Nolan's Odyssey is a beautifully made film that appropriates Homer for modern progressive morality.
Adaptation crosses into appropriation when the heart is cutPrio accepts Sinon, Virgil borrowings and a villainous Agamemnon, but says replacing the question of human nature with PTSD and suppressed memory is unearned.
Casting choices in the first three minutes are politicalCross-sex and cross-racial casting opening the film, with Elliot Page classed as a white man under Oscar categories, is read as teeing up the Academy.
Calypso's island becomes California therapy cultureShe arrives in a netted swimsuit like a Malibu part-time yoga instructor and tells Odysseus he really has to learn how to let go.
Executive SummaryAI
The hosts open on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as the first singular, universal cultural moment in years, and bring on Alex Prio, professor at the University of Austin, as their bard for the text.
Prio's immediate takeaway is that the film is a Trojan horse: it takes one of the primary texts of the Western tradition and shoehorns its core into modern secular morality, with Odysseus sailing off into the unknown West.
The core difference he names is that in Nolan the choice is moral — Odysseus violated Zeus' law with the Trojan horse to help Agamemnon — where Homer asks what it means to be a mortal man rather than a god, a question Prio says is simply absent.
Pressed on the political readings, Prio argues the film is plainly not conservative: a weak man in a big suit manipulating religion for financial gain against trans folks and minorities, with Sinon called almost stunning and brave, while the hosts push back that this reads too much politics into it.
His final word is to treat the film as a gateway at best and go read Homer — Richmond Lattimore's translation over Fagles — because the Odyssey is a profound meditation on human nature that Nolan looks down on.
Key Quote
“But I think it's fundamentally a progressive movie.”
— Alex Prio
Key Quote
“Everybody does that in Western history, but you better do a good job.”
— Alex Prio
Key Quote
“That is what the Odyssey is about, this guy who is seeking his heroism.”