Ep. 1809 - The Odyssey Was EVEN WORSE Than I Expected. Here’s Everything Wrong With It

**Matt Walsh** (0:00)
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Now that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been released to near unanimous critical acclaim and significant box office success, we've been told that all the criticisms made against the film prior to its release, mostly by conservatives, have been proven baseless, even embarrassing. Those who raised concerns about the movie should now hang their heads in shame and crawl before Christopher Nolan on hands and knees, begging for forgiveness, offering gifts of supplication like an ancient Greek standing before the shrine of Apollo. This has been the basic conclusion of commentators on the left and even a fair number of commentators on the right. The wokeness allegations, they say, have been refuted. The movie is an artistic triumph, a masterpiece. And now it is our job to show that we are culturally intuned by joining in with the applause or at least ceasing our criticisms. That is the general consensus, as you've probably heard. And the general consensus is, as the general consensus so often tends to be, wrong. Now that I've actually seen the movie, I can definitively say that every single criticism from conservatives was entirely correct on every point. We were not only correct in our prejudgment, but much more correct than we ever knew.
You can judge a book by its cover most of the time, and the cover of this one had a gender confused woman in a man costume and a race swapped Helen of Troy. We judged those to be massive red flags and turns out we were right. The Odyssey is indeed a three hour long middle finger to its source material, to Western civilization, to white people, to Greeks, to literature and to movie making in general. It contradicts itself to the point that every important aspect of the story, from the plot, to the theme, to the characterization is reduced in coherence. The dialogue in the rare moments where it's even intelligible is often clunky and heavy-handed and wildly out of place. Most of all, the film does not feel like a story set in the ancient world, which is a fatal problem for a film set in the ancient world. It barely feels like a film at all, in fact. It has more the feel of a rough draft of V1 that Nolan was contractually obligated to produce, which probably isn't far from the truth. Everybody understands that with the rise of streaming services and the glut of content all over the internet, movie theater attendance has plummeted. Profit margins in the entertainment industry are lower than they've ever been. At this point, now that Marvel has died, at least for now, there are only two reliable ways to fill theaters and generate significant profit, at least from the perspective of movie studios. The first approach is to fund an existing IP to include very recently, viral meme IPs like Back Rooms. The second approach is to produce an event film by somebody like Christopher Nolan, an epic that has enough set pieces and feels big enough that people be compelled to get off their sofa and pay 20 bucks to see it. Then that's what we have here. Nolan is done making original risky stories that might not go over well. The days when he made Memento are over for the simple reason that you don't need an IMAX theater to enjoy a film like Memento. You can watch it on your phone and get basically the same experience because it's a high concept, dialogue driven film with no reliance on giant monsters or 20 different A-list actors filling out the cast. Not that there's anything wrong with giant monsters, by the way. That's actually one of the only good points of Nolan's Odyssey, as we'll discuss, but in any case, with very few exceptions, films like Memento are no longer interesting to the big studios or to directors like Nolan. They're only interested in green lighting films like this one. So whether you like it or not, that's the economic reality of the industry right now. And there's nothing wrong with a film like this one either, by the way, at least conceptually, in event film, an epic film based on an ancient foundational story of Western civilization could be, should be, a wonderful thing, which makes the failure of this film all the more tragic. Now, to be sure, if any director could withstand those pressures, you'd think it would be Nolan. He's about as bankable as a director can possibly be, but you have to wonder, especially after the flop that was Tenet, if he's lost his will to do anything, particularly novel or outside the box. Tenet lost something like $100 million for the studio, which was only partially because of COVID. People didn't like the movie for the understandable reason that it made no sense. So now after that catastrophe, maybe Nolan is more concerned with protecting his image, which is why he's increasingly relying on established stories and massive ensemble casts. Whatever the case, The Odyssey is a striking example of a director who, whether he's aware of it or not, is terrified of failing to meet expectations. He wants to give everybody, from audiences to the suits and universal pictures, exactly what they expect. And that means he must adhere to every norm in Hollywood, from DEI casting to one-dimensional characters and lots of sentimental nonsense. It also means that Nolan has to participate in Hollywood's larger objective, which is to subvert American culture by making everything gayer, more feminine, less patriotic, more depressing, and of course, less white. Now, I've seen people desperately trying to describe this film as path-breaking, awe-inspiring, even transgressive, almost as if they're trying to make it true by saying so. But infusing modern liberal values into ancient story is pretty much the least transgressive thing a Hollywood director can do. It's utterly cliched and expected, not the slightest bit challenging or interesting or bold. Nolan's not interested in telling transgressive stories. He's too afraid. And that's at least that's one theory. I mean, you can make up your own explanations for Nolan's motives. Whatever the motives are, the end result speaks for itself. And to begin with, yes, this movie was just as woke as we thought it would be. The DEI casting in particular is far worse than we knew, far worse. Nolan's version of Ancient Greece is a kind of multiracial utopia. Well, perhaps not utopia. Actually, Nolan's Ancient Greece is relentlessly drab and dreary and depressing and colorless. All the buildings look like ancient ruins, which, yes, it makes sense for those buildings to look like ancient ruins today, but they would not have all been ancient ruins in ancient times. So this is not a utopia, but in Nolan's vision, it is nonetheless absurdly diverse and multiracial. Blacks and Asians, Hispanics, somehow all coexisting in the Mediterranean 3,000 years ago. Now, Nolan does not softly coax the audience into the DEI net, easing us into it slowly but surely. No, he cranks the diversity meter up to 1,000 from the very first frame. The first character we see is the rapper Travis Scott, who somehow manages to turn in a bad performance despite appearing on screen for 12 seconds. He got 12 seconds and he completely botched it somehow. And then we see Ellen Page portraying a Greek warrior waddling around the desert like a child with a soiled diaper straining under her rubber armor, looking like she's about to die even before she gets shot through with arrows. The defenders of this film, especially on the right, have tried to claim that Page's appearance is not a huge problem because she only has a small role. You've probably heard that. It's a very small role. Now, I don't want to ascribe sinister motives to anybody or accuse them of lying, so I will generously assume that the conservative commentators making that claim must have fallen asleep 10 seconds into the movie, which would be totally understandable, frankly. If they actually watched the entire thing in a state of full consciousness or at least half consciousness, then they would know that Ellen Page is not a minor character in this film at all. She is utterly pivotal to the plot. She's one of the most important characters in the entire film. She is more than that, and as Steve Deese has pointed out, the moral conscience of the story, her inclusion in this film, in that role, is without question, one of the wakest, most radically left-wing things we have ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster film. There is no doubt about that. If any director but Christopher Nolan had done this, he would have no conservative defenders at all. To claim that a movie is not woke when there's a trans-identified female actress pretending to be a male Greek warrior who serves as the linchpin of the plot and the film's moral conscience, is just ridiculous. I mean, if we're going to rightly claim that it's woke to have a brown-skinned Hispanic snow white, then how can we possibly argue that there's nothing woke about a trans female portraying an ancient Greek warrior? Now, the argument from Nolan's conservative defender seems to be rather explicitly that it's okay when Nolan does it. I find that argument to be unpersuasive, if not pathetic. Indeed, if you believe that Nolan is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, then the logical conclusion is that it's worse when he does it, not better.