Christopher Negrolan's confused mess is a sure sign of the decline of the Anglo Mind.
When the negative buzz began to spread about Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY, many were incredulous that the project could really be that stupid; maybe, it was just unfounded gossip or dubious misinformation. Now that the film is out, the rumors have been validated, with the exception of Ellen/Elliot Page in the role of Achilles — she’s in it but as ‘Sinon’(as in sin-none?) The casting alone is so atrocious that there’s no way the movie could(or should) work. And there’s no reason to pay good money to encourage this kind of garbage.
Still, out of curiosity I checked a Russian video channel rife with bootleg titles and got a glimpse. It’s bad. It’s terrible. It sucks.
It was so bad and kept getting worse that I skimmed through most of it at 2x playback speed, but even then it felt excruciatingly overlong.
Of course, one could argue that a big production shot on 70mm for the IMAX screen cannot be done justice on a computer screen, especially if it’s a far-from-ideal bootleg copy. It could also be conceded that the ‘woke’ casting, which I found so offensive, biased my perspective. Fair enough.
But then, I’ve seen many classic films, especially in the days before the digital revolution and DVDs, in poor quality, but their greatness still shone through.
The film generation of the 60s/70s grew up watching grainy movies on b/w television with 4:3 frame(that vandalized widescreen aesthetics), but they still noticed greatness in its truncated or otherwise compromised forms.
Just as greatness has a way of shining through even under unideal conditions — as with ancient ruins in sculpture and architecture — , awfulness shows itself(and may be amplified) even under the best circumstances. An ugly woman seen through blurry lenses is less ghastly than seen through clear lenses. The 3D AVATAR on the big screen could only be a worse case of the 2D version on TV, just like awful music is only made worse in high volume through the biggest speakers. It’s bad enough to see garbage but who wants to be engulfed by it?
Even putting the repugnant casting choices aside, Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY is a godawful mess, even though, allowing for some generosity on our part, the reasons aren’t entirely ignoble because Nolan tried to do something different, and it must be noted even failed ambition is better than no ambition at all.
Still, a work must ultimately be judged by its fruits, its overall results, and THE ODYSSEY is a series of stillborn ideas if not an outright artistic abortion.
At any rate, Nolan is now merely a stooge of Jewish Globalists, making common cause with other Anglo cuck-collaborators in sneaking ‘woke’ Trojan Horses into our psyche to have us swallow the lie that ‘Oceania was always Africana’. Even a good number of ‘conservative’ types have fallen for the bait, rather like the Trojans duped by the Greek ‘gift’. The so-called ‘conservatives’ are so devoid of artistic achievement and cultural involvement that they desperately pretend that something ‘prestigious’ or popular holds some hidden ‘traditional’ message.
What follows is on how Nolan took one of the biggest and smelliest dumps on Western Civilization in recent memory, all the more unfortunate because so unnecessary as Nolan over the years had accumulated the enviable clout and influence in the industry to pursue his vision with minimum interference from the executives and/or the cultural commissars. When someone has the freedom and sway to make any film he wishes but embarks on a pile of horse dung like THE ODYSSEY, one really wonders about the state of the Anglo mind. Most Anglos these days are little more than gelded horses of Jewish Power, lacking in agency and autonomy, unable to generate their own ideas and meanings. Thus, Nolan has become the Jewish Horse, a cursed ‘gift’ that should be kept outside the gates of one’s psyche.
Christopher Nolan seemed to have it all: Box Office numbers and ‘auteur’ prestige. If Steven Spielberg is most famous for blockbuster movies and Martin Scorsese for art films, Nolan has been touted as having fused popular movie-making with personal filmmaking. He’s made everything from superhero comic movies(the BATMAN series) to serious adult drama, most notably OPPENHEIMER. Not only were his takes on BATMAN immensely popular but they garnered a fair amount of ‘serious’ consideration from critics. Conversely, OPPENHEIMER not only won over most critics(and swept the awards) but was a total smash with the public. Thus, Nolan appeared to dissolve boundaries between popular entertainment and personal art/vision, also true of Denis Villeneuve who makes blockbusters with an artier touch than found in STAR WARS and the like.
So, no wonder many eagerly anticipated Nolan’s tackling of THE ODYSSEY in the hopes that his treatment would be a hit with both the unwashed masses and the discerning elites(though, it must be said, elite opinions on arts & culture these days tend to be even stupider and more retarded than among hoi polloi, what with the worst film of all time, JEANNE DIELMAN, being chosen as the best/greatest masterpiece ever by the Sight & Sound community of critics, scholars, and insiders).
I’ve neither been particularly partial or hostile to Nolan over the years. His film I admire most is the remake of INSOMNIA, which improves on the Norwegian original and rewards repeat viewings, not only for its nuances and ambiguities but the all-around fine-acting(among Al Pacino’s best) and the masterly craft.
I also liked certain aspects of INCEPTION, overblown as spectacle but elegant in its inner logic. MEMENTO may be gimmicky and contrived but is provocative about the uses/misuses of memory, with profound implications for civilization as a whole.
DUNKIRK is an honorable work, a worthy tribute to the Finest Hour generation, everyone from military men to patriotic civilians, of World War II. A war film with more of the human element and personal pathos than is generally found in the genre that tends to load up on excessive mayhem or mawkish sentimentality(or both as in the case of Mel Gibson’s HACKSAW RIDGE).
OPPENHEIMER had at least one great asset: Robert Downey Jr.’s performance of astonishing psychological subtlety; his character could be construed as a villain but is also the one the audience is most likely to identify with, as in AMADEUS where we get to know Mozart through the mental and emotional thicket of Salieri. But if Salieri wears his love/hate thing with Mozart on his sleeve throughout, Downey’s Lewis Strauss keeps it under the lid sealed tight, his resentment buried beneath the composure, like a gun-used-for-murder lying at the bottom of a placid pond.
Nolan is something of a contradiction: An unsubtle director with an eye for the subtle, like a caterpillar-machine excavating for a nugget of gold. In INCEPTION, everything hinges on whether a sentiment planted in someone’s mind(that of an heir to an oligarch’s fortune) will profoundly impact his worldly decisions. Like the Butterfly Effect, Nolan’s epiphany of power explores the possibility that the towering trees of history have hidden/invisible origins in fragile seeds that have taken root in the human psyche. Given that Greek mythology may be the most poetic mapping of the human mind/heart, it made sense that one of the key characters was named ‘Ariadne’ in INCEPTION, a science-fiction about an architect-cum-locksmith of the mind, a man who both maps/secures and invades/violates the innermost private worlds of others(to slip in the trojan-horse), though his inability to shake off the ghostly presence of his late wife suggests there are layers of the mind that even he cannot penetrate and purge(or maybe doesn’t want to).
To the extent that INCEPTION is about a man-in-exile seeking to return home to his children, it could be seen as a kind of Mind-Odyssey, at once intimate(as most of the action transpires in someone’s dream-world) and epic(as the dream-world can be infinite in its subjectivity of time and space). For all its problems, INCEPTION is certainly far preferable to THE ODYSSEY, most likely Nolan’s worst film.
Long before Nolan directly tackled Greek mythology, his imagination had undoubtedly been informed and inspired by it, i.e. the stories have usually been as much about the psyche as about the physics of the human experience. INTERSTELLAR, more ambitious than INCEPTION but also more foolhardy, aspired to be more than about space and technology; like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, it imagined near-mythic dimensions through which the present could commune with the past and future, but it was overly elaborate about a film whose essential message is ‘Corn is good’.
Nolan’s breakthrough film MEMENTO was also multi-dimensional. Unlike most psychological thrillers that dwell on normal minds that fall prey to misperception and emotional duress, the abnormal mental condition(or the physiology of psychology) is the very turf on which the battle takes place in MEMENTO. In INCEPTION, the protagonists enter the mind-scape of their target to manipulate the subconscious. In MEMENTO, a corrupt cop manipulates a man’s inability to shelve short-term memory onto long-term memory. If INCEPTION is about the manipulation of memory, MEMENTO is about the manipulation of lack of memory. Incidentally, it seems the Jewish hold on the academia and media have planted some poison seeds in Nolan’s mind that finally sprouted into the Diversity Garbage that is his THE ODYSSEY.
Nolan’s best film, the much improved remake of INSOMNIA, similarly incorporates a mental state as one of the agents of the plot. If the ‘hero’ of MEMENTO suffers from memory impairment, the investigator(Al Pacino) suffers from a prolonged bout of insomnia resulting from the sudden shift of scenario from Los Angeles to a town in Alaska where the sun doesn’t set for weeks on end. The insomnia serves as both metaphor(of sleepless anxiety & doubt under God’s constant gaze) and reminder of the subjectivity of reality(rationality at the mercy of cognitive function teetering between waking life and constant drowsiness). It also suggests the mythic nature of man’s eternal struggle with himself amidst the larger struggle between Good and Evil, a murky affair in which good becomes entangled with the bad, especially if the good can be attained only through a ‘necessary evil’. There’s also the complications of ego, pride, and self-preservation, a daunting challenge even to those committed to the good.
Thus, the cop’s investigation into a murder is only half the adventure; the other is a journey into himself, haunted by a past indiscretion and the accidental killing of his partner. The man in pursuit is himself pursued. There are echoes of this in THE ODYSSEY where Odysseus chases after home but is himself chased by the ghosts of destroyed Troy. He must return home to defend and reclaim his throne and honor, but wasn’t that what the Trojans were doing? Fighting to defend their own home from the invading Greeks?
In a movie culture saturated with conventionality, formula, and routine — made worse by ‘franchises’, to which Nolan woefully contributed with the so-called BATMAN Trilogy — , ambition, especially of the visionary kind, is most welcome. And Nolan’s film career can’t be faulted for lack of ambition, sense of grandeur, and striving for originality. Still, ambition alone doesn’t cut it, and movie history is strewn with misconceived or misguided follies, to which Nolan added his share, especially with THE PRESTIGE and INTERSTELLAR(and now with THE ODYSSEY); I haven’t seen TENET but heard it’s belabored(and presaged Nolan’s crypto-Negrolatry).
Nolan relishes the art of trickery but has often fallen short of the deftness and elegance necessary to make the trick work. No one needs a Rube Goldberg Machine to break an egg. Or, a maze amazes if it navigates an apparently complex but actually continuous path to the center or an exit, not if it breaks walls to force a connection.
INCEPTION worked more or less because it presented an elegant dream logic and followed it through to the very end. In contrast, INTERSTELLAR seemed to make up new rules as it went along, and so the conclusion felt like a cheat; likewise with THE PRESTIGE, the idea of which(the psychological toll of pathological envy/resentment) was done better in the sweet-on-surface-but-bitter-beneath tension between the simmering Lewis Strauss(Robert Downey Jr.) and the unsuspecting Oppenheimer(Cillian Murphy), a man of genius presented as profoundly insightful about the heart of atoms, not so much about the hearts of men.
Still, THE PRESTIGE and INTERSTELLAR feature impressive effects and designs, captivating to the eyes and ears, even if they fail to convince the mind. In contrast, THE ODYSSEY is an unmitigated disaster on all fronts. Even minus the retarded casting, it is an ugly mess of scarcely any depth and resonance. It might as well have been directed by the one-eyed Cyclops(especially after blinded). It lacks even the pleasure of the visuals, like Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049, amazing to look at even if it made little sense.
Now, let’s address some of the controversies stirred up by the film.
First, there’s the multi-racial casting, especially the conspicuous presence of Negroes, both in Ithaca and on the ship of Odysseus. Blacks especially stand out due to stark differences between them and whites, even though, ‘spiritually’ and ‘sensually’, whites feel closest to blacks on account of the popularity of Black Music & Entertainment, black domination of sports, and the cult of Mandela & Mandingo; thus, adding blacks to white narratives is seen as boosting the Cool Factor. In the film, there are other implausible races as well, like an East Asian among the crew. Odysseus’ right-hand man is played by a Hindu actor named Patel, but that’s somewhat passable because Greeks and some Asian-Indians share a common Aryan ancestry. (Tamil Indians, on the other hand, would stick out.) Besides, while some Ancient Greeks were fair-skinned, others were swarthy then as many are today, hardly surprising among Southern Europeans who evolved under the Mediterranean Sun. Undoubtedly, by far the most jarring is a tar-black Negress as Helen.
Some light-skinned Hindus at least have the Indo-Aryan connection.
There should be no need to explain why all of this is crazy. People who defend or even celebrate such stuff are either retarded or insipidly enslaved to fashion. Every disingenuous rationalization sounds dumber than the next. It’s one thing to say there was genetic diversity among Greeks and their ethnic neighbors(who may have served as mercenaries, hosts, slaves, aids, or whatever), but it’s quite another to willfully present(even prominently) Sub-Saharan African-types as ‘fellow Greeks’ and then to include an East Asian as well.
For instance, addressing the ethnic diversity among East Asians — Han Chinese, Mongols, Koreans, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Laotians, etc. — doesn’t mean we have to pretend a typical Asian community was or is made up of whites, blacks, Mexicans, and etc. Russia is a mostly white country with a varied ethnic spectrum, but that doesn’t mean a typical Russian community resembles the Global Diversity of Hindus, Kenyans, Moroccans, Bolivian Indians, Cambodians, and etc. A film based on Russian folklore invoking Russia’s ethnic diversity as justification to cast blacks, Hindus, Hawaiians, and Peruvian Indians as ‘Russians’ would be downright retarded.
We know that the REAL and ONLY reason for THE ODYSSEY’s oddball casting is the current ‘wokeness’, the de facto religion of the West whereby white identity is degraded and white heritage subverted. Jews run the West and insist there is no such thing as ‘whiteness’, or if such exists, it’s the fount of all evil. Thus, if white or Western history, culture, and heritage is to be preserved or appreciated, it must be rendered un-white or anti-white. Or, at the very least, ‘awhite’, as in ‘asocial’, i.e. whites may appear in stories and narratives but not as a distinct race or culture. Thus, Greek Mythology isn’t a white thing but one in which whites and nonwhites alike have equal claim and space.
There used to be the chant, “Hey Hey Ho Ho, Western Civ has to go!” But wait, it might come as a handy instrument of ‘progress’! Via the cult of Diversity, Western Heritage may indeed be redeemed and salvaged(like the Terminator was made good with reprogramming to serve the humans). All those academics, intellectuals, pundits, and activists who’d for so long denounced Western Civilization as ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘white-male dominated’(and even called for its extinction) may now come around to upholding, revitalizing, and cherishing it as a vessel for celebrating Negrolatry, Diversity, and ‘Inclusion’.
One wonders how far this can go. If Nazis were made black, Jewish, Asian, Mexican, and etc., might they also be made ‘cool’? Come to think of it, Ukro-Nazis are now sort of ‘cool’ for working with Jews against the Russkies. (And Al Qaeda Jihadis are alright once more as partners-in-crime who destroyed countries like Libya and Syria in cahoots with the Empire of Judea.)
Anyway, Western Civilization is thus revised from a great evil to a useful good(much like Alexander Hamilton and some of the Founders became cool cats upon being re-imagined as rapping Negroes/mulattoes in the musical HAMILTON). Western narratives and tropes go from embodying Exclusion to promoting Inclusion.
Ridiculous as this may seem, it isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. When Christianity took hold across the Roman Empire, paganism was attacked as ungodly and profane. Iconoclasm became the rule of the day. But once Christians found a way to make paganism(especially in arts & architecture and ritualistic forms) serve Christianity, it was deemed acceptable and prized as an expressive vehicle for the Catholic Church. Pagan temples and structures, once targeted for destruction, were reconstituted to praise Jehovah, Jesus, Mary, and the Apostles than Jupiter, Minerva, Juno, Mars, and etc. (And when the Muslim Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, they repurposed many Christian churches to serve Allah and Muhammad instead.)
Under Jewish rule, not only has Christianity been ‘rewritten’ to bless sodomy but to worship Jews as the superior god-men. (If Christianity seeks to convert individuals to the faith, Jews have a different notion of conversion, i.e. they seek to convert Christianity into a fealty to the Jews as the Chosen Master Race. Christians convert people, Jews convert the religion itself, thereby turning Christians like Mike Huckabee, Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, and Steve Turley into anal-licking cucks of Zion whose idea of Jesus is a Deity who celebrates Jewish-promoted sodomy and cackles with glee at the sight of murdered Palestinian women and babies.)
If Western Civilization/Culture is mostly dull and boring, it could easily be dismissed and forgotten in the New Order. But even the most hostile detractors couldn’t help but realize it as a treasure trove of some of the greatest stories and expressions: Everything from the Viking warriors to the robust Germanic barbarians to the mighty Romans to the incredible Greeks. The music, the dramas, the novels, the poetry, the architecture, and etc. There was just too much to pass up. So, if the problem is ‘Eurocentrism’, just go from ‘Euro-fugal’ to ‘Euro-petal’(as in centrifugal vs centripetal), or FROM the vice of Europeans expanding outwards to dominate the world as Mighty Whites TO the virtue of the White World absorbing all the world to share in and replace what had been white.
Still, this is a radical departure from the historical-cultural norm. While all peoples had to resolve the clash of cultures and syncretize new possibilities, it dwelt on the present and the future, not with the past. Take Japan that accepted Westernization and created new ideas, narratives, and expressions from the blend of the West and East. Japanese absorbed influences from Western cuisine, music, literature, and philosophy and developed modernity Japanese-style. There was also some race-mixing. Even so, it didn’t mean the remembrance of past Japan had to follow this pattern. Just because you can find people and cultures from all over the world in today’s Tokyo, it doesn’t mean the bygone Tokugawa Japan in books and movies should be depicted likewise, a world where one might casually meet an Iranian or African or Hindu on the streets. It’d be even stranger if a period piece(set in past history) featured blacks, Hindus, Mexicans, and Arabs as Japanese themselves, e.g. an Egyptian Tenno served by a Hindu Shogun who, in turn, is served by a Nigerian daimyo who presides over an army of samurai straight out of Central Casting in Sao Paolo. That would simply be retarded. Granted, Jews are doing exactly that in pushing the notion of the Afro-Samurai. Indeed, when the new TV series of SHOGUN aired, there were gripes among some that there were no blacks in the cast.
Strange as it may sound, THE ODYSSEY would be less jarring if the cast were made entirely black(or Asian or Hindu or whatever), in which case we could just see it as an alternative-universe scenario where Ancient Greeks just happened to be of some other race. It’d be like doing a Planet-of-the-Apes version where all the Greeks are talking apes. But imagine a movie where some Greeks are human and some Greeks are apes, in which case even the alternative-reality scenario would make no sense.
The flexibility of the human mind is such that it can allow for all manner of possibilities and make-believe. Take THE LION KING, in which human conflicts have been transposed to animals in the form of a fable. THE LION KING features a diversity of species, but the lions are presented as lions, thus maintaining the inner logic of the given universe. But imagine if hyenas, warthogs, giraffes, and etc. were cast in the roles of lions. That would be like Nolan’s retarded THE ODYSSEY where a substantial number of Greeks are portrayed by races profoundly distinct from Southern Europeans, the category to which the Greeks belong.
As for those who disingenuously justify Nolan’s folly on account of Greeks having encountered a diversity of non-Greeks, they must surely know that encountering diversity isn’t the same as embodying diversity. The British Empire, which covered much of the globe, encountered all manner of diverse people, but most Britons were northern European whites. White Americans interacted and clashed with American Indians, but most whites remained white. It’s like the lion characters in THE LION KING interact with non-lions, but they themselves are lions, not members of a pride composed of inter-species diversity. Whoever heard of a lion pride with a hyena, warthog, wildebeest, antelope, zebra, and chimp, all pretending to be lions?
But, such nuttery is now the norm throughout the West. It’s no longer about Europeans and whites in general having to adapt to a new order in a globalized world in tandem with other races and cultures. It isn’t only about making the future more diverse but retrofitting the past to conform to current Diversity standards(in which blackness is next to godliness, i.e. featuring diversity minus blacks hardly wins plaudits; a black African story without East Asians is fine, but an East Asian story without blacks is increasingly deemed problematic).
If Diversity is sacrosanct in our time, it means the lack of Diversity(the kind featuring blacks especially) in any historical time or space is somehow insulting or intolerable. So, forget about all the great feats of the West when it was all(or nearly) all white. The fact that the Western Past wasn’t properly ‘diverse’ means it was deficient or diseased in some crucial way. Therefore, the only way to redeem and rehabilitate the past is by reimagining it with ‘diversity’. Over time, as future generations grow up watching the historical past depicted in such a manner, they may well come to assume it had always been so. It’s like George Orwell’s formula: “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” The West is now all about Diversity; therefore, the West has always been about Diversity. And it seems to be having an effect as even so-called ‘conservatives’ have grown accustomed to Negrolatry as an essential ingredient in the Western Narrative.
The closest phenomenon to the current madness is perhaps the projection of Aryan forms onto Semitic ones during the Renaissance. Via Christianity, Jews of the Bible became sacrosanct figures in the West. Instead of representing these figures in their Semitic forms, they were depicted with Aryan characteristics developed in the history of Greco-Roman pagan art. Thus, the phenotypical forms that once adorned figures(mythic and historical) such as Zeus, Apollo, Heracles, Theseus, Perseus, Venus, Athena, Plato, Pericles, Augustus, Mark Anthony, and etc. were attributed to figures such as Moses, David, and Jesus. As the Jewish Bible spiritually trumped paganism, the forms of Aryan beauty developed in Greco-Roman art were transferred to the Semitic Jews of the Old and New Testaments. Michelangelo’s David is perhaps the most famous sculpture in the world. It’s supposed to represent a Jewish Semitic King, but the form owes to the countless depictions of the Aryan in the history of Greco-Roman Art.
The current Negrolatry is somewhat similar but in reverse. If the Renaissance rendered the pagan-originated Aryan physical beauty to serve the canonical holiness of Semitic-centered narratives, the ‘woke’ age remolds the the epic grandeur and poetic beauty of Western narrative in service to the currently sacrosanct idolatry of blackness, aka Negrolatry.
Pagan-Aryan Beauty was christened and redeemed via representing and honoring the holy Semitic heritage, and Western Narrative is now to be forgiven and healed by placing sacred blackness on the pedestal.
Whites were once proud of their accomplishments but then were accused of having achieved just about everything at the expense of nonwhites, i.e. white gain by nonwhite pain. Therefore, there were calls to ‘cancel’, tear down, and erase so much of white heritage and history.
But hey, maybe a compromise is viable by pretending that those great whites were nonwhite. Restore the portraits of great white scientists, doctors, and the like on the walls of elite colleges and institutions but in black face, thus ascribing white achievements, impressive but morally suspect, to holy blackness. We joke, but we’re living in an age when no one gets the joke. The real future dystopia is one where people take Monty Python straight.
Ancient Representation of the Semitic
Ancient Representation of the Semitic
While some whites, especially those on the Racial Right, may see the casting of blacks(especially in the role of Helen) as a humiliation ritual — no doubt, Jews relish it as such — , it can also be a sincere show of devotion to blackness as next-to-godliness(or even higher-than-godliness). Many whites earnestly believe there is something magical about blacks for reasons ranging from the spiritual to the sensual/visceral. For some, MLK’s booming oratory as a kind of black Moses/Christ figure might as well be the voice of god hisself. The Civil Rights Narrative tracing back to the slave trade has elevated blacks as the moral pillars and backbone of American History. Whites all around the world are addicted to black music of various kinds, from blues to Jazz to R&B to Rock n Roll to Disco to Hip-Hop/Rap. As Paul McCartney said, blacks are his favorite race. Anglo-Brits believe they had been repressed, frigid, priggish, and ‘anal’ prior to being thawed by the sunny warmth of blacks. In the US and EU, whites idolize blacks as the top athletes. White women got jungle fever for black dongs, and white guys cuck-worship black muscle.
All those factors have made blackness virtually magical to whites, and so they believe adorning blackness to anything is like an act of Afro-Christening or ‘ebonicalizing’. (GloboHomo has a similar effect because the so-called LGBTQXYZ thing has been consecrated as angelic and heaven-blessed. Mainline churches today exist primarily to bow down at the altar of sodomy and tranny-penis-cutting-and-testicle-removal. Because ‘gayness’ has been equated with holiness, many institutions and businesses go about limp-wristening, or ‘gay-christening’, their establishments, as if blessing things with the ‘gay’ wand will favor them in the eyes of god or gods.)
Just as virtually all Europeans for over a millennia knelt at the feet of Jesus the Jew(as the Son of God and Messiah), many whites feel most honored to sing paeans and say prayers to blackness.
A non-convert who is compelled to kowtow before something is being humiliated, but a convert feels no humiliation, just righteousness, as he prostrates himself before what he deems to be blessed. It’s why what looks so grossly humiliating to non-cucks feels so wonderfully natural to the cucks, e.g. all those Christian Zionist Evangelical and HBD types who feel fully justified in sucking up to the Jews as either the Chosen Tribe or the Highest IQ race; they believe it’s only cosmically right for inferior goyim to venerate and serve the real master race of Jews. They feel honor and gratitude, not humiliation.
The quasi-trinity of Jewish-Worship, Negrolatry, and GloboHomo works like Neo-Christianity in the West. Long ago, White Europeans, once proudly pagan, were spiritually conquered/converted to the worship of Jesus the Jew and the investment in Jewish Biblical Texts/Prophecy as their holy writ. As such, the West since the time of Christian domination came to spiritually and morally favor The Other.
In due course, much of Christianity was Europeanized or Aryanized. In painting and sculpture, Jesus and the Disciples(except for Judas on occasion) were imbued with European features. In the telling and staging of the Old Testament and New Testament stories, the original Jewish sensibility was replaced with the more straight and earnest European one(to the annoyance of Jews who’d always regarded their relation to God with a degree of wit and humor). Nevertheless, those European traits and tendencies were made subservient to Jewish Prophecy.
Today, white abilities and skills have been made subservient to the quasi-trinity of Jew-Worship, Negrolatry, and GloboHomo. The US and EU militaries exist to serve Global Zion, whether in the Ukraine War or the conflict with Iran. Western metropoles exult in the ritualistic celebrations of ‘gay’ vanity and Anno Sodomini. And talents like Christopher Nolan commit their abilities to idolizing The Other, especially blackness.
It’s something of a replay of the West having been converted to worshiping an alien Jew as the Son of God(which in Christianity is God Himself). It’s amusing when white right-wing Christian types bitch and whine about how today’s ‘wokeness’ is making white people bow down to other races and foreign cultures. They’d been doing that for 2,000 yrs by worshiping Jesus the Jew, relying mainly on the Jewish Holy Text for spiritual truth and historiography, and purging/destroying the indigenous pagan heritages of Europe. It’s amusing to watch the ‘intellectual’ contortions of fatheads like Andrew Torba who try to square ‘white nationalism’ with Christian values.
Of course, the current situation is far worse than when Christianity swept through Europe. In the latter case, whites adopted a foreign spirituality while eradicating their own, but they were still politically dominant and demographically secure. They adopted a foreign culture but on their own terms, rather like Red Chinese extolling a foreign ideology of Marxism-Leninism(while purging indigenous philosophies like Confucianism) but in full control of their own nation. The Christianized West converted to The Other in idea & iconography but maintained itself in body. Currently, however, the West submits to The Other in both idolatry and demographics, as well as in political authority, what with hostile Jewish Power dominating all the West.
At any rate, the incompatible hodgepodge of races and cultures in Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY makes even the white characters stick out as somehow alien given the lack of any semblance of commonality and integrality. If the cast were composed entirely of white British actors, we could make believe they are ‘Greek’ in their appearances, speech patterns, and manners. At the very least, Britishness could stand in for the shared attitude and values among the ‘Greek’ characters. This was so in David Lean’s DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. The characters were mostly played by British actors and their Britishness shone through, but in their shared racial characteristics and cultural manners, one could make-believe they shared a common culture. Even the exceptions worked to an advantage. Rod Steiger the American played Komarovsky and stood out from the British actors, but his character is meant to be a man-for-all-seasons and a jack-of-all-trades. His Americanness conveyed a cunning adaptability and resourcefulness. Zhivago was played by the Egyptian Sharif, who was still of Caucasian stock(as most Arabs and North Africans are); lightened up a bit in complexion he could pass for a European, just as, darkened a shade or two Europeans could pass for Arabs in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. Besides, his exotic looks suggested the ethnic diversity/mixture of Russia(visible in the faces of Lenin and Putin); furthermore, the novel was written by Boris Pasternak, a Russian Jew with likely some Semitic traits shared with Arabs such as Sharif, and surely Zhivago was partly an alter-ego of Pasternak himself.
But in Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY, the wild diversity undermines any sense of organic culture, ethnicity, and habits. (Who was the casting director? Mark Zuckerberg’s obnoxious younger sister who rants against whiteness in the Classical Department?) Unlike the shared Britishness that approximated or simulated the commonality of Russian culture in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, there is no sense of any intrinsic culture in THE ODYSSEY. Instead of a culture that naturally grew among the Greeks, it looks like an externally imposed pastiche of post-modern attitudinizing about ‘muh diversity’. They strike us as passengers of various nationalities and ethnicities in an International Airport.
The whole idea of THE ILIAD was that the independent-minded Greeks, however reluctantly, united in the war against Troy because they had something in common as a people and culture. But one wonders what impelled such a diverse cast of characters in the film to fight a ten-year war against the Trojans. Why would they sacrifice so much for one another with so little in common?
The late Romans found out the hard way that a military grown overripe in diversity becomes more like a demoralized and disunited mercenary force without the requisite sense of unity essential for prolonged conflicts. While empires gain an advantage via diverse recruitment — Nazi Germans should have tried harder to recruit the Slavs — , there’s a limit to everything.
Are we to believe whites, Negroes, Hindus, and even an odd East Asian decided to larp as ‘Greeks’ and risk life and limb fighting the Trojans in a grueling ten year bloodbath? The whole mess is more sea-sick(or see-sick)-inducing than the ocean waves. If all or most of the actors were white American or white British, the commonality of race and accents could serve as a kind of ersatz Greekness. But everything, even white acting styles, sticks out like a sore thumb in contrast to everything else. Thus, when the British Robert Pattinson acts British, it simply comes across as Britishy than as a stand-in for Greekness, especially in contrast to a Negro who sounds all too American(or ghetto). One is reminded of the odd Negro sperm among the white(or Jewish?) ones in the segment “What Happens During Ejaculation?” in Woody Allen’s EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX*(*BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK), except that Woody Allen did it for laughs, as with the black sergeant in Russia in LOVE AND DEATH, whereas Nolan is oh so very serious about his ‘Diversicating’.
He sure can be silly, pontificating that the message of his THE ODYSSEY is ‘be kind to strangers’. It’s good as advice but hardly worthy of a dictum. Besides, didn’t Odysseus’s journey home get stalled precisely because of the excessive kindness of two women, Circe and Calypso who wanted to keep him around? Out of the ten long years, seven were spent confined to Calypso’s ‘kindness’.
For someone who aims for subtlety, Nolan should surely discern that kindness has been one of the most lethal weapons of control and conquest. Take the Robert De Niro character in THE KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. He acts like a sympathetic ‘liberal’ to the Indians and gains their trust but to lift the rug out from under them. The US empire’s ‘kindly’ and ‘beneficent’ notion of ‘inclusion’ often means much of the world better be ‘included’ within American hegemony… or else CIA and NGO’s move in to foment a ‘color revolution’ to install whorish puppets who are to the US empire what white cucks are to the Jews. Humanity would be better off if the Zionist-run US empire didn’t speak ‘kind’ words about how it aspires to transform the world via ‘human rights’, ‘rules-based order’, and ‘democracy’, all of which, like the Helen Excuse, is just pretext for more conquest, conversion, and control.
The problem of the mixed bag of races/ethnicities is compounded by the mixed bag of styles and sensibilities, approaches and attitudes. Nolan was of two minds on just about every aspect of the production. He wanted this to be a blockbuster and an anti-blockbuster, Hollywood and anti-Hollywood, classic and modern, traditional and post-modern, personal and popular. The result is bewildering with any given element undercutting, neutralizing, or negating some other.
On the one hand, there’s the realism so uncharacteristic of Hollywood movie-making. Much of the movie feels gritty and down-to-earth, far less sanitized & cosmeticized(in the manner of Hollywood spectacles of the 1950s and 1960s) and considerably less exaggerated & outlandish(like the neo-spectacles lavished with CGI effects, ultra-violence galore, or visceral hyperbole, e.g. Ridley Scott’s GLADIATOR, Wolfgang Petersen’s TROY, and Zach Snyder’s 300).
Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY looks and feels more raw and rugged than most. But, if Nolan is into realism in terms of wear-and-tear of a harrowing and tumultuous sea voyage beset with dangers, why reject realism in terms of ethnic accuracy? Why not get Greek and Southern European actors, especially in this age when most Europeans can speak fluent English(as the new lingua franca)? Why be realistic with the adventure but fantastic with the casting where Helen is a tar-black sub-Saharan Negress and where an East Asian is among Odysseus’ crew?
Also, why are the historical/archaeological details so unreal despite the realism in style? Why does Odysseus’ ship resemble a Viking ship? Why does a certain house look like an English cottage? Did Nolan gang up with the dwarfs in TIME BANDITS to play a game of time-swapping?
Granted, Nolan isn’t the only one to falter under these challenges. Mel Gibson, unlike Nolan, did go for realistic casting, setting, and even linguistics in APOCALYPTO but then played loose with history and plausibility. He seems to have confused the Mayans with the Aztecs who carried out the truly spectacular human sacrifices, and the action scenes are out of MAD MAX movies as the hero goes from a seemingly ordinary tribesman to a superhuman warrior capable of overcoming all obstacles. The film went from believability to incredulity.
An even worse case is Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. Antithetical to the comatose reverence of play-it-safe Hollywood Biblical spectacles, Scorsese consciously courted controversy with his blood-sweat-and-tears(with semen thrown in) telling of the Jesus story. That, in and of itself, wasn’t the problem on the artistic scale.
The film was shot in North Africa in terrains similar to the Holy Land, and Scorsese eschewed his usual filmic finesse to give it a you-are-there documentary-like feel. So far so good. But then, he populated the film with American actors who spoke and emoted 100% American. Why go for rawness of style and realism in detail if the film is going to be like JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR minus the music? Scorsese could have gone for historical accuracy(based on archaeology) or textual fidelity(to the spirit of the author Nikos Kazantzakis, i.e. Christ story with a particularly Balkan/Mediterranean feel). Instead, despite efforts to de-Hollywoodize it, Scorsese totally Americanized it with all manner of ridiculous Counterculture tropes. Why go to the trouble of shooting a film in Morocco if you’re gonna put on a Christian Woodstock? And what’s with Peter Gabriel’s New Age schlock soundtrack? One thing Scorsese copped from the Old Biblical epics was the casting of a Briton as a Roman: David Bowie.
Such discrepancies of style and sensibility undermined both APOCALYPTO and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, but their failure pales in comparison to Nolan’s schizoid epic-anti-epic that runs all over the map. It’s like someone trying to be, all at once, a fancy chef, short order cook, granny home-cook, and a latchkey kid, combining everything from the choicest ingredients to the cheapest items on sale and fixing up a platter based on recipes from a dozen cultures in a style and manner ranging from haute cuisine to diner fare to school lunch to grab-anything-in-the-fridge.
A well-measured work, like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, can offer something for a wide audience, from high to low, from elitist to populist. Also true to a lesser extent with SPARTACUS(Kirk Douglas & Stanley Kubrick) and EL CID(Anthony Mann). What those movies have is a consistency of tone and unity of vision. Different people may take away different things, but all the elements come together into a grand whole.
In contrast, THE ODYSSEY keeps coming apart at the seams in theme, narrative, and pathos because it’s an impossible patchwork of incompatible parts. Suspension of disbelief that we are watching Ancient Greeks at work is impossible with such an insane cast. It doesn’t matter how good the actors are — the performances are almost uniformly risible, by the way — because the overt and brazen diversity keeps reminding us that it’s a work of 21st Century ‘wokeness’. Now, one could argue that was precisely Nolan’s point, i.e. he used an ancient tale as a commentary on the current global order. But then, why not update the story to modern times? Why set it in the ancient Hellenic world? Besides, Nolan’s supposed allegorical intentions could just as well have been served by THE ODYSSEY done straight with Greek/European/white actors. Arthur Miller didn’t have to fill up THE CRUCIBLE with Jewish radicals and communists to convey that the play was really about the Red Scare or McCarthyism. SPARTACUS in literal terms is strictly about Romans vs the slave revolt, but it was clearly meant as a pro-communist allegory reflecting the struggles of the 20th century.
On the one hand, Nolan entices us with the magical illusion of bringing the past back to life, but then, this supposedly tantalizing past is about as interesting as an episode of the TV show LOST.
Given that Christopher Nolan, much like James Cameron and other big-name directors, had taken to CGI special effects with relish, surely many expected THE ODYSSEY to be heavy on state-of-the-art movie magic(on par with the remake of THE CLASH OF THE TITANS and THE WRATH OF THE TITANS, not to mention Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy).
While employing CGI in key moments, Nolan swam against the cultural tide and opted for more traditional or classic means of editing/montage, focus & camera movement, and use of tangible materials(such as molds) to convey the strange, magical, or mysterious.
Very likely, he didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a special effects wizard, what James Cameron has become over the years. In a way, CGI has undermined the art(and pride) of filmmaking by rendering everything all-too-literal. If filmmakers can rely on computer technology to fully manifest the transformation of A into B, what is the need for the tricks of framing, editing, lighting, and etc. as sleight-of-hand deftness to fool the eye? What need for Jean Cocteau’s visual tricks in THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST?
Prior to CGI, many effects were simply unfeasible or unconvincing shown as a whole, and so filmmakers relied more on suggestion, which could go a long way. Even in scenes that have nothing to do with special effects, the mastery of technique could suggest far more than is actually shown, even to the point of the viewer believing he saw something he didn’t. Brian De Palma doesn’t actually show the chainsaw cutting into flesh, but by means of a little fake blood, intense facial expressions, and the menacing roar of the motor, he ramps up the suspense and renders palpable the sheer horror of the moment. Or take the scene on the bridge in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Instead of actually showing Clarence the angel descending from Heaven, a quick cut to his sudden presence amidst the falling snow of a forlorn night works like magic. Filmmakers had to be like magicians, making the audience sense more than what is shown, perhaps the most famous example being Alfred Hitchcock’s shower scene in PSYCHO. John Boorman relied almost entirely on the rudiments of filmmaking craft in the making of EXCALIBUR, still the best of its kind.
CGI and the over-reliance on special effects diminished the filmmaker as the ‘auteur’ in favor of the computer nerd as the ‘codeur’. Now, with A.I. on the horizon that may even render the computer geek obsolete, perhaps Nolan made THE ODYSSEY as a kind of last hurrah of classic filmmaking.
Take the scene where Circe turns Odysseus’ men into pigs. Peter Jackson might have gone for CGI techno-wizardry, but Nolan relies on editing and handmade molds to convey the transformation. Or consider the scene when Odysseus contacts the underworld. Instead of using elaborate special effects to conjure up Hades, Nolan has the dead rise from a sandy beach.
As such, THE ODYSSEY, in look and feel, more resembles Peter Brook’s LORD OF THE FLIES than Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It’s the egoism of every artist to stand apart, the only way to make a difference. Perhaps, had Nolan embarked on this project when CGI was a cutting-edge tool, he might have been more liberal with its possibilities. But with just about every blockbuster movie — James Cameron’s AVATAR, Zach Snyder’s 300, the later ALIEN sequels, all those superhero movies, and etc. — being saturated in high-tech goop, CGI-aesthetics has become dime-a-dozen, a far cry from the astonishing impact of TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY.
Nolan proved what he could do with special effects in his BATMAN movies and INCEPTION & INTERSTELLAR. He did it better and more thoughtfully than most of his peers. Still, when everyone’s doing it, it just isn’t special anymore, like when Bob Dylan, who’d pioneered something approaching proto-psychedelia, moved onto greener pastures when the entire Rock scene basked in the Summer-of-Love, even if it entailed a ‘reactionary’ retrenchment into more traditional modes of music, as with JOHN WESLEY HARDING, BASEMENT TAPES, and NASHVILLE SKYLINE.
Nolan’s ‘reactionary’ aesthetics, in and of itself, isn’t the problem of THE ODYSSEY. Rather, the film is an ungodly mess, and results speak louder than intention. If Nolan really sought to go against the current in favor of the poetics of cinema(ala THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES) than of the bombastics of technology, he should have opted for smaller production values.
Something feels terribly off in a work with the expansiveness(and expensiveness) of a Hollywood production and the eccentricity of experimental filmmaking in the manner of Pier Paolo Pasolini or Peter Brook.
There’s a difference between maintaining a degree of artistic integrity amidst the pressures of a mega-production(as were the cases with David Lean with LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and Sergio Leone with ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) and combining incompatible sensibilities & modes. What’s the point of making a film in the style of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW in 70mm for IMAX theaters? It’s like renting a gigantic concert arena with the biggest speaker system and 80,000 seats to put on an acoustic folk music performance.
Nolan likely had Pasolini’s Jesus film in mind on the evidence of the look and feel of THE ODYSSEY. Those steeped in the history of Christianity will surely notice the allusions to a wide range of expressions of Faith through the ages in Pasolini’s work. A character poses in a manner resembling a figure in a religious painting. The music draws from various songs and instrumentals of different cultures, each stamped with its unique hues of devotion: Moroccan-Christian folk music, Negro spiritual, the music of Bach, and etc.; also, a passage from Prokofiev’s soundtrack for Sergei Eisenstein’s ALEXANDER NEVSKY(intended as a commentary on Germanic militarism, medieval and modern) as if to draw parallels among mankind’s horrors down through the ages. Though more or less faithful to “The Gospel of St. Matthew”, the film is also infused with Marxian urgency(in contrast to the staid reverence of most Christ films), i.e. closer to the spirit of Che Guevara the firebrand than to the passive dogma of order and stability. Pasolini’s objective wasn’t to reassure and comfort but to provoke and challenge, a reminder of Christianity’s complex and contradictory history from its humble origins to troubled triumph, what it meant to different peoples, cultures, and classes.
Likewise, Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY is an all too consciously modern(or post-modern) narrative-contemplation on the subject matter than an attempt at faithful adaptation of the original material or a ‘contemporization’ for maximum mass appeal or respectable relevance, though its confused state allows for those aspects as well. (Most Hollywood epics about the Classical Age project contemporary manners & attitudes or contemporary conceits about the past onto the ancient world, e.g. TEN COMMANDMENTS reveals more about the Fifties and GLADIATOR more about the Nineties than their historical settings. This is also true of the futuristic visions in science fiction. A 1950 movie and a 2000 movie about the year 3000 will say more about the times in which they were made. The few exceptions, historical or sci-fi, are MARKETA LAZAROVA and THX 1138.)
Historical(or legendary-mythological) works that attempt to recreate a forgotten world, e.g. ANDREI RUBLIEV and BARRY LYNDON, are a rare breed. Granted, such works tend to present worlds-unto-themselves, not exactly faithful to historical evidence or textual substance, but they offer wholeness and consistency within the terms of their conceptions. William Wyler’s BEN-HUR is an Americanized fantasy of the Ancient World loaded with Hollywoodisms, but everything remains and operates within those established terms. You can take it as grand entertainment or leave it as fake and phony. For a film that agonizes over the violation of ‘rules’, THE ODYSSEY lacks the basic rules of storytelling that allows for audience immersion in the presented universe.
Old Hollywood’s immersive or escapist option was denied by Pasolini’s ‘cubistic’ film that challenged us to ponder the legend/myth of Jesus from the contrasting angles of history, theology, aesthetics, and politics. Pasolini’s combination of rank amateurism(as filmmaker), documentary-style, and intellectual musings made for a livelier and more provocative(as well as exasperating and bewildering) work, one unburdened by pressures to keep Biblical subjects respectable and safely ‘reverent’. The gritty realism lent an aura of historical authenticity; the Italian and Spanish cast accentuated Southern Europe as the ground zero of Christianity that the world would come to know; the casting of non-professional actors reminded us of Jesus’s closeness to the people of the street.
Yet, despite the multifarious approach, the final product nevertheless melded together. Pasolini evoked, alluded to, and paid homage to various manifestations of Christianity but in a suggestive manner that didn’t undermine or negate the basic established ‘reality’. Thus, there was a certain consistency(of being fixed in a particular time and place) in the core body of the work, rendering the allusions as supportive and thought-provoking than as integral and essential to the events on screen. It’s one thing to use a Negro spiritual to imply the long reach of Christianity and its universalism amidst endless permutations, but it’d be quite another to have a Negro-spiritual-singer suddenly appear as one of the characters. The evocative would have been rendered incongruous. But that is exactly what Nolan is guilty of throughout THE ODYSSEY.
Like the space aliens in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND who suck up people and things from various periods & places and then plop them down all over the world — like a ship in the Mongolian desert — , Nolan’s film is mindlessly tossed together with alien races and anachronistic objects. Odysseus sails around in what looks like a Viking ship. Was Nolan trying to draw links between the seafaring Greeks and the seafaring Norsemen, i.e. voyage of adventure has defined the Western soul from the north to the south? But we know that already, and surely there are subtler ways to convey the wider significance or universal import of Greek mythology. Do we really need to see something like an English cottage to grasp that the Classical influence reached the northernmost part of Europe? And what’s with the sci-fi-esque touch with Agamemnon presented as a kind of Darth Vader(or Dark Knight perhaps) figure?
What may work in a collage doesn’t work in a narrative where continuity and consistency are key. A collage combines seemingly contradictory and unrelated images either for striking effect or as clues to hidden links. Thus, what begins as chaotic and incoherent gradually grows suggestive and meaningful(albeit subjectively for each observer). It’s like certain clever non-sequiturs, absurd and obtuse at face value, but related in some oblique way.
So, one can juxtapose African art, Western classical art, advertising, news clipping, pop culture, and etc. and leave it up to the viewer to connect the dots. Narratives, however, don’t work this way, unless it’s some avant-garde short. When you have a film that runs 2 hours and 40 minutes, people expect immersion into a world whole unto itself, not some bogus concoction that tosses everything hip and fashionable into the pot along with the haute and classical.
Fatally, Nolan left out the humorous aspect of Odysseus while cluttering the mess with irrelevant, off-putting, and nonsensical distractions. A humorless Odysseus is like a musician without an instrument. The story is enlivened by Odysseus’ pride of cleverness, not always a wise thing. He not only uses his superior wits to escape from Cyclops but has to rub it in, infuriating the monster to hurl a boulder that nearly sinks Odysseus’ ship. Thus, the hero’s smarts, though an invaluable asset, can also be vanity-driven liability.
Indeed, the great irony is that the smartest man takes the longest time to get back home when just about everyone else has a swift return journey. The story is a reminder that intelligence can take us far but also far from what matters most. Certain gods are especially infuriated with Odysseus because his wits challenge their authority. Being gods of immense pride, they won’t relent and are resolved to punish Odysseus to the end of the world. Athena, being the state-of-the-art deity who, more than the other gods, appreciates intelligence opts to be his patron and protector. But none of this comes through in Matt Damon’s Odysseus. His role is so dull and dreary that one is reminded of the ‘Matt Damon’ jokes in TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE. Granted, Damon has proven himself a capable actor over the years, especially in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY and THE INFORMANT, and so, his lackluster performance surely owes to Nolan giving him one expression and one emotion.
Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY is one of the most ill-conceived big budget films, and its box-office success doesn’t nullify its artistic failings. After all, some very bad movies raked in tons at the box office: Michael Bay’s PEARL HARBOR, THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, AVATAR, Nolan’s BATMAN stinkers, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, and on and on. When prestige-personal filmmaking is a dying art and when superhero ‘franchises’(and others of their ilk) have grown tiresome even for diehard fans, THE ODYSSEY is understandably welcome to many as something prestigious(and classy) as well as popular and action-packed. So, from a strategic viewpoint of maximizing accolades and profits, it was a sound approach. But, from an artistic and ethical viewpoint, it is a catastrophe of almost unprecedented proportions. Even the biggest disasters in movie history — THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE(Anthony Mann), CLEOPATRA(Joseph Mankiewicz), RYAN’S DAUGHTER(David Lean), WATERLOO(Sergei Bondarchuk), 1900(Bernardo Bertolucci), HEAVEN’S GATE(Michael Cimino), REVOLUTION(Hugh Hudson), ALEXANDER(Oliver Stone), and etc. — seem like towering masterpieces next to Nolan’s heap of garbage.
Nolan, who seemed to be a reasonably intelligent and well-rounded filmmaker, just about got everything wrong. Never mind the historical details(which were willfully subverted for post-modern credentials) and the offensive casting. Nolan doesn’t even seem to know the difference between triumph and tragedy. True, the world of THE ODYSSEY hides a calamity behind every corner, as if governed by Murphy’s Law(where everything that can go wrong goes wrong); still, the hero somehow manages to overcome all obstacles and triumph in the end. Adventure-comedies like AIRPLANE!, PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES, and MIDNIGHT RUN are ODYSSEY-like in that sense. (Incidentally, even though set in modern America, those comedies have fewer Negroes than Nolan’s Negrodyssey.) Generally, a tragedy is one where everything appears calm, oblivious to the volcanic forces forming below or storm clouds amassing in the distance, like in Akira Kurosawa’s RAN that begins with a lord at the peak of his power and glory, clueless as to what may engulf all he’d achieved.
Agamemnon’s fate is the opposite of Odysseus’. He soon returns to Mycenae, with Trojan loot in tow, and is showered with praise as the great victor. All seems well with him as the indisputable master of his world, but he comes to a horrible end, which compounds in further tragedies that befall his wife and children(who commit matricide).
Paradoxically, the endless hardships that repeatedly threaten to undo Odysseus actually set the story up for eventual triumph; after all, what’s the point of beating down a man who’s already been pummeled many times over? In such a tale, the audience naturally desires and expects a light at the end of the tunnel. So, Odysseus, after a series of mini-tragedies, rises to the occasion and slays the intruders and regains his domain with his faithful wife and virtuous son by his side. It ends in triumph.
Nolan the dunderhead doesn’t seem capable of distinguishing triumph from tragedy. Or, he’s too-clever-by-half and wants to have it both ways, serving up the thrilling action-packed heroics while conveying a darker and more ‘meaningful’ message, LOL. For example, Nolan could hardly make up his mind whether his Odysseus should live or die. After eking out a victory in the battle with the intrusive suitors, he appears to fade into the netherworld with Penelope weeping over him. Apparently, fate meant to destroy him even with his honor redeemed. How more serious and somber than the original story! But then, his death might be a bummer for the popcorn audience who, depressed, may kill it via word-of-mouth; and so, he lives and is carried across the seas, like Arthur to Avalon at the end of EXCALIBUR, except that Odysseus is all smiles with his wife by his side(as the throne has been passed to his son). Nolan went for the hoariest cliche in movie-dom: Death and resurrection, jerking for tears and jolting with relief.
Reportedly, Nolan found the original ending overly ‘grim’ and ‘misogynistic’.
But why? It is well-structured, lean and mean, with Odysseus and Telemachus(with the aid of loyal servants) efficiently dispatching the unruly suitors. If Nolan sought to tone down the grimness, he sure went about it in a strange way, turning the confrontation into an all-out melee, the kind in MAD MAX or a Michael Bay movie. (In apparent homage to Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD, Odysseus’s armor gets spiked with arrows.) Maybe Nolan thought otherwise, i.e. a necessary rubbing of our faces in the violence as ugly and messy. But the realism is undercut by the fact of Odysseus, against far greater odds than in the original story, defeating his foes and surviving despite repeated blows and piercings. Again, Nolan tried to have it both ways, hardly the approach of a true artist.
Another revision makes little sense. Following the melee, the apparently dying Odysseus confesses his burden of guilt over what happened in Troy. But why there and then the outpouring of what he’d held back over the years? It took him a whole decade to get back home, and so, one would assume he’d have gotten over his misgivings by then. After all, his numerous ordeals could be seen as a kind of punishment(and penance) for what he and the Greeks had wrought in the war. For sure, some gods wanted to punish him, even unto death, for what he’d done to the Trojans, albeit more for egotistical than ethical reasons. Anyway, ten years is a long time, and surely he had ample time to mull over the war with Troy and the Greek victory that was as ignominious as it was ecstatic.
Straining for meaning, one argue that Odysseus had an epiphany where he identified his defense of his own beleaguered home with the Trojan’s defense of their homeland besieged by the Greeks.
But, given his bare survival after the hellish maelstrom with the suitors, you’d think his ‘guilt’ conscience about Troy would be the last thing on his mind at that moment. Imagine some American soldier coming home from WWII, finding his family & home abused by trespassers, fighting them off, and just barely making it out alive… and his first words to his wife are about how his conscience weighs heavily over some war atrocity. One could picture him unloading that sort of thing later when calm has been restored, not right after he’d fended off a bunch of goons who’d threatened his wife and kids in their own home. In other words, Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY is as tonally mismatched as racially miscast.
On the matter of Odysseus’ war guilt, some say it’s an anachronistic imbuing of a pre-Christian culture with Christian ethos. Some say it’s ‘woke’ in burdening a white (anti)hero with a pervasive sense of guilt than virile pride. Some say it’s part of historical revisionism, on the right as on the left, that questions narratives such as The Good War, e.g. Tucker Carlson denouncing the nuking of Japan and dissident right figures condemning the conscience-free Zionist-led destruction of Iraq, Libya, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, with Iran now in the crosshairs. For MAGA-types who look to Pete Hegseth as the model of manhood, the slightest doubt or second thought about what the US(and its ‘allies’) has done or is doing is anathema to patriotism and heroism. As Hegseth the ‘Christian-Zionist’ said, his Department of War will be about ‘maximum lethality, not tepid legality’.
Thus, there is no need for Americans to ever question or reexamine what their country did in past wars. Or to express remorse over atrocities in which untold numbers of civilians were massacred. Or shed a tear over the mountains of dead children in Gaza because, after all, Jews are the absolute best and whites exist mainly to appease the Tribe. Gangsterism is synonymous with patriotism among such types. They see no dishonor in using the smokescreen of negotiations to carry out surprise attacks that may even slaughter civilians.
If Jews see the world in terms of Holy Jews and lowly goyim, white Americans have a tendency to see the world in terms of Cowboys and Indians. To them, it doesn’t matter that Indians were here first and the treaties were violated by whites. All said and done, Indians were stupid savages and simply had to go to make way for white progress. This legacy colors America’s view of the world. The US is the exceptional nation, that of the Cowboys. The Darkies of the world are a bunch of backward Indians. So, even if the US cheats or reneges on deal after deal, it is justified on account of America’s awesome superiority.
This explains why the American Narrative is still outraged by Japan’s act of infamy, the perfidious attack on the US navy during negotiations, but is mostly okay with America’s sneak attack on Iran. It’s why Americans, who justify the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuking of Japanese cities on account of Japan’s perfidy, will argue that the US doesn’t deserve such repercussions even though its actions against Iran were far worse, i.e. Japan, though wrong, acted out of desperation, whereas the US has nothing to fear from Iran(that pursued peace with the US that sabotaged all agreements because it’s come totally under the thumb of Jewish Supremacism).
That said, there used to be an element of honor in Anglo-American thinking. Many US and Western historians thought the wholesale US bombing of German cities went beyond the justifications of war. A good number of US generals, MacArthur and Eisenhower among them, condemned the nuking of Japan as barbarous and unnecessary, not the kind of thing a civilized nation does. Such sense of honor could be traced back to the aristocratic warrior culture of the West, but it has been woefully lacking among the Jews(who rose to prominence as merchants, financiers, gangsters, and radicals) whose domination of the current West means that true honor of any kind is kicked to the dirt in pursuit of maximum power for Jews as the ‘masters of the universe’.
Some on the Right argue that the Greeks did nothing wrong in tricking the Trojans with the wooden horse, but they seem incapable of distinguishing between deception in war/strategy and deception in peace/diplomacy. In sports, for example, deception is an essential factor: boxers, quarterbacks, soccer players, and etc. all try to fool the opponent with feints, slips, and other trick motions; but if a boxer throws a punch after the bell or during time-out, that is foul.
Once the war broke out, Germans and Soviets naturally used all manner of deceptions. But, Operation Barbarossa had been a violation of peace and diplomacy, as was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor(and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria despite the non-aggression treaty between the USSR and Japan). Likewise, the US strikes on Iran during negotiations was an absolute violation of international and ethical norms.
Generally speaking, the American hegemonist nihilist-types see no problem in what the Greeks pulled off with the Horse. To them, Greeks are the Cowboys and the Trojans are the Indians, and in their minds, the Cowboys are always right, even when wrong. And these types argue that in the pre-Christian pagan world, there was no such thing as guilt and hardly anything like conscience. So, Greeks presumably only felt chest-thumping over what they’d visited on Troy… except the evidence clearly shows otherwise. The Greeks were a highly sophisticated people immersed in spiritual/metaphysical contemplation, ethical discourse, and political philosophy. More than most peoples, they raised questions about everything under the Sun.
Also, given that the Trojans are shown in a more favorable light than the often petty Greeks in THE ILIAD, especially with half the gods favoring the Trojans, the Ancient Greeks likely had a far more nuanced view of the world than today’s American rightards do. Even Athena, who sides with the Greeks, is appalled by the Greek slaughter of Trojan women who seek sanctuary at the feet of her statue; she later destroys their ship as punishment. Greek drama is full of stories of people who are haunted by their decisions, brash and impetuous in the moment but unwise and foolish, thereby fomenting the wrath of the gods.
So, even though it may well be that Nolan applied some Christian ethos to a pagan tale, it’s worth considering the reverse-process as well, i.e. Christian ethos partly flowed from pagan influences; indeed, if Christianity is wholly Jewish in origin, why would Jews have been so hostile to it? While it’s true that Judaism is profoundly moralistic, it’s also grounded in pathological tribalism, the conviction that Jews are the favored and chosen of the one true God. Thus, there was hardly any impetus among Jews to develop much empathy for The Other, the lowly goyim. Jesus could value humanity outside Jewishness, the Jews themselves couldn’t or wouldn’t. In the Tanakh, there is hardly a shred of remorse among Jews over the mass deaths caused by themselves or by their God in their favor. If the enemy had to be wiped out down to every man-woman-and-child, so be it, and no need to lose sleep over it since God ordained it. What matters is that the Jews are the Chosen, and the Promised Land in theirs, even if it entails the wholesale extermination of other peoples. Thus, despite the spiritual prophecy and the moral philosophy of Judaism, it couldn’t or wouldn’t break free of the ultra-tribal view of the world in which Jews were right(simply for being Jews) and goyim were wrong(simply for being goyim); indeed Jews were right even when wrong because of their Chosen-ness as the ‘Cowboys’.
Christianity broke from those ultra-tribal chains, and it owed partly to the Greek pagan influences that, directly & indirectly and consciously & subconsciously, influenced the heretical Jews who comprised the Early Christians. Greeks, for all their pride and arrogance, were capable of empathy for the Other and for thinking and feeling beyond blind ethnocentrism. Herodotus, considered the father of History, had a profound respect and admiration for other civilizations, so different from the Jewish outlook of “We are the Chosen and lowly goyim exist only to serve us”(which is the Zeroeth Amendment of the current US).
While Greeks, like any people, naturally went with ‘my side, right or wrong’, they could still acknowledge when their side had indeed being wrong. So, the Greek audience would root for the Greek warriors in THE ILIAD but in acknowledgement of the honor and pride of the Trojans whose alpha warrior Hector is presented as nobler than the often petulant and egotistical Achilles who, at one time, nearly sabotages the entire war effort over a personal grievance.
In that vein, it’s not necessarily true that the element of guilt in Nolan’s characterization of Odysseus is a case of Christian moralizing imposed on amoral paganism. Rather, one should consider the pagan roots of Christianity, not only in the concept of the demigod(what Jesus resembles as Man-God) and in the Gospels being structured more like Greek drama than Biblical storytelling but in its broader view of humanity as varied and valid in its myriad manifestations. Could the Jews have written something like THE TROJAN WOMEN(Euripides) about the plight of communities destroyed by the Israelites in the Exodus? Even today, Jews delight in the mass murder of the said ‘Amalek’ in Gaza with no sign of conscience.
More distressing still, the Jewish mastery over America and the Zionic strangulation of values have bled dry the last ounce of honor culture among Anglo-Americans. Consider: Whites ruthlessly vanquished the American Indians but possessed the requisite honor culture to pay respect to them as a people with deep sacred ties to the land and who had fought bravely against great odds.
The New American White Christian-Zionist mindset is utterly devoid of such grace and magnanimity in its utterly self-debased servility to the Jews. Incredible as it may seem today, there was once a time when some in the US government were ‘Arabists’, an epithet used against men who sought a more balanced, rational, and fair-minded US foreign policy toward Israel and the Arab states alike. Over the years, Jews, as the new ruling elites, insisted it had to be their way or the highway, and, upon white America’s cucking to such demands, all potential for empathy, objectivity, honor, and dignity went out the window. Current white politicians, especially in the GOP, are without agency and autonomy in their kneejerk obeisance to the Jews regardless of the latest outrage. White Christian Zionists reject humanism in favor of doggish caninism, i.e. God’s design for the white race is to serve as loyal canines to the Jewish Chosen Master Race.
Back in the Sixties and early Seventies, conscientious white Christians teamed up with radical Jews to decry America’s near-genocidal venture in Vietnam and its neo-imperialist interventions in Latin America. What white Christians failed to realize was that, while their own criticism of the Power was to restrain the abuses of their own kind, Jewish criticism was to delegitimize White Christian power so as to pave the way for the maximization of Jewish Power. White criticism was to make whites equal to all; Jewish criticism was to elevate Jews above the rest.
When whites criticized whites, Jews didn’t criticize Jews but just piled on the anti-white rhetoric until Jews gained the advantage over the whites. The children and the grandchildren of the Jews who protested the Vietnam War are cheering for the war against Russia in Ukraine and demanding the US go all the way to wreck Iran, even if it means tens of millions of refugees headed toward Europe.
As for the Trojan War, the ideal outcome would have been for the Greeks to end the hostilities and return home. Then, it would have been even-steven, with the Greeks having failed to conquer Troy and the Trojans having failed to demolish the Greeks. Both sides could have walked away with their heads held high. Indeed, both sides had more-or-less fought honorably as warriors facing off in the fields and shores around Troy. The Greeks eked out a victory only by way of deception in peace, an ignoble deed, the kind carried out by gangsters.
The Greek victory owing to Odysseus’ wits betrayed the double-edged nature of intelligence, also the theme of THE WIND RISES and OPPENHEIMER. In both films, men of immense curiosity and talent make astonishing use of intelligence in the creation of technology that comes to be abused in war. That Odysseus’ feat is reason for both pride and shame seems about right, just like the gift of fire as both a blessing and a curse unto mankind. Those who insist on a strictly gung-ho interpretation of THE ODYSSEY are just as foolish as those who demand a simple ‘white guilt’ spin.
Nolan’s ambition strains under the weight of contrarian conceits. Against standard interpretation, he goes for strange and unexpected representations of forms and events. It wouldn’t be a problem if they worked, but they invariably don’t. Nolan’s Trojan Horse appears less a (faux) gift to the gods than some flotsam swept ashore. ‘Athena’, played by some homely mulatto, seems more like a maid(not even a maiden) than a great goddess of power, wisdom, and beauty. It’s a case of unsubtle subtlety, suggestiveness served with a heavy hand.
The saying, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” applies here. The original story is marvelous as it is. Telling it straight would have done the trick. Or, an inspired and/or expanded reinterpretation could work too, prime examples being what John Boorman did with the Arthurian legend in EXCALIBUR and what Cecil B. DeMille did with the Moses story(far beyond what’s in the Bible). Nolan’s personal contributions, however, are fanciful, loopy, pretentious, or just plain silly, not least the inclusion of some made-up character named Sinon played by Ellen/Elliot Page; how did such a feeble-looking character last ten years fighting the Trojans?
THE ODYSSEY is the latest victim of the Greek Curse, similar to the Biblical Curse. Given that the Ancient Classics, Hellenic and Hebraic, offer such rich material for narrative potential and imagination, one might assume many, or at least several, great works were made from them. But, one is hard-pressed to name one truly great film based on Biblical sources or Greek mythology. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is roundly recognized as the best of the Jesus films(and it probably is), but it’s more interesting as an experiment than arresting as narrative. Certain Biblical-based movies are great entertainment — Cecil B. DeMille’s SAMSON AND DELILAH and TEN COMMANDMENTS — , but they can hardly be taken seriously; besides, their main appeal is the pagan allure than the sham piety, i.e. the audience really came to see Delilah or the buxom Anne Baxter as the Egyptian princess than the virtuous dullards.
The Biblical-adjacent BEN-HUR by William Wyler, is also grand entertainment, of which one can say, “They sure don’t make ’em like that anymore.” It’s a kind of Jewish Odyssey where a Judean in exile claws his way back home to redeem his honor, save his mother & sister, and defeat his foe, in the process finding grace in the blood of Jesus Christ. But, it isn’t art.
Most epics set in the Ancient/Classical world deal with history & politics than myth & magic; they tended to be high on production values and low on originality, with the failures of THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE and CLEOPATRA finally closing the book after the promises of BEN-HUR and SPARTACUS.
Mythology was a bigger challenge as it required special effects, which usually resulted in laughter than wonderment. TEN COMMANDMENTS was one of the few exceptions, by almost every measure more impressive than what came later with the benefit of high-tech. The 1981 version of THE CLASH OF THE TITANS was released to considerable fanfare and critical acclaim, but its technical shortcomings exemplified the difficulty of bringing myth to life. The 2010 version wasn’t much on character and story but at least delivered in the special effects department.
The success of BEN-HUR offers a clue as to the problems of the New Testament as movie material. For one, the story is known to all, and familiarity breeds boredom(if not contempt). Also, the fear of controversy in dealing with sacred subjects has led most filmmakers to play it safe, settling for generic reverence than probing revision; Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST was a notable exception but more embarrassing than enlightening.
Even though the story of Jesus is compelling enough as scripture(or in dramatic form performed on stage), it’s not exactly the stuff of cinema. BEN-HUR, an exciting grand spectacle intersecting with the Jesus story, provides juice to Christian themes. Same goes for Kevin Reynolds’ remarkable RISEN, another Christ-adjacent movie but with a Roman soldier in the leading role. Thus, the focus is directed away from the pious(and rather dull) reminder of Jesus as the Son of God to the question of why men of war are drawn to the Prince of Peace. In either case, a Jew in BEN-HUR or a Roman in RISEN finds his way to Christ in dramatic and exciting fashion.
Greek mythology is full of wonders even when rendered void of divine presence and interventions. Wolfgang Petersen’s TROY did away with the gods and dramatized the personal and political conflicts between(and within) the two camps, but that wasn’t the problem. Its failure owed to shoddy characterizations, cartoonish performances, hammy emotions, and ridiculous over-the-top action scenes.
The 1954 ULYSSES with Kirk Douglas in the lead role was adequate, certainly not disgraceful. The more serious European efforts like Franco Rosi’s L’ODISSEA are worthy of respect but fall short in inspiration and realization, more laudable for what they are not, such as the sword-and-sandal B-movies starring dubbed American muscle-men churned out by Cinecitta, than what they are: earnest and well-intentioned but turgid and leaden.
Hardly better have been the ‘art films’ based on Greek mythology, such as Pasolini’s MEDEA and OEDIPUS REX, bigger on Art Film mannerisms than the nature of man. Among the more artistic treatments, the best is probably Michael Cacoyannis’ ELECTRA with an electrifying performance by the one-of-a-kind Irene Pappas. Cacoyannis later directed IPHIGENIA in a similar, if anything more realistic, vein with less success.
Those two works, in contrast to Cacoyannis’ THE TROJAN WOMEN, demonstrate the advantages of ethno-based casting. ELECTRA and IPHIGENIA, despite their deficiencies, feel authentic with Greek actors speaking Greek. One can quibble that ancient Greeks didn’t exactly look like modern Greeks or that Ancient Greek was different from modern Greek, but the essence of Greekness comes through. In contrast, Michael Cacoyannis(or in this MIchael Cacophony)’s THE TROJAN WOMEN with the American Katharine Hepburn, French-Canadian Genevieve Bujold, and British Vanessa Redgrave speaking English never feels like a Greek or Trojan tale. The fault isn’t with the performances, almost uniformly good, but with the ethno-disjointedness. Imagine how more alien it would have been with a Negress, Mexican woman, and Japanese woman as the fallen women of Troy. It did have Irene Pappas(in the plum role as Helen), but Greekness felt alien amidst the mishmash of an international cast as Greeks and Trojans. What may work on stage doesn’t work so well on the movie screen that lives or dies on the illusion of realism.
Even so, one could honor Cacoyannis’ THE TROJAN WOMEN as an acknowledgement that Greek culture has become Western Culture, i.e. the themes embedded in the Greek tragedies/comedies have informed and inspired peoples and cultures throughout Europe. And historically, culturally, and racially, it is undeniable that Greek influences essentially flowed westward to Italy and then northward to the rest of Europe(and later the Greek-dominant Byzantine civilization had a profound impact on the Balkans and Russia).
Of course, the commonality of race doesn’t guarantee the commonality of culture. Buddhism originated in northern India but grew to cultural prominence in East Asia. Christianity was birthed in the Near East but planted its most promising seeds in Europe whereas the Middle East and North Africa eventually came under the domination of Islam.
Therefore, it was possible that Greek influences might have flowed to non-European peoples and places whereas Northern and Eastern Europeans might have adopted other influences into their core culture. Indeed, in ancient times the Greeks interacted far more, in the spirit of mutual respect, with the non-Europeans of North Africa, Near East, and even India(with Alexander’s invasions) than with the barbarians of the North who were held in low regard.
Consider the many Asian-Indians who came under the influence of Islam; they chose to be spiritually and culturally aligned with the Middle East than with their genetic Hindu brethren.
In ways subtle or obvious, similar processes are at work in the West. Even though all whites share in the racial gene pool, many whites have been quasi-converted to anti-white worldviews, such as Jew-Worship(or Semitism), Negrolatry, and GloboHomo(used by Jews to undermine norms all over the world). The fact that so many whites, even so-called ‘conservatives’, praise Nolan’s NEGRODYSSSEY is a sure sign of their rejection of white identity and unity in favor of the cult of diversity that views whiteness as deficient and diseased, thereby in need of healing via ‘inclusion’ of other races.
But then, the wholesale desecration of white indigenous and pagan cultures, Greek and Germanic, in the fanatical preference for Jewish prophecy was the first great schism among white folks. Until then, there had been a unity of the white race and white culture, pagan and indigenous across Europe from north to south, west to east. But with the spread of Christianity, the West became a world of whites spiritually beholden to a nonwhite culture.
Despite the dire history of Greco-Roman-themed movies(especially in recent times), there were successes along the way, most notably GLADIATOR by Ridley Scott, a huge box-office draw and showered with Oscars despite being artistically worthless, therefore a victim of the Greek Curse just the same. (Incidentally, GLADIATOR, like SPARTACUS, had a Negro, but that made historical sense as the Rome took in slaves from their vast empire. On the other hand, GLADIATOR II was ridiculous with Denzel Washington as a Negroman.)
The most ambitious film set in Hellenistic times in the past fifty years was ALEXANDER by Oliver Stone, a dream project since the 1970s when he was but a film student, but despite the flashes of grandeur and visionary power, it was no less ill-conceived than TROY and THE ODYSSEY.
Though about history and politics — essentially a biopic or bio-epic — than mythology and the supernatural, it had mythic resonance with a hero-conqueror who regarded himself as a demigod with the will and vision far beyond those of ordinary men, striking odd at a time when Greek high civilization, grounded in philosophy and mathematics, regarded their myths as imagination than truth. Alexander the Macedonian upstart would have none of that and went about his short life like a god traversing the world by leaps and bounds. In that respect, Alexander the Great was like a pagan precursor of Jesus (the) Christ who, according to Christian myth, came to see Himself as the Son of God with visions of world conquest(albeit spiritually) and died about the same age.
Stone failed for several reasons. He overly focused on Alexander’s personal life than on his political feats and cultural influence. Also, as a labor of love, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he threw himself into the passion project without the requisite distance of objectivity and judiciousness. The result felt like a rehash of his THE DOORS with Alexander retrofitted as the Rock Star of the Classical Age.
That damned Greek Curse(or Greco-Roman Curse) has undone just about everyone, even Federico Fellini in his wild flight(or crash-and-burn) with SATYRICON. Even Andrei Konchalovsky, the notable Russian director, made a mess of the TV version of THE ODYSSEY, though it is still by every measure superior to Nolan’s Ody-travesty. Incidentally, Konchalovsky’s SIBERIADE took inspiration from THE ILIAD as a kind of Russian national epic, and it is a supremely great work.
Fate hasn’t been kind in procuring a truly great work based on Greek mythology or set in the Classical World. Some were enjoyable enough, like JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS and 300 SPARTANS(that inspired the later CGI-laden Neocon War-porn 300 by Zach Snyder). The sequel 300: THE RISE OF AN EMPIRE is ridiculous but has the stunning Eva Green. IMMORTALS, done in a similar style, holds a certain fascination as a darker fantasy than usual.
More often than not, the material was given the comic-book treatment, like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS(the original and the remake) and THE WRATH OF THE TITANS, or some weird Art Film spin or high-concept delusion(as in the case with Nolan’s latest monstrosity).
Why fix what’s not broken? If additions are to be made, why not build on the solid foundation than trashing it with boneheaded ideas, like a coal-black Helen, a ship full of Negroes, Greeks on a Viking ship, an anachronistically feminist Penelope(played by the insipid Anne Hathaway, one of the most anemic screen presences ever, a woman who is as stupid and shallow in real life as in the movies), a manic-depressive and witless Odysseus, Trojan Horse that looks like beached wreckage, some made-up character named Sinon played by the atrocious-looking tranny Ellen/Eliot Page, Athena as a mostly mute maid, Meneleus as Andrew-Tate-look-alike, and etc.
Nolan may have been emulating Peter Brook of THE MAHABHARATA(1989) that featured a multi-racial cast. Personally, I don’t care for that stuff in any context, but Brook’s methodology was somewhat excusable. First, it was essentially a filmed play, and theatre is intrinsically about artifice, not realism. Also, Brook used the Hindu epic as a metaphor for the universality of conflict across time and space, especially prescient during the Cold War with great power politics toying with nuclear weapons. So, the cast consisting of whites, Negroes, Asians, and, yes, Hindus as well made a kind of sense(though not to my taste).
In contrast, Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY isn’t filmed theater but draws us into a re-imagined time and place of distant memory, indeed doubly mythic-legendary as the tale was historically remote even to the Greek civilization at its peak, i.e. the worlds of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY were as distant from Greek civilization as the stories in the GENESIS and EXODUS were to the Jews at the time when the sacred texts were written.
Thus, THE ODYSSEY has to convince us of another time and place, a strange and mythic time of a unique people and culture. Such is totally upended by the cast resembling a bunch of idiots one might encounter in a subway in NY or London, much of which has gone Third World. Why make a film about the Ancient/Mythic world of the Greeks(or proto-Greeks) only to serve us the latest ‘woke’ sermon? It feels less like a movie than a sensitivity session at Starbucks. Indeed, THE ODYSSEY may be the most expensive instructional film for DEI training.
The stupid thing is downright Orwellian in this sense: NEGRODYSSEY is no different from compelling Winston Smith to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. The Jewish-run West would have us believe that a man can be a ‘woman’, a woman can be a ‘man’(like Ellen-Idiot Page), Western History was brimming with Negroes(especially in high/prestigious positions), and even the Greeks of Homer were diverse in the American(or London-ish) way, with tons of Negroes, some East Asians, a Hindu, and etc. Nolan the fool, alongside the Jewish-brainwashed white cucks in their Negrolatric and GloboHomo fervor, welcome this as holy writ. (Given that the Greeks were relatively tolerant of homosexuality, especially in comparison to the Hebrews who clobbered the sodomites with stones, one might have added some plausible homo touches, but Ellen-Idiot Page as a warrior is completely ludicrous and laughable. Did Nolan really think that opening the film with her grotesque mug would be some kind of a win?
It’s no use debating the numbnuts, ‘woke’ or otherwise, who justify, rationalize, overlook, or tolerate the racial casting in NEGRODYSSEY. The ‘woke’ types are obviously retarded or deranged, and one would expect their pea-sized NPC-brains to cave to every ‘intellectual’ fashion and ‘moral’ mania. Far more problematically, the nuttery has infected the mindset of the would-be sophisticates, the cultured, the moderate, and even the conservative. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts? In our age, beware of Jews bearing gifts of their poison-pilled ‘wisdom’, whether from Neocons/Neolibs or the Soros Clan.
One should never confuse social norms with natural norms. The latter is firmly grounded in reality or actuality, whereas the former is slave to fashion. Even the stupidest things can become the social norm, like the prevalence of corsets among respectable women in the 19th century or, even crazier, the craze for foot-binding in China.
In our time, veneration of Anno Sodomini has become one of the dominant social norms, a part of the New Respectability. ‘Gay Marriage’, the mere thought of which was an abomination for all peoples and places at all times, became the defining ‘moral’ issue of the 21st Century in the supposed ‘more evolved’ West.
As Negrolatry has come into fashion, it’s not just the ‘woke’ but the ‘respectable’ neo-bourgeois types who accept as ‘normal’ and even ‘essential’ the hallowed inclusion of Negroes in just about anything. It’s almost as if the Jewish-run West believes whiteness is somehow deficient on its own(or tainted or diseased in some way) and requires the ‘spiritual’ or ‘iconic’ antidote of blackness.
For many socially ‘normal’ people, it’s becoming suspicious and even intolerable that anything might be all-white, e.g. the complaints about Robert Eggers’ THE NORTHMAN not featuring Negroes. Given that conservative-types, sheepish and subservient by nature, are prone to conforming to the prevailing norms, it should hardly be surprising that some of them praise Nolan’s NEGRODYSSEY. It’s no different from GOP tards convincing themselves that, gee, ‘gay marriage’ is alright because it spreads ‘family values’ among the homos. Cowards and retards will rationalize anything.
So, debating the fools, weaklings, and morons on the racial casting of THE ODYSSEY is an exercise in futility. The prevailing social norm in the Jewish-run West is ‘Negrolic’, and therefore, many whites, ‘conservatives’ included, dare not express anything that might give offense to Magical Blackness.
A ‘groid’ Helen? It’s obviously a retarded idea to any NATURALLY NORMAL person whose sense of reality remains independent of social fashions and cultural dogma. Among the insane ‘woke’ and the gutless social-norm types(who almost invariably bend to the prevailing Zeitgeist), there’s acceptance or even ecstasy over NEGRODYSSEY because one of the pillars of their sham-’spiritual’ worldview is Negrolatry or the idolatry of the Negro.
All their rationalizations about how Ancient Greece was diverse and blah-blah are disingenuous bullshit. These morons will insist that the naysayers are ‘obsessed’ with race, i.e. Greek characters should all be presented as blue-eyed blondes(a straw argument if there ever was one), when they themselves are the ones who are racially obsessed in their expectation/demand that everything be painted black. It’s like some idiot hyperventilating that women who want to keep women’s sports female are ‘sexually obsessed’ by excluding trannies. As the saying goes, every accusation is a confession.
Stupidity is bad enough, but we also have dishonest discourse making believe stupidity is validity. Insisting that Greeks be represented by white/European actors isn’t some outrageous expectation but common sense. The fact that we have to argue such things, along with whether tranny men should play in women’s sports, is a sign of civilizational degradation in the West under the control of the most venal kind of Jewish supremacist manipulators. But, what can we do when Jews are smart and clever while whites are dumb and earnest? One has to admit Jews are like Odysseus while the whites are like Cyclops. Clever Jews run circles around clueless and/or spineless whites.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s take the assertions of the benighted at face value. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend they are trying to be rational and sincere in their defense of NEGROYDSSEY. Let’s tackle their points one by one.
Point #1. Negroes and nonwhites need diverse characters(or people who resemble them) in order to identify and empathize with the subject. Is this argument really valid? SEVEN SAMURAI is entirely Japanese, yet the world had no problem following the plot and feeling for the characters. Following the ‘proglodyte’ logic, nonwhites couldn’t possibly relate to EXCALIBUR, and the corollary must also be true: Whites cannot relate to CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON because it has no whites.
Now, it’s true enough that many people prefer to see their own kind in narratives, and indeed, the conservative mindset tends to be lower in empathy or curiosity for The Other, preferring what is familiar, reassuring, and ‘mainstream’; indeed, such lack of empathy and curiosity explains the relative dearth of conservatives in creative endeavors that feed on imagination, mystery, and questioning. (Conservatives, for all their talk of ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ and ‘respect for cultures’, tend to prefer the familiar-in-the-now and are less likely to show interest in silent cinema, b/w films, and foreign cinema, even if the ideas and values expressed are more traditional than in current Hollywood fare. Oddly, it’s the liberal types, who seem committed to destroying the West, who are more likely to be interested in past culture and history, if only to ‘deconstruct’ them. What do most American Conservatives in the South have as their culture: Country Music and Big-Wheel Truck derbies, with zero interest in classical music or European history.)
Still, a person with a modicum of intelligence and interest(in peoples, cultures, and things outside his comfort zone) should be able to appreciate stories of other times and places. A Russian can appreciate Japanese stories, a Japanese can appreciate French tales, and non-Christians and even anti-Christians can still find the Bible engrossing.
If blacks cannot appreciate something without blacks, the onus is on them, not on us. It means their mindset is essentially tribal, jigrically ethnocentric to the point of blindness to other peoples and cultures.
Unfortunately, instead of encouraging blacks to broaden their own horizons, the insipid ‘woke’ ideology saturated with Negrolatry places the entire burden on whites and nonblacks, i.e. if blacks show no interest in a nonblack subject, we must blacken it to appease the blacks to win their approval. But then, even if blacks still remained disinterested, ‘woke’ whites will defend the black-tarring for their own edification on the basis that soul-deficient-and-diseased whiteness requires the healing power of Negrolatry to be redeemed.
Point #2. If someone wanted to do a black version of THE ODYSSEY, there are sensible ways to go about it. Consider Akira Kurosawa who adapted MACBETH to a Japanese setting with THRONE OF BLOOD(aka SPIDER WEB CASTLE). And Orson Welles did a black(or ‘voodoo’) version of MACBETH by setting it in Haiti. One can easily merge story ideas in THE ODYSSEY with some Sub-Saharan African folklore about a man on a difficult journey home(as such narratives are universal and found in every culture). Or, one can update the story to modern times. APOCALYPSE NOW took certain elements from THE ODYSSEY, and NO ONE is bothered by its black characters because black soldiers played a substantial role in the Vietnam War. One could come up with a story of a black American soldier stranded far from home having one hell of a time getting back home. Walter Hill’s THE WARRIORS is loosely based on ANABASIS by Xenophon, and the mixed-race cast makes perfect sense because New York is that kind of place. But imagine doing ANABASIS set among ancient Greeks & Persians and filling the cast with blacks, yellows, indigenous Mexicans, and Hawaiians. Some Asian-Indians with Indo-Aryan background might meld in, but of course, the best option would be to cast Greeks and Persians/Iranians or, at the very least, their closest ethnic/racial cousins. The original ANABASIS with the cast of THE WARRIORS would look totally ludicrous, but such is what Nolan did with NEGRODYSSEY.
To the best of my knowledge, only three films based on European mythology/legends have entered the pantheon of greatness: Fritz Lang’s DIE NIEBELUNGEN(in two parts, SIEGFRID and KRIEMHILD’S REVENGE), John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR, and John McTiernan/Michael Crichton’s THE 13TH WARRIOR(even in its truncated state with the release of fuller version nowhere in sight), all based on Northern myths than southern ones. (Perhaps the deep forests, mists, and the snow/frost of the North are more evocative of the mythic, even minus the mystical or supernatural, as in the case of THE 13TH WARRIOR, whereas the sun-drenched clarity of the South makes it more difficult to convey the sense of mystery based on mood and atmosphere alone.) Lang’s classic, being a silent film, may mostly be of interest to cinephiles and film scholars, but it’s packed with striking images and dreamy atmosphere, truly Wagnerian in its achievement. A Germanic myth, it has heroes and villains who look the part and was made at a time when the film world didn’t have to contend with quasi-‘woke’ nuttery(though to be sure, plenty of Jews and degenerates were hellbent on subverting and destroying the culture and values of Weimar Germany).
Looking the part goes a long way in the arts, which isn’t only about ideas and meanings but aesthetics and illusion. Why is casting so crucial to the success of a movie? Even in a racially homogenous movie, anyone cannot play everyone. e.g. Steve Buscemi wouldn’t have been ideal for the role perfectly played by Harvey Keitel in RESERVOIR DOGS and Scorsese’s AGE OF INNOCENCE, so masterly and exquisite, was marred by the miscasting of Michelle Pfeiffer.
It’s no wonder all these neo-productions of Wagner’s operas with characters in anachronistic costumes and makeup are irritating and pointless to the max. Classic Opera may be a lot of things, but it’s generally not a vehicle for irony, especially the profoundly impassioned works of Wagner. When something so unmistakably romantic is given a smarmy-smug post-modernist twist, it’s just pseudo-sophisticates and armchair-radicals/subversives patting themselves for being oh-so-trangressive.
Perhaps, given the stigma of ‘antisemitism’ attached to Wagner, the favorite artist of Adolf Hitler, the prevailing attitude predicates Wagner’s acceptability on a degree of ‘deconstruction’ or ‘distancing'(not least by Jewish directors brought in to muck up German culture). “We are not celebrating but critiquing Wagner.”
The power emanating from the mere look and feel of EXCALIBUR and THE 13TH WARRIOR amply demonstrates the absolute advantage of accuracy in casting. Arthurian legends, arisen from British soil, simply sounds & feels more authentic with British actors. We can split hairs about how people back then didn’t speak modern English and wore different kinds of armor, but the ethno-mythic spirit of the film comes through. Besides, the material details of history matter less in the mythic universe in which eons are compressed into a dreamed memory; it’s not to be confused with an archaeological pursuit. (For example, it doesn’t matter that Jerry Goldsmith’s stunning score for THE 13TH WARRIOR takes its cues from Richard Wagner’s 19th Century operas. They are all part of the dream.)
So, we can overlook that the Greeks in TROY wear armor that historically were developed later. Historians will note that men of Arthurian times wore chain-mail armor, not the silvery metallic ones shown in EXCALIBUR, but then, Boorman’s work isn’t history but a blurred imagining of the founding lore of Britain(and its cultural links with the rest of Europe). Similarly, a film based on a Chinese or Japanese legend is acceptable in(and even may be aesthetically enhanced by) combining the styles of the 10th century and the 11th century as long as the sense of cultural unity is preserved. But what would result from some Chinese characters wearing Chinese clothes while others are donned in Italian, African, Turkish, Arab, and etc. garb? Such level of cultural dissonance would stick out like a sore thumb, especially if some Chinese characters were also played by non-East-Asians.
EXCALIBUR has about the richest texture among the films of the genre, a true marvel to behold. It offers a kind of visual alchemy, blending qualities of disparate, even contrasting, elements to create never-before-seen impressions. The water shimmers silvery, the armors reflect the green of ferns; all that is presented before us, manmade and natural, interact in mysterious ways to sustain an otherworldly aura. It’s the opposite of Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, a childishly literal-minded CGI-fest that actually goes about showing river waves taking on the semblance of horses!
Historical accuracy isn’t the point of EXCALIBUR. What matters is it feels real with British actors steeped in British culture and history embodying the defining spirit of the British Isles. Even the use of white non-British actors would have chipped away at Boorman’s striving for authenticity; but truly, the use of non-white actors would have been disastrous, which is why virtually all recent British and Hollywood movies(or TV shows) about the European past are simply unwatchable and indigestible. Beyond irritating and annoying, they are excruciating in their willful pushing of BS to serve the anti-white agenda of Jewish Supremacism that wields Negrolatry as a talisman and cudgel.
To sit through these abominations, one has to go through certain mental(or mentally-retarded) gymnastics, telling himself/herself: (1) gee, there might have been all those blacks in European history(when there wasn’t) (2) we’ll just pretend that race doesn’t matter(when in fact it does, especially given the human sense of reality is largely visual) (3) it’s false but good for progress because diversity, especially including blacks, is sacrosanct (4) it’s just a movie or TV show anyway, so anything goes (5) it would have been better if blacks were part of Western History because they’re cooler and better than us, and so, it’s good to fantasize.
At least the notion of ‘Judeo-Christian’, however problematic, is based on a historical continuum(as well as fracture). In contrast, the now fashionable Afro-European Cult is utterly made out of whole cloth(or dashiki). One could speak of an Afro-Latin culture in South America, especially in Brazil, or an Afro-Anglo culture in the US given the history of slavery, blackface/minstrel shows, blues, and Jazz, but pretending that Vikings had Negresses as queens or that the British aristocracy was notably black is bone-crushingly imbecilic. This is beyond the controversial thesis of Martin Bernal’s BLACK ATHENA that traced Greek origins to Near Eastern and North African cultures; it’s pure fantasy that has come to be normalized in the West by the Jewish-run media and academia.
In Mao’s China, there was the slogan ‘Red over Expert’, favoring ideological fervor(deficient in actual ability) over technical expertise(deficient in ideological zeal). In the Jewish-run West, the slogan might as well be ‘black over white’ on the assumption that blackness has inherent worth whereas whiteness doesn’t; therefore, a second-rate black scientist deserves more praise than a white one who made the breakthrough. Indeed, if a white guy outdoes a black guy, he’s made to feel guilty about it by having offended magical blackness. It might as well be called ‘black over real’.
Another prime example of fidelty in casting is THE 13TH WARRIOR. It’s about Norsemen played by Scandinavian and northern Slavic actors who look the part of the barbarian tribes of distant times. The Arab character is played by the Spanish Antonio Banderas, but it works well enough because of the genetic links between people of MENA(Middle East & North Africa) with certain populations of Southern Europeans. In movies, even before we come to know the characters and follow the story, we are drawn to what looks and feels real, and THE 13TH WARRIOR delivers in the actualism department. It’s also quite deft in dealing with the thorny matter of linguistic differences. It begins with the Arab character whose Arabic is presented as accented English, whereas the Northmen speak in what sounds like a proto-Germanic language. For commercial reasons, of course, having the bulk of the cast speak in a foreign tongue wasn’t viable, and so, through a sleight-of-hand device, the Germanic tongue is incrementally made intelligible to the sharp-minded Arab in the form of Germanic-accented English, signifying that he has cracked the rudiments of their barbarian-speak. In the literal sense, it’s hard to believe anyone picking up a foreign language so fast, but for the purposes of narrative, it works brilliantly. (In the original novel, EATERS OF THE DEAD, the Arab communicates with others through a particular Northman who knows Greek, presumably a kind of lingua franca at the time.)
Anyway, who in his right mind would argue that THE 13TH WARRIOR would have been preferable with a Mongoloid Viking, a black Viking, a Mexican Viking, a Hindu Viking? The whole idea sounds stupid, like the idea that a tranny is a ‘woman’, but we live in a time when white minds are putty in Jewish hands, i.e. lacking agency and autonomy, whites believe 2 + 2 = 5 if Jewish Power so insists.
THE 13TH WARRIOR is a worthy model of how to address racial/ethnic/cultural diversity in historical-legendary terms. The basic story was drawn from BEOWULF and interwoven with the historical records of an Arab traveler named Ibn Fadlan, whose observations proved to be invaluable to the scholars of barbarian Europe. Thus, even though Arabs weren’t prominent in the Viking/Norsemen world, there were contacts and interactions, and THE 13TH WARRIOR handled it with the balance of curiosity and humor. It was like a role-reversal version of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA where a white European(as the alien figure) becomes entangled in the conflicts of the desert tribes. THE ODYSSEY could have featured this kind of historically grounded inter-diversity instead of cramming down our throats a most implausible and ludicrous intra-diversity where Greeks are teeming with blacks, East Asians, Hindus, and whatnot. (Indeed, the fact that the Norsemen in THE 13TH WARRIOR treat the Arab as an oddity and that the Arab struggles to adapt to barbarian ways is what makes the story all the more interesting. In contrast, as if clinically colorblind or just plain blind, no one in THE ODYSSEY seems to react to or even be aware of the diversity. Even in the US military composed of various races, there are tensions and anxieties among the soldiers, an irrepressible awareness of varying backgrounds and different, even opposed, outlooks.)
Incidentally, the critical community was far kinder to John Milius’ cartoonish CONAN THE BARBARIAN than to THE 13TH WARRIOR, disparaged by most critics as gratuitously gory and bloody when, if anything, the violence was elementary and purposeful, never exaggerated. Apparently, critics prefer the cartoon violence of movies like 300 or the video-gamey thrills of Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS(where the good guys dispatch innumerable baddies without breaking a sweat) over the blood-and-sweat violence of THE 13TH WARRIOR where every stroke of the blade is a matter of life or death.
An instructive case of racial or ethnic miscasting is MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, an awful mess(for myriad other reasons as well). On the Charlie Rose Show, the idiot director Rob Marshall justified casting three Chinese women in Japanese roles on grounds that the non-Greek Anthony Quinn made a wonderful Zorba. This is how a moron thinks. First of all, Quinn looks racially ambiguous, therefore could play anyone from a Mexican to a Turk to a Moroccan to an Italian(Zampano in LA STRADA) to a Russian to an Arab(‘river to my people’) to, yes, a Greek. Furthermore, certain parts of the world have more genetic intra-diversity. Whereas most Irish look distinctly Irish, Turkish features can range from blonde-European-like to Semitic-Arab-like to Eurasian-like. Greeks likewise have a wider range of genetic characteristics than other Europeans. Thus, someone like Anthony Quinn, with racially ambiguous looks, could do Greek, just like Vin Diesel made a plausible Southern-Italian-American character in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Some Italians, like Dan Bongino(or Bongo-gino), appear to have some ‘eggplant’ genes, the kind mentioned in TRUE ROMANCE.
Furthermore, Zorba, while profoundly Greek, stands for Universal Man who, at one point, even says, “I have done things for my country that would make your hair stand. I have killed. Destroyed villages. Raped women. And why? Because they were Turks! or Bulgarians! That’s the rotten damned fool I was. Now I look at a man – any man – and I say, he is good, he is bad. What do I care if he’s Greek or Turk? As I get older, I swear by the bread I eat, I even stop asking that. Good or bad? What is the difference? They all end up the same way… food for worms!” Lizzy Caplan with her ‘ancient’ face is also someone who can play a wide range of roles, whether Jewish, Arabic, Greek, Roman, Persian, Turkish, Armenian, and etc.
Lizzy Caplan
In contrast, Japanese aren’t genetically very diverse. Even other East Asians cast as Japanese could easily stick out as suspiciously ‘gaijin’. Moreover, contra ZORBA THE GREEK’s universalism, the whole appeal of MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA(first as a novel) was the hushed illusion of peeking into an exotic world. In other words, it sold the uniqueness of ethnicity and culture, not the universal brotherhood of man.
So, casting three Chinese ladies in Japanese roles undid the magic, the sense of secretly prying into a hidden world, a modern twist on TALE OF GENJI. Besides, Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh lack even the faintest suggestion of Japanese ethno-aesthetics. No better was Marshall’s utter lack of curiosity for actual Japanese culture, instead building up the story into a Japanese FLASHDANCE.
Edward Zweig’s LAST SAMURAI took ample liberties with history but at least conveyed a sense of an alien culture with its own entrenched norms and codes of honor, and therefore it worked on that basic level(despite all the Hollywoodisms). It certainly helped that the Japanese characters were played by Japanese actors who look and sound like the real thing. In Nolan’s hands, the head samurai might have been a Negro, a samborai.
Now, the issue of authenticity is relative to one’s knowledge of the subject. To non-Chinese viewers, Michelle Yeoh’s Mandarin-Chinese in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON sounded Chinese, but Mandarin-speaking Chinese audiences couldn’t help but notice the Cantonese accent. To the global audience, the Japanese actor(Tadanobu Asano) who played Genghis Khan in MONGOL may appear ‘Mongolian’ enough, but Mongols might beg to differ.
So, what looks or sounds Greek-to-me might very well annoy or amuse an actual Greek. For sure, many Russians snickered at the various details of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO by David Lean, especially at the mansion topped with onion domes, a recognizable Russian cultural motif but never actually used for private estates.
Still, there’s a range of liberties and flaws that could be overlooked or forgiven, especially if the work is effective where it counts most. Failing at the basics, there’s nothing left to notice but the flaws.
It’s so often the case that the essence of a thing is best(or at least better) conveyed via some other. For example, the most intense illustration of the Greek idea of the hero is found in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.(directed by William Friedkin). The best filmic realization of the Greek Tragedy is SEPPUKU, aka HARAKIRI(directed by Masaki Kobayashi). COOL HAND LUKE probably comes closest to the psychology of Christianity. THE SWIMMER(directed by Frank Perry), for all its flaws, is a more poignant exploration of Odysseusian themes than are the films based on the actual myth. BLADE RUNNER, TRON LEGACY, and BUBBLEGUM CRISIS, though futuristic sci-fi movies, rework Greco-Roman and Germanic myths more effectively than most movies set in the Classical World. Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST has more the dimensions and the aura of Greco-Roman history/mythology than his first movie THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES, a sword-and-sandals flick.
The film that best embodies Germano-Romanic themes is THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Substitute the American Indians for Germanic Barbarians and the Anglos for the Romans, and it’s like a rerun of an ancient conflict in the New World. It’s leagues above the over-the-top Roman-Germanic battle in the opening scene of Ridley Scott’s braindead GLADIATOR. John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS is a better ODYSSEY than just about any movie based on the Greek myth. In terms of action and adventure, PAPILLON(Franklin Schaffner), MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON(Bob Rafaelson), FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE(Jan Troell), and HUMAN CONDITION PART III(Masaki Kobayashi’s epic about war and its aftermath) have more the feel of Odysseus’ travels(and travails) than Nolan’s NEGRODYSSEY. For the sense of what it’s like to be seafaring men, you’re better off with John Huston’s MOBY DICK, Roger Donaldson’s THE BOUNTY, and yes, Kevin Reynolds’ underappreciated WATERWORLD. Even PLANET OF THE APES is a better ODYSSEY than Nolan’s dung-heap.
Very possibly, the greatest cinematic re-imagining of Western myths & adventures is Hayao Miyazaki’s NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND and LAPUTA: CASTLE IN THE SKY. Nolan, though a Westerner himself, is too much of an Anglo cuck-maggot, mentally infected by Jewish Globalism, to see straight and do justice to the glory of Western Civilization. He’s gone flaky as Julie Taymor. One’s better off listening to Vangelis and dreaming one’s own dream of the Greeks.
