The Odyssey
Friends, I don’t care if you go or do not go see The Odyssey. I really don’t.
But I want to assure you it is not a woke movie, if that is your concern. There is what appears to be a very organized, or at least monetized, effort on social media among right-wingers to disparage the film for casting Elliot Page as Odysseus’s cousin. No, Elliot Page is not Achilles.
The dialogue could be better at times. It is not as sharp as it could be. But the movie is a visual masterpiece. It starts off slow and builds towards a relentless third act. I enjoyed it.
I have had several friends reach out, concerned based on the online commentary. The terminally online who never touch grass and complain about culture are marginalizing themselves and ruining their own credibility.
I’ll just give one small spoiler.
Elliot Page is a woman who changed her name from Ellen to Elliot, started taking hormones, cut off her breasts, and decided to present as a man while insisting gender is not binary. She wants to be a masculine dude, though she is not.
In the movie, Page plays Sinon, Odysseus’s cousin, who is manipulated into going to Troy to prove himself. Sinon dies quickly and comes back later as a ghost. The character who wants to prove he has what it takes turns out not to.
In the process of this storytelling, Christopher Nolan is gaming a system. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences isn’t giving Oscars to films without diversity. Nolan adds a woman pretending to be a man who gets induced to go prove her fitness to fight and dies doing so. He got the diversity, and the audience can get the subtlety of what is going on.
The movie is not the greatest movie ever made. But it is a great movie that covers the ambitions of men; the fragility, rage, and faithfulness of wives; a life controlled by fate and the vain efforts to change that fate; and a hero who wants to go home to the wife he loves.
I really did enjoy it. You might not. But please don’t let the right-wing woke scolds convince you not to take a chance on it if you have any interest in it.
Nolan is no David Lean, or even a Dorothy Arzner , for that matter.
His real masterpiece was Dunkirk, which of course did not pander to "woke" constraints.
Oppenheimer was flawed by its inherent leftist bias.
As for the Odyssey, being devoid of British actors it is difficult to really see it as "epic" in any traditional sense.
For Nolan, it is mostly an exercise in format and technology, not a real connection to the cultural significance of what Homer contributed to what would be Western literature.
Pandering to the "Academy" demeans the entire exercise.
Good grief! You all sound like whiny liberals. Afraid to be confronted by something that doesn't meet your official definition of conservative orthodoxy.
If every actor in every movie, or every person in any job had to meet my own personal standards of rightness, I couldn't go anywhere or do anything. And if Page was aware of the irony of her part in the movie and took the job anyway, then more power to her.
We are all sinners. There has only been one perfect person on this earth and He died on the cross.
It sounds like a great movie. I intend to go with my grandsons at our local IMAX.