fredbo

The only thing epic here is the aesthetic catastrophe. Nolan is a cerebral director of the global anglo world, all his intelligence put to industrial ends. Grey matter for a grey world. Nothing in this trailer is Greek. Nothing is Mediterranean. No olive groves and no white stone burning under the sun and no salt and no pine and no sea-glare. A deracinated Odyssey, made for imaginary nobodies from nowhere. The script feels like it's going to be the work of a diligent student who took down the events of the Odyssey one by one, forgetting that this is not a novel but an archaic poem, from a time when men and women lived each word as a heartbeat, who sang the soul and flesh of a people and of a world at once real and supernatural. A poem in which Telemachus does not say "my dad is coming home." The Odyssey deserved a Parajanov or a Fellini or a Welles, someone larger than life, a Dionysian ogre, someone hungry, someone who could make a film that smells of figs and raw wool and roasting meat and tar and blood. Monsters that are actually monstrous and seductive witches with real venom and golden shields catching real light and banquets going on for days. And the women of the poem, who are everywhere in Homer and seem so cold and dull here. Circe in her smoke and Calypso in her cave and Penelope at her loom, the sensuality of witches and the rigid loyalty of wives, all replaced by a fashion-armor Athena and a Penelope played as a strong American woman. And then there is what the Odysseus of the trailer says: "No one can stand between me and home, not even the gods". The cunning sufferer who knew how to bow to divine forces turned into a defiant individualist who bows to no one. Greek cunning replaced by American autonomy. The poem's central lesson reversed in a single line of dialogue. I usually don't mind Hollywood slop, but this has made me weirdly angry, and the film isn't even out yet. I feel as if a red line has been crossed, some hubris that has gone too far. The gods have been angered. How could they not be, with the decapitation of that statue at the end of the trailer? An iconoclastic gesture absent from Homer, usual with the monotheistic traditions that have spent centuries smashing pagan images. Nietzsche said he would believe only in a god who knew how to dance. Apollo without Dionysus produces exactly this: cerebral, cold, unambiguous. I cannot trust a filmmaker who is not hungry enough to banquet with the gods.