Christopher Nolan is filming the Odyssey. And, of all people, Matt Damn will be Odysseus. And his son Telemachus will be played by Spiderman (Tom Holland) and Charlize Theron will be Circe. Anne Hathaway is listed high in the credits so I fear she will be Penelope. And most frightening of all, John Leguizamo is in the cast. I guess I should be grateful that Pee Wee Herman is dead or maybe he would be cast as Achilles or Zeus.
Christopher Nolan is a talented director. Could the movie turn out to be an entertaining and well-made film? Sure. But based on the cast I’m pretty sure it will have only the most tangential connection to Homer’s poem. I’m guessing Damon will channel his character in the Bourne Identity and kill the suitors in a blur of shaky cam footage. Maybe he can use his character development from “The Martian” to recreate Odysseus’s sense of abandonment on Ogygia with Calypso. And come to think of it, Calypso can be played by RuPaul in drag.
No kidding, we’ve finally reached a point where special effects are good enough to show the scene in Polyphemus’s cave believably and what will render the story unfilmable will be the ethnicity of the characters. In order to be eligible for Academy Awards, there will need to be a certain number of non-white and non-straight actors distributed among the most important roles. I’m guessing that blonde Helen and specifically red-haired Menelaus will have to be portrayed by Australian aborigines and the Sirens will be transgender creatures. Who knows, just to win Best Picture he’ll have to make several of Sylla’s heads look like prominent Republicans.
I’m probably painting this thing impossibly more negative than it needs to be. But I think that Christopher Nolan is the closest thing to a good director left in Hollywood and the fact that he’s casting the movie with woke actors and following the DEI guidelines reinforces my worst premonitions for what this will end up being. Well, why not? Instead of Odysseus, the Sacker of Cities, we’ll get Matt Damon, Keeper of Safe Spaces. I’m sure that instead of putting the hundred plus Suitors of Penelope to the sword, he’ll sue them in the court of public opinion and then realize that fighting for his wife’s honor is a toxic patriarchal practice that assumes that Penelope needs him to return when instead she could have shacked-up with Clytemnestra and ruled Ithaca as the first lesbian power couple of the Bronze Age.
And obviously, his son Telemachus would have discovered that he was born in the wrong body and want to be called Telemacha from then on. And all of Odysseus’s slaves will have read Ibram X. Kendi and will rise up and decolonize Ithaca.
Well, I guess everything in the world is backwards at the moment and we’ll have to wait for a different motion picture environment before something like an authentic Odyssey is possible. I guess the good news is that the book is still there to read.
The Odyssey
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all —
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through the heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return
(Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1961))
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.
(Homer circa 1,000 BC)