think it works best on the big screen because let's face it, the trailers were dogshit. I did find the anachronistic Viking ship and pseudo-mediaeval armour on the Laestrygonians (and Agamemnon's Batsuit) annoying, but what can you do with a director who says he's updating the material for the modern audience?
Venturing into spoiler territory here, but Odysseus blaming himself for the Bronze Age Collapse probably is the silliest thing in the movie. Wow, we broke the old customs of guest-right and introduced modern total war, the world has now changed? If that was Nolan's message, he should have set this movie in immediately post-First World War Britain: all the old verities are exploded, the Empire is now on its deathbed (though they don't know it yet), I am become Death Destroyer of Worlds - oops, sorry, that was his *last* movie.
If I go by the reviews, it seems to be a good Nolan movie if you like Nolan movies. I just hope the movie is visually better than the gloomy, grey, dull, dark, everyone wears black pleather armour trailers.
His message isn't that Odysseus literally caused an in-universe Bronze Age Collapse or that an individual choice to reject hospitality somehow gave people the idea of deception in warfare. That's why it's only ever whispers of sea/boat people. It's literal insofar as the rumors of a marauding band of sea warriors travels with Odysseus, but it's mostly about personal damage and consequences, not about broad nation-state movements.