The Odyssey NUKED By It's Own Translators

[00:00:00]Now the Odyssey is out, we get the fallout, both from the media and a wider range of views of people that actually know about it rather than the hand selected chills we had to put up with for a week before the movie released.

[00:00:10]Now on Rotten Tomatoes, everybody loved it. In fact, they loved it more than Lord of the Rings. Yeah, the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is just destroyed. That's why this says verified ratings and Lord of the Rings doesn't.

[00:00:21]And why The Woman King does at 99%. The best movie ever made. Clearly, it's got Karen from HR in it. It must be great.

[00:00:29]The score changes though when you go on Metacritic with 5.1 out of 10 or Criticless at 49%. Even IMDb at 8.4 out of 10, which is owned by Amazon. It's this corporate interaction, the more mainstream presentation of the narrative, which I find the most interesting in the fallout of any movie, good or bad. That's how you end up with the Odyssey's epic box office breaks.

[00:00:48]The go woke go broke myth myth. I mean, you said it broke it by one example. I mean, let's not pretend that the Odyssey box office is some astronomical never seen before total. You had Captain Marvel with $1.1 billion. Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness with $955 million and Thor Love and Thunder with 761 million. A total which some have suggested could be similar to what the Odyssey makes. Let's not pretend that any of those three are good movies.

[00:01:12]Christopher Nolan's film once again proves that flops like Ghostbusters and Little Mermaid weren't due to politics and people will pay for a great yarn.

[00:01:19]She's going to go on to say it's because they were bad movies and I'm like, yes, but what made them bad movies? The Ghostbusters is bad because it was an all female comedy movie. And what prompted you to do an all female comedy movie? Always makes me laugh when people act like you can separate the value system that motivates your actions to the outcome of your actions. It's like saying you want to serve people rubber eggs because you're a vegan and then going, "This food's crap, but not because she's a vegan." If it wasn't for that, you wouldn't be eating rubber eggs. When people were saying go woke, go broke, it was something that refers to a trend rather than a specific example. And when you're crowing that Ghostbusters was a failure but not the Odyssey, what you're really saying is, "Look, after 16 years of being woke, we finally made a movie that made a profit." Quite frankly, I'm just not sure how much of a brag that really is.

[00:02:03]But we'll get back to her because I think stupidity that strong need to be handled in detail. Comedy of that quality just doesn't come around all the time. But this week, we also got interesting opinions, not just from people that were like, "I gave this movie 10 out of 10." or even people that shared more of my opinion when it came to the movie. The in Apocalyptto, Mal Gibson transports you into the mind of a Mayan 500 years ago. In the Northman, Robert Edgars transports you into the mind of a Viking a thousand years ago.

[00:02:28]And in the Odyssey, Christopher Nolan transports you into the mind of a liberal woman in 2017. We even have pictures of the liberal woman from 2017.

[00:02:36]That is an interesting octopus that you've got on your arm. Did you draw that yourself? But we do now have the opinion of actual translators of the Odyssey itself, such as Emily Wilson.

[00:02:45]And I want to celebrate the fact that so many more people are aware of it. But at the same time, I had the sense that Chris Nolan was trying to pack everything in. Well, missing themes essential to the poem. And we had Daniel Mendelson, another modern translator who says it has a densely braided narrative, but its tormented hero sounds more like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies than the Odyssey itself. And it's not like Mendulson would agree with me on many issues, even previously defended the controversial decision to cast Leita on Bongo as Helen of Troy, saying it was a worthy way to provoke challenge and discomfort. How we think about beauty and identity, where I can only assume they mean the discomfort comes from if you have to look at it. I got to be honest, over the course of the Odyssey coverage, I've had to read a lot of articles about Leita on Bongo. It was just only this one that managed to jump scare me. But Mendlesson went on to say he faulted the director for giving us an Odysius with no cleverness, no humor, no wy charm. Instead, he just turned him into a haunted protagonist like he has in Oppenheimer and Momento. This tormented, guiltridden Adysius, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness, cleverness. It's a sibling of Momento's anguished amnesiac of Batman of Oenheimer. Nolan has merely remade Homer's hero in his own image. He's a onetrick pony. One of the things I find interesting, the amount of people going, "You've got to sit an IMAX." But why do you think if people don't get wrapped up in the experience of just a massive screen, an experience that only exists in like 34 screens on Earth or something, then they might just not get carried away by that experience and instead end up focusing on the movie.

[00:04:08]Now, probably the strangest criticism comes from Wilson herself, who said she didn't want to be snobby and nitpick things, but did question a range of admissions and other choices like the absence of the gods, incoherent message that condemns both war and physical cowardice, and also thought that Penelopey's role was so thinned out it endangered any possibility of believing in this marriage at all. All which had surprisingly reasonable points, especially the incoherent message about war. But that comes from the fact that he wanted to use Zeus's law as an indoctrination message and an analogy for modern times, which means you have to give forward a contradictory, incoherent response because that's what modernity is. You're asking people to submit to something horrific for them.

[00:04:45]It's never going to make sense. But the strangest comment she made is she thought other parts of the movie, notably the scenes with Adysius's dog, Argos, catered towards modern sentimentality. Everybody's a sucker for a dog. Modern sentimentality. That's her entire translation. She is ups for modernizing literally everything except how much people care about animal which is utterly bizarre, right? Because she's a feminist. You would have thought she'd be heavily invested in getting people to care for a stupid be. Now I was confused by that. So I went back to an Emily Wilson interview where she was speaking about that passage of the dogs. And it turns out I don't think she likes animals.

[00:05:17]>> Noble slave Umeas who takes care of the pigs. So in the context of a discussion of slavery, this is this is first um is talking the slave.

[00:05:23]>> That's why she doesn't like that scene.

[00:05:25]Instead, she decided to turn that scene into a conversation about slavery. I'm not even joking.

[00:05:29]>> Adysius had noticed and he wiped his tears away and hid them easily and said, "But now he is in bad condition with his master gone, long dead. The women fail to care for him. Slaves do not want to do their proper work when masters are not watching them. Zeus halves our value on the day that makes us slaves."

[00:05:43]>> Oh, you're so hard done, Ba. You have half the value when you get taken as a servant. I don't think she realized that what she actually said there was the problem with the dog was the women.

[00:05:53]>> The women failed to care for him, do not want to do their proper work. It turns out it's not slaves which are the problem, love. Also, she makes it sound like Adysius just doesn't care about the dog.

[00:06:01]>> Adysius had noticed and he wiped his tears away and hid them easily.

[00:06:04]>> Yeah, he may have cried a bit, but he hid it easily. You know, he doesn't really care. And the dog dies in this, by the way, with Adysius just standing over the other side and walked off.

[00:06:12]>> 20 years had passed since Argos saw Adysius. And now he saw him for the final time. Then suddenly, Black Death took hold of him.

[00:06:18]>> This makes Chris Nolan's movie, if anything, more like hers where Matt Damon Matt Damon barely cares about that dog at all. is just like, "Oh, bury that, will you?" That scene is done way better in The Return, cuz it at least seems to be made by a human that, you know, feels something for an animal. But despite Emily Wilson being roaphobic, she did say, "It was fun to be with my kids, I didn't feel like it was pulling teeth." I think we all agree is high praise. When I was watching the Odyssey, I thought, "Well, it could be worse. I could be undergoing enhanced interrogation." Also, in case you were still confused about the leanings of Emily Wilson, she did call Adysius a migrant and a colonial invader. Fails to realize those two are the same thing.

[00:06:54]The reason he's moving from country to country is to invade. Like, look, I already liked Adysius. You don't need to keep selling me on him.

[00:07:05][music] Whereas Daniel Mendelson said that it was a mixed bag. At once, a vehicle for the director's virtues, and as with the return, a case study of the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work, many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbingly archaic. They mean based. They mean the values in the timeless work are actually based on something which is inherently true in humanity which is why it survived for thousands of years rather than all the evil values which have been made by modernity about last Tuesday. He also admits there are a few feminism inflected moments and also at the speech where he's like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I hurt Troy. Can't believe I attacked a city and brutally murdered my enemies as they deserve."

[00:07:48][music] As the speech echoed in his ears, it occurred to me that this sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer, who after all gleefully vaunted over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies, dishing out justice to the scum in front of them. But it did sound like a lot of the whiny heroes from Christopher Nolan movie, tormented, guiltridden, stripped of anything good, is a sibling of Momento's anguished amnesiac of Batman and Oppenheimer. Whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer's heroes in his own image, just as he imposed on Adysius Adventures values utterly foreign to Homer. Is it essentially Homerich? On that note, I'll let Penelopey have the last word. The structure is nothing without the people's respect for its meaning. [music] Says the guy that thinks we should challenge traditional beauty standards, and there are people giving this a 10 out of 10. All I'm saying is maybe some people aren't being quite as honest with us as they may pretend to be. But it was nice to read what is a very very long assessment of the Odyssey from Daniel Mendelson. Because quite frankly, after sitting through all the Lita bongo interviews, it was nice to take in some content from someone who had higher than an 85 IQ. Lepita was asked what's your favorite mythological creature? To which she thought she was going to spit around like a helicopter for some reason.

[00:09:05]>> Shot in the dark. She then seems to get confused by what mythological even means. Myth person, animal, creature.

[00:09:13]You can just choose anything, dear. Now, I know what you're thinking. You can't expect Leita to know anything about mythological creatures. You can't expect her to know anything as a DEI hire.

[00:09:22]That's unfair. And I agree. Except this did happen at the French premiere. I mean, you can tell by the dress. And that makes it the second premiere of their tour, which means the night before she was in London already watching the movie. You know, the one with the cyclops in it or sirens. At this point, I'm so desperate to throw her a bone. I would have accepted a description. The oneeyed monster mermaids. It wasn't even limited to the Odyssey. It was just mythological creature in general. She could have said, "We're cander. A country in Africa that hadn't been colonized that invented technology beyond a wheel. You don't get much more mythological than that. They hadn't even invented the wheel." But out of everything, the worst part of the interview was her excuse. Yo, man. Like, I'm so jet-lagged. I don't think I can.

[00:10:03]Oh, well that's okay. I love you. You have a beautiful outfit. Thank you.

[00:10:06]Thank you. Now, you may be thinking I'm being unfair. The poor wench is jetlagged. But need I remind you, she spent the last 2 days in London. There's a 1-hour time difference. If your entire brain capacity is destroyed by waking up 1 hour early, I don't know why we'd need to consult your opinion about anything.

[00:10:22]>> I'd be like, "So, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them?"

[00:10:28]>> I don't really think anything, Leita.

[00:10:30]I've gone through daylight saving times.

[00:10:32]My brain's all a model. If you're angry about race and gender in the Odyssey, that's a you problem. And I know what you're thinking. That's the author. He's clearly an expert on the Odyssey. If ever in the entire world there's a guy who knows what it's like to go out to work, come back home, and find a load of suitors wanting to bang his wife, it's that guy. Except you'd be wrong.

[00:10:52]Instead, this guy is arguing for um Alphabet Entertainment critics. In fact, this entire article is going to use the standard uh trap, as he so aptly calls it, of going, "Well, you don't really know what it was like 8,000 years ago, and therefore, everyone looks like me."

[00:11:06]Yes, he's using Nolan's evil idea of Zeus's law that this random stranger has walked up to something you own, and he's like, "Are you have to give me everything you have?" I don't, though, do I? You actually have no power here.

[00:11:18]It's indicative of a disturbing underlying belief that any depiction of life where white straight men and women conforming to traditional standards of masculinity and femininity aren't the center of attention is suspect or dishonest. No. So that it's bad entertainment. Is that actually it is required to have the basis of civilizational beliefs in a story in order for it to be good? These are bigoted notions. Whether the people champion those beliefs are comfortable admitting it or not. To who? You feel pretty safe. I got to be honest, there's a difference between filmmakers making mistakes and filmmakers making conscious creative decisions about how to play classic tales to connect to modern audiences. In other words, yes, we destroyed it on purpose and we're proud of it. But strangely, he thinks you're supposed to be ashamed if you disagree with them. Why? Well, it's because NPCs care about the social consensus. That's where they get morality, their opinions from. Everyone around them is giving them their opinion. They feel like this is the dominant social order. I'm safe cuz I'm in the herd. So, he just gets the impression that it'll work on everyone else. That if I call you out, if I make you say that you're not part of the herd, you'll be scared and afraid to. But why? Oh no. Is some of the most horrific people in all of human society going to shame me? Am I going to lose the respect of um Bib Bib Bib Bibby Bibani? Big Will, someone get that manifed stat. And that includes writing dialogue that reflects modern sensibilities and casting actors who look like modern audiences. What does a modern audience look like? It's like mandam thing in it, bro. We don't have to be limited by modern audiences. We can be better. We can demand higher standards. Those choices aren't inaccurate. Yes, they are. You've even said mistakes, creative decisions, they're inaccurate. They're working the way they're supposed to. Yes, they're supposed to undermine Western society. I know. But you won't know how well they work until you watch the actual movie.

[00:13:05]Well, actually, you do cuz you can see it in the trailer and you go, "That's not them. That ruins the story." You don't actually need to watch the movie to understand that these were mistakes.

[00:13:12]with an open mind. Why would I watch it with an open mind? If you open your mind, your brain falls out. You want a closed mind. Cuz a closed mind is one of standards. Standards that other people are required to meet. Capable of at least considering the possibility that you have something to look from who? You [snorts] genuinely didn't mean to laugh then, but I mean, come on. I'm sure if I needed lessons on what to do with a tube. It's not about history. Yes, it is. then at least about how the way we choose to dramatize history represents humanity here and now. I don't like humanity here and now. I want to return to a previous time when we were better. There is footage of London from the ' 60s when people were better. But I also want to touch on some commentary by Brent Weeks.

[00:13:55]Now Brent Weekes is an author and both the Night Angel trilogy and the Lightbringer series are well worth reading. I always give the Night Angel trilogy. It has a very dark start warning, but it really sets up the characters and um especially in the modern day the way that leads to one of the characters being is pretty controversial. It's almost like they could be linked. But he says, "I have read the Odyssey many times. But my main annoyance with it is for the next 30 years whenever it comes up, I always have to talk about Nolan's choices rather than Homer's. It's happened again and again. Hollywood colonizes some long-beloved realm, kicks out the locals and the OG nerds, strip mines the ground for profit, and leaves toxic tailings in the soil. Are you a terrible human or do you love the casting? Now, I rarely look into the leanings of authors that I like. This point, I was fairly surprised. I don't want to talk about Nolan's casting. I want to talk about Homer's characters, their culture, and the stories they've shared with me. I'm a guest here myself. I have no claim to ancient Greece. A magical thing about reading old books is it lets you hear ancient people's deepest questions about life and morality directly. It lets you see their preoccupations and obsessions, invites you to wrestle with their conclusions. But this is only if you read a legitimate translation. If you read Emily Wilson's, you won't get any of that because she stripped that from the book already to put her own worldview into it themselves. That's why every other word is slave slave slave slave slave slave. It's farical because at the time they were just servants and housemmaids. Now at the point that he wrote this, the movie wasn't even out.

[00:15:19]So he couldn't have known anything about it besides the marketing. So he couldn't have known that Nolan would have come along and done the exact same thing.

[00:15:24]imposed modern morality onto invasions and war, the sacking of cities and the taking of women. The the fact that at the time it was just normal. There was no moral judgment about it. It was deemed to be good. People were proud of it. And modern people can look back on that and go, I I don't know how that's physically possible. But if you want to represent the story accurately, that is the way you have to portray it. You can't go back and change those people to be modern people cuz they weren't you.

[00:15:47]That's why their story is better than yours. These preoccupations and obsessions, if they lasted for thousands of years, are actually just deep human truths. And so you have to be willing to consider things. This brings up contradictions with modern day cults and you have to go hang on. So what if I'm wrong? Now you can think about that. You can work through that and still come back to the same conclusion you had in the first place that you were right. But the interesting part of these stories is it does raise those questions in the first place. So you can find out if you are wrong cuz many people learn things when they're kids and never think about it again. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. It's clearly nonsense. You take a good person, give him power, and suddenly he's evil. That doesn't even make any sense. And yet many people heard it as a kid. it imprinted on them and then they use that as a foundation to build the rest of their life on and it's wrong and so everything you build on top of that is wrong. This is the same with people's idea of equality. Compare any two people on earth, you won't find them to be equal. And once you knock that one out, you find out a lot more truths about life. In experiencing other eras, you may come to understand that you we also live in an era with his own passing obsessions. Homer was far more concerned with guest rights than than foreigners.

[00:16:48]That was because everyone he met looked like him. It's because he still had a nation. It's not that we shouldn't have or express our modern opinions on these stories. It's that a thoughtful guest invited into a new culture listens first and makes a real effort to understand the things that seem strange and then speaks. And in all of Nolan's movie, there was absolutely no effort to listen to all, let alone consider. Didn't even reproduce the actual story. Instead, it was all about what can I [clears throat] do? What do I believe? What do I put on this? I actually found it very interesting that at the moment there's a lot of people come out the woodwork who never talk about movies. And they mean this on all sides. There's commentators from all other kind of genres and they've all come together like I need to talk about the Odyssey and say it's a 10 out of 10 and you need to go see it in IMAX. Like where did you come from? Like why why this? Why is this the movie that made you come out and go actually no I need to tell everyone to go and see a movie all about Zeus's law and how we need to invite everybody in and just feed the world. Very strange. 10 out of 10. I tell you this movie seems to be far more about the 20s than 1100 BC or 800 BC. It seems poised to talk over Homer rather than listen at all. And I think that's a mistake. The movie wasn't even out. He's nailed everything. I do hold hope that my fears are misplaced.

[00:17:57]They weren't. And Nolan is brilliant. He wasn't. The land will heal, but maybe not in my lifetime. Classicists of the future, I envy you. For classists in the future to actually care about the past, uh, they would need to be of an entirely different inclination. Movies like Nolan's would need to fail. Hollywood would need to collapse. There would need to be an entire understanding of everyone in the business world that that ideology leads to bankruptcy. And I think that's inevitable. And that's why I don't care at all if this movie makes money cuz it's never been about if a movie makes money. For this ideology to succeed, it would have to make loads of movies make money. The trend would have to be positive. People would actually have to like the stories and the messaging it provides. And yet a lot of people I've seen talk about the Odyssey are the ones who entirely missed the message altogether and seem to think it's some based movie about going into your home and wiping everyone, which isn't what the movie says. If a lot of people are saying they like the movie because they missed the point, I'm not sure that makes it a good movie. But my position has always been this ideology, whatever you want to call it, woke feminism. I see the former as just a natural outgrowth of the logical conclusions of the latter. So to me, the words are interchangeable. But my entire theory, the basis of a lot of my videos is that's not satisfying to humanity because it's a lie. That to make a satisfying story, you have to play in to natural human inclinations and the sort of behavioral traits and values we've learned via evolution of how society and people are, natural things like gender roles that you have to reinforce those and play into those in order to make a satisfying conclusion that people like.

[00:19:22]This is why people like natural heroism, why it's men sacrificing themselves for the damsel in distress, which is a classic story which will always survive.

[00:19:29]Why? The moment you get a girl boss in, unless she's there for the male gays, which is encouraging repopulating species, then she's utterly rejected because you end up looking, oh, why on earth is this 5 foot little tart beating up men? That doesn't happen. It's why I think to learn from studies and actually make good stories, you would do much better to listen first. Because when you've got a story that survived for 2 and a half thousand years, it's probably got a reason why. That over that time enough people have read it and thought that is enough of value. I need to make sure this survives. that even now people are still doing new translations even if those translations are to subvert things even they realize the importance of the original work that it means that you take from those stories because they're essentially telling you what to write how to write the things which are important to write and so you take Nolan's attitude that I need to go in there and subvert it to undermine it to replace everything with me you're wiping out all of the combined lessons and wisdom that every single generation which has touched that story has added into the story for 2 and a half thousand years and just removing all of it because no, I'm way smarter than you.

[00:20:28]I'm way smarter than everybody else. I'm Christopher Nolan. Now, as much as I do like Nolan coming in here as the English conqueror, proving that the only way that a movie with foreigners and women in it can actually be successful is when they're being ruled with an iron fist by a straight white Englishman, which is incredibly base message.

[00:20:49]It turns out, no, we can make you successful as long as there's an old straight white man in charge leading the colonies. What you're trying to do is take a message that work and twist it through you into something else. And that's just not going to work. Nobody's in two and a half thousand years is going to be going, I think we should watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

[00:21:06]Cuz the message is wrong. Cuz the message is bad. Cuz if you listen to the message, it will destroy your civilization. If people did actually logically, emotionally, biologically, for some reason, decide that they wanted to embibe this message, their civilization would collapse and die.

[00:21:20]That's why this movie can never go forward in society and do what he wants.

[00:21:23]It will never build some new culture.

[00:21:25]It'll never leave an impact because it can't cuz the wrong message because the original messages were those in in the original text. Because the scariest question to any of these people is what if it's right though? What if the things that they have banned? What if the ideas they have banned? The times from which they are not allowed to think or take or learn. What if they were correct? A magical thing about reading old books is it lets you hear ancient people's deepest questions about life and morality directly. What if they were right? What if the real question raised by Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is, >> "Are we the baddies?"

[00:21:55]>> Because yes, Christopher, you are. But those just my thoughts. What are yours?

[00:21:58]Let me know down in the comments below.

[00:21:59]Like the video if you like the video.

[00:22:00]Subscribe. More videos like this in the future. And I will see you in the next one. Abby.