Just saw The Odyssey. Despite what you may have heard, literally all of the criticisms by conservatives were entirely correct. The movie is just as woke as you fear, if not more so. The DEI casting is atrocious. Completely takes you out of the story right from the beginning. But even worse than that is Nolan’s decision to turn Odysseus into an anachronistic whiney, solemn shell of a man plagued by “trauma” and guilt. It’s impossible to overlook these flaws because the film itself is not terribly entertaining or well constructed. For the most part it is disjointed, dull, self-serious, disenchanted, somehow feeling both verbose and overly rushed at the same time. The dialogue is some of the worst I’ve ever heard in a “critically acclaimed” film. “On the nose” and “clunky” are descriptions that can’t even begin to describe this script. At no point in the story does Nolan ever transport the audience to the ancient world. You never feel like you’re 3,000 years in the past. You feel like you’re watching modern Americans put on a pageant, because you are. Nobody would be calling this thing a masterpiece if it was made by a director not named Christopher Nolan.
