Stop! Homer Time: The Odyssey (2026)

Summary

Overdue Podcast: Special Collections — The Odyssey (2026)

Episode Date: August 3, 2026
Hosts: Andrew and Craig
Featured Book/Movie: The Odyssey (2026, directed by Christopher Nolan)
Episode Focus: A detailed (and thoroughly fun) discussion of the new big-screen adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, plus broader thoughts on adaptation, Christopher Nolan, and classical literature in pop culture.

---

Episode Overview

Andrew and Craig break format with a “Special Collections” episode, venturing into film territory to discuss Christopher Nolan’s epic new adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey—a film that’s already a cultural event (and box office smash). With their long-running fascination for Homer and classical stories (and in particular, translator Emily Wilson’s work), the hosts dissect what Nolan’s movie does with the ancient tale, its bold choices, and its strengths and weaknesses as an adaptation. They also dive into the internet’s discourse around the film, the cinematic and literary histories behind it, and importantly: what makes “an Odysseus” on the page versus on screen.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context: Why This Movie, Why Now?

Craig and Andrew discuss their rationale for dedicating a book podcast episode to a movie:

• They’ve previously covered Homer’s works, interviewed Emily Wilson (translator of both The Odyssey and The Iliad), and see this Nolan adaptation as part of the literary continuity they explore ([04:18]).
• The film is described as both a critical and box office hit and a valid new way to engage with a "book" overdue for adaptation.

“We wanted to talk about this movie and... just do an episode about it and not put it behind the paywall… because people want to listen. People like us, I think.” — Craig ([05:14])

---

2. Christopher Nolan: Approach, Reputation & Homeric Leanings

The hosts provide a high-level overview of Nolan as filmmaker and why he’s a fitting (if idiosyncratic) choice for The Odyssey:

• Nolan’s “one for me, one for them” filmography; his preference for big, accessible, but cerebrally-structured movies (Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer).
• His analog/IMAX exhibition obsession—(The Odyssey is the first film shot entirely in 70mm IMAX)* ([14:15])
• Many of Nolan’s movies feature family-oriented, guilt-ridden protagonists struggling to get home—themes central to The Odyssey ([15:43]).
• Nolan’s earlier attachment to the 2004 Troy project and how he’s been ruminating on the Trojan Horse sequence for two decades ([16:28]).

---

3. Film Structure, Adaptation Choices, and Big Deviations

Andrew and Craig detail how the film adapts (and often changes) Homer’s narrative:

• Trojan Horse: The film makes the horse its prologue and epilogue, elevating it to “nuclear bomb” or “original sin” status—much larger on screen than in Homer. The character Sinon (Elliot Page), a minor figure in other epics, becomes a moral anchor ([39:01]–[43:01]).
• Odysseus’ Arc: Nolan’s Odysseus (Matt Damon) is recast as a soulful, guilt-ridden “wife guy,” far from Homer’s gleeful trickster ([63:46], [65:27]). Both hosts (and Emily Wilson’s review) note this is a significant, distinctly modern (and Nolan-typical) alteration.
• Hospitality/Xenia: Xenia/“Zeus's law”—the sacred guest-host bond—becomes overt theme (“everyone yelling Zeus’s law all the time,” [55:49]), symbolizing societal collapse post-Troy.
• No Gods Allowed: Very little of the Olympian “playing chess”—most notably, gods are off-screen. Zendaya as Athena appears only to Odysseus, providing him guidance ([52:03]).
• Narrative Structure: The film mixes up linear narrative with flashes back, mirroring how The Odyssey reveals Odysseus’ tale ([50:02]).

---

4. Emily Wilson’s Critique & The Discourse

The hosts tackle Emily Wilson’s much-discussed review—and broader online discourse—and clarify its actual substance:

• Wilson’s points: The Odyssey film’s moral/characterization is muddled; it sidelines non-Odysseus characters; Penelope’s depth is reduced; dialogue is flat and “relentlessly expository, humorless and flat” ([26:15]).
• Wilson praises the film’s mishmash of costumes, dialects, commitment to non-historicist aesthetic, and “not caring” about accuracy in a way that’s actually Homeric.
• The film triggers both the right-wing “woke Odyssey” crowd and over-zealous fanboy pushback toward Wilson—both hosts point out the cyclical absurdity ([44:42], [45:28]).
• Both largely agree with Wilson’s points, especially Odysseus’ baffling recharacterization, but still find joy in parts of the film.

---

5. Performance Highlights

• Robert Pattinson as Antinous: Steals the movie with a “weird, scene-stealing performance”—the “best character in a movie for a while” ([36:38]–[37:02], [96:27]).
• Matt Damon as Odysseus: Good in the role but playing a character who doesn’t quite fit the poem; “just not any understanding of Odysseus that anybody has ever had” ([66:40]).
• Tom Holland as Telemachus: Strong performance; “I like when he says, my dad,” and his embrace of “wise eyes like Athena” as Homeric epithet ([59:49]).
• Zendaya as Athena, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Hamish Patel as Eurylochus: Noted as largely good in underwritten or altered roles.

---

6. Visuals, Practicality, and Cinematic Merits

• Nolan’s commitment to shooting on film, location, and practical effects pays off—Cersei’s transformation, Hades sequences, Odysseus’ journey all look “great, real, and big” ([31:07], [83:02]).
• The Trojan Horse itself—how it’s designed, moved, occupied—is a marvel and thematic centerpiece ([46:15]–[48:23]).
• “Nothing feels fakey fake,” even in wild magical scenes; a rarity when contrasted to Marvel and other modern blockbuster CGI ([30:32]).

---

7. Key Scenes & Sequences

• Trojan Horse: Detailed, “How would it work?” approach, emphasizing the suffering inside ([46:15]).
• Polyphemus the Cyclops: Visually striking, but undercuts the original “no man” trick and atmosphere ([71:12]–[73:14]).
• Cersei: Samantha Morton’s “clay-molding” transformation of men into pigs—“unsettling and cool” ([83:21]).
• Sirens, Hades, Scylla & Charybdis: Imaginative, visually outstanding, and the “how does it work” problem is always foregrounded ([49:04], [84:55]).
• Suitor Slaughter Finale: A “Jason Statham action sequence,” including a musical bow and bloody set pieces led by Damon and Pattinson ([96:12], [97:12]).

Notable Quotes:

• “But I love it.” — Matt Damon as Odysseus (on Calypso’s lotus, [53:35]), a line unintentionally funny and fondly repeated.
• “It's only until pretty late that they invent scouting ahead.” — Andrew ([85:14]) on the party’s tactical missteps.
• “This conversation is a Nolan movie which is... stricken with nonlinear storytelling.” — Craig ([48:30])

---

8. Adaptation as Interpretation

• Hosts reflect on the responsibilities and freedoms of adaptation—how Nolan’s translation is less about fidelity and more about thematic reinvention; sometimes it works, sometimes it’s at odds with what makes Homer’s poem enchanting ([103:00]).

---

9. Critiques and Missed Opportunities

• Odysseus’ guilty arc doesn’t land as powerfully as it could; the thematic weight about “civilization collapse” at times feels clumsy ([100:46], [104:39]).
• Some secondary characters, especially Penelope, feel flattened ([23:17]).
• Coda about the loss of writing post-Troy shoehorned thematically (“because I caused the collapse of the Bronze Age, people will only be able to sing about Troy since no one will know how to write anymore,” [99:28]).
• The sea people—introduced early as a major existential threat—aren’t sufficiently integrated into the story’s emotional or narrative payoff ([105:04]).

---

10. What the Hosts Loved

• Visual spectacle, practical sets, Ruth De Jong’s production design, and Goransson’s score ([29:49]).
• Unexpected humor (“But I love it”).
• Pattinson’s (Antinous) and Samantha Morton’s (Cersei) show-stealing performances.
• The joy of discussing Homer with, and through, a pop culture phenomenon.

---

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On “Wine dark theater” and moviegoing rituals: ([05:49]–[08:08])
• Popcorn mishaps and “our odyssey to see this long film” ([08:05])
• Musical bow skepticism: “You're not gonna get this big, room-filling twang off of this bow.” — Andrew ([28:45])
• Dirtbag Odysseus vs. Wife Guy Odysseus: “Odysseus in the poem...is just coming up with new little fibs to tell people, even when it is not necessitated by the circumstances...The Odysseus of the film is much more of a wife guy, much more introspective.” — Andrew ([63:44])
• Argos the dog, eternal tearjerker: “The only part of the movie that made me feel anything emotionally.” — Andrew ([91:14])

---

Noteworthy Timestamps

• 03:08–04:31: Bait-and-switch opening about the Honda Odyssey and the actual epic.
• 13:09–16:28: Nolan’s biography, tendencies, and connection to Homer.
• 18:32–23:17: Nolan’s process, Emily Wilson’s involvement, and adaptation choices.
• 26:15–29:49: Wilson’s review—praise and critique.
• 39:01–43:01: Sinon's role and Trojan Horse as centerpiece.
• 53:35–54:19: "But I love it." (Odysseus and the lotus)
• 66:40–68:30: On Matt Damon’s “wife guy” Odysseus.
• 83:02–84:14: Visuals of Cersei sequence.
• 91:03–91:14: Argos the Dog.

---

Takeaways & Final Thoughts

• Nolan’s The Odyssey is both homage and revision—equal parts epic spectacle and modern auteur’s meditation on war, guilt, storytelling, and homecoming.
• Adaptation inevitably involves transformation. Sometimes those transformations (musical bows, lost writing, wife guy Odysseus) delight; sometimes they confound.
• Both hosts would recommend the film (“especially visually”), though classicists and Odyssey die-hards should brace for a substantial reinterpretation.
• If you love Homer, literature, movies, or just a blend of sharp critique and good humor—there’s plenty in this episode to enjoy. And if Nolan ever adapts The Iliad, Overdue will be there.

---

For more context, discussion, or to hear Andrew and Craig unpack the next overdue classic—check out overduepodcast.com.

Transcript

[A]

This is a headgun podcast,

[B]

Andrew. This episode is brought to you in part by Mint Mobile. When we were kids, summer meant freedom. No more homework, no more books, no more teachers, dirty looks. But as adults, summer still means freedom. Thanks to Mint Mobile's summer sale. Right now, all of Mint Mobile's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So free yourself from big wireless and their gimmicks and their gotchas and their dirty looks and switch to Mint for high speed data and coverage on the T Mobile 5G network. Andrew, you use Mint Mobile.

[A]

I do use Mint Mobile. Not just in the summer, but in all the seasons it has provided me good, reliable and inexpensive cellular telephone service. And I have not thought about switching since we switched to it.

[B]

Because you know that with your high speed data, you get unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G. And if you switch today, you can even bring your current phone and number with you. So to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com overdue. That's mintmobile.com overdue. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com overdue. That'S it. There's no catch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months. Plan required, $15 per month. Equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term 50 gigabyte. May slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot capable device required availability, speed and coverage varies. Siemenmobile.com While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not

[A]

shy away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.

[B]

Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Hey everybody. Welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.

[A]

My name is Andrew and we are here to discuss.

[B]

Discuss the Odyssey 2026. Andrew, I have some pull quotes from a review that I found and I just like to share them with you. Solid. Better than expected. Surprisingly delightful. Generally attractive. Lots of room. Button heavy center. Providing abundant space for people and their things.

[A]

Sounds. Are you describing the movie? Are you describing me?

[B]

This is a review of the 2026 Honda Odyssey. Is that what we're here to talk about?

[A]

That is. That's a funny bit. That's a funny bit that you did.

[B]

Are you sure we're not talking about that car anymore?

[A]

No, we're not. No, no, we're not talking about the car anymore. We've. We've. In fact, never. We've. It would make more sense for us to do an experimental episode about a car, because that would be like, a new thing that we haven't done recently.

[B]

We could call it Car Talk. Because we're gonna talk about. We could call it Car Talk.

[A]

Cause we were gonna get to talk about the cars. And we're like a couple of funny. Just a couple of funny guys.

[B]

We are. We're cut up. You're right.

[A]

But no, this is. So. Remember in April when we did Twilight? Because we were kind of giving ourselves a break that month. And then this. And then this month we're back with another Robert Pattinson movie called the Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan. Oh, there was some. There was some. That was funny when we did that in a theater. There was some debate behind the scenes as to whether it would be cool to do another movie. For our book podcast, where normally each week one of us reads a book that we never read before and tells the other person about it. But we have spent a lot of episodes talking about Homer.

[B]

Yeah. We feel like we wanted to talk

[A]

about this movie and the Odyssey and the Iliad and specifically translator Emily Wilson's takes on those. Those two works. Interviewed her twice. I feel comfortable describing her as a friend of the show.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And not in, like, a funny. Like, jokey joke way.

[B]

No. I feel like we got. I can think of at least one anecdote from a listener saying that they mentioned the show to her at a book signing, and she remembered who we were, you know?

[A]

Yeah. I think our. Our camps are friendly.

[B]

Yeah. Yes. We. We are on the same side of the Trojan Wall, let's say.

[A]

And this and this and which side is it? You'll have to find out.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

But, yeah, this. This movie came out. It's been. It's. It's done pretty well. Huge success. It's been pretty well reviewed. And we wanted to go see it, and we wanted to talk about it. And then we're like, well, let's do an episode about it and not put it behind the paywall. And not like, yeah, just do it.

[B]

Because people want to listen. People like us, I think.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And people like books. And this is a movie based on a pretty famous. Well, it wasn't a book originally, but you know what I mean?

[A]

A pretty famous oral history that was put down into book form by a man or a group of people at some point in antiquity.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we don't really know.

[B]

And we don't really know but we do know that Andrew and I did see the film the Odyssey by Christopher Nolan.

[A]

You know, wine, dark movie theater in West Philadelphia.

[B]

Sure. There was wine there and it was dark. And we got there in time to see some previews, including a preview for Other Mommy.

[A]

Man, I don't know how I feel about Other Mommy. I also don't like. I don't normally when we go see a movie, we go to the. The movie Movie Tavern, which is like

[B]

one of your Movie Tavern. Yes.

[A]

I love my Movie Tavern. And part of it's because it's owned by some, like, dorky old guys, but it's like, not amc, it's not regal, it's not like part of the cinema industrial complex.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And so I like. I was not familiar with the practice, for example, of just airing regular commercials for regular stuff between the commercials for the other movies.

[B]

You really lost it when it a. A regular commercial for Tik Tok.

[A]

It's not allowed. It's not allowed.

[B]

That doesn't seem allow.

[A]

Listen, the compact. The compact is if I show up to the movie theater too early, you can show me ads for other stuff.

[B]

You can show me usually stuff like in the community, maybe.

[A]

Usually. Well, and then you can also show me, like, here's an ad for Coke that's like going to tell you to turn your phone off at the end or something.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Though maybe we've. I mean, it seems like we've mostly given up on that one.

[B]

Yeah. You're objecting it to it being mixed in amongst the trailers, but once the

[A]

trailers start, that is a sacrosanct place for me to learn about what the next Minions movie looks like. And I don't want to see ads for regular stuff. I can. I have ads for regular stuff at home. I've come to the movies to see movies.

[B]

Yeah, sure.

[A]

And commercials for.

[B]

For movies. Yeah. Sorry that. That happened to.

[A]

I was really upset.

[B]

You were very upset.

[A]

You were really frustrated. Still upset. I had. I had blocked it out until now.

[B]

Well, and you took some. Some hastily written notes in the wine dark movie theater, which.

[A]

I brought it. I brought a notepad. I brought a notepad. I dropped my pen in the dark and had to dig around amongst the popcorn to find it.

[B]

That was all my popcorn. Did you catch when that happened?

[A]

Oh, no, I didn't know that was all. I thought someone else did that. Wow. Okay.

[B]

No, there was a big popcorn mess.

[A]

I was crunching your popcorn?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Like for the entire three hours.

[B]

Yeah. The man. I ate three bites of my popcorn in the Lobby. And the man topped me up like I was in a restaurant. And he was like, you want more popcorn? And as soon as I sat down, like, a third of it fell on the floor. And I did my best to keep. And then you didn't mention it when we were rescuing your pen. And so. No, I thought myself as the trickster. I am. Okay.

[A]

I just. Because I saw that and I thought that's just how the floor was.

[B]

No.

[A]

Wow. This seems like a lot of popcor the floor. But it's a popular movie. It's a pretty full theater. I did not know that that was your specific mess. I did go to get a refill of my medium Coke Zero. And she was like, normally, we're not supposed to do this unless you get a large. But, like, nobody's around. And so.

[B]

Did she really say that? Just give you the Coke?

[A]

No. She did, though. She gave it to me.

[B]

But you made.

[A]

But she let me know that I was a special boy and I wasn't supposed to be getting the free coke that I got.

[B]

We will talk about the film the Odyssey based.

[A]

We're just talking about going to the movie.

[B]

No, I know.

[A]

This is our odyssey to see this very long film.

[B]

It's a very long movie. I don't think it is a slow movie, though. I think it kind of moves pretty well.

[A]

It's not a slow movie. It is. Yeah.

[B]

I didn't feel like I. There was, like, a little bit in the last half hour, like, leading up to the last sequence where I was, like, still going, still going.

[A]

It did feel like there was not a lot of Runway left for the amount of stuff they needed to happen. Yeah. Then the last 20 minutes of it became a Jason Statham movie.

[B]

It did.

[A]

And that one. I think I mostly liked it. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about the whole last bit with Telemachus and, like, a guy who's just, like, throwing knives through a hole in the ceiling. I don't know if how. How I feel about how much time the movie devoted to that being a whole section.

[B]

That was a long.

[A]

It did happen, but we should. We should talk.

[B]

So. Okay.

[A]

Christopher Nolan.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He's a. He's a British American filmmaker.

[B]

Yeah. Grew up in Chicago and London.

[A]

Grew up in Chicago and London. He couldn't get into film school, so at his father's urging, he goes to

[B]

school for English at the University College of London.

[A]

And he says this greatly informs his writing and filmmaking processes.

[B]

It's also where he met his wife and Producing partner Emma Thomas, who's helped him make all of his movies.

[A]

To my understanding, his breakout movie, which I think is the second movie, it's not his first movie, but his breakout movie is Memento, which comes out in the year 2000. In the future.

[B]

Yes. He had made the following in 1998 after two short films. Yes.

[A]

What did he make in 1998?

[B]

The following.

[A]

The. Okay, so now tell me, what movie

[B]

do you mean follow?

[A]

You keep telling me that he made the following movie and you are not. And then you aren't telling me the name of the movie that he made.

[B]

Oh, yeah, he made the movie following.

[A]

He made. He made the movie the following in 1998. This has gone on long enough. And then he gains a huge following in the sort of arts into the. Into the 2010s, huh? The big. The big trilogy is the Dark Knight Batman movies. The Christian Bale themed trilogy.

[B]

They're not Christian Bale themed. They're not like.

[A]

I guess they are a little bit. I did write helmed, but I wrote

[B]

themed 2005, 2008, 2012.

[A]

Those are particularly the Dark Knight in 2008, which is like a comic book movie so big that it made them change the rules of the oscars to include 10, 10 movies for best picture. Because everybody got so mad that they did. They didn't consider this movie.

[B]

Those Batman movies are a really prime example of the One for me, one for them. Rule of thumb with a lot of directors where they're in the studio system. He gets his breakout Batman Begins after being taken off of Troy, which we'll talk about. And he does Batman Begins. Then he does the Prestige. He gets to make his magician movie. And then he does Dark Knight, and then he gets to make his dream thieves movie, Inception. Blah. And then he goes back and makes another Dark Knight movie. And then from there, he's kind of off on his own doing his own thing.

[A]

Yeah, he's got. He's. He's got in between those Batman movies. And then after those Batman movies, this isn't comprehensive, but it's a lot of the big stuff is. Yeah, you've got Prestige in 2006, Inception in 2010, Interstellar in 2014, Dunkirk in 2017, Oppenheimer Tenet is 2020.

[B]

And then Oppenheimer.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And Oppenheimer comes out opposite of Barbie movie and the grass. We all remember Weird meme campaign combines them together.

[B]

Saved movies.

[A]

Moviegoing experience.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And Oppenheimer is what won him his Oscars for best director and best picture. And that's pretty much what I've got about him. Like, he is a. He makes pretty roll movies. Yes.

[B]

Cerebrally.

[A]

Popcorn movies. Like, they still they throughout. Even. Even in the. The one for me, one for you thing. Even when. Even in, like, Inception, you know, he's a filmmaker who is not trying to do, like, quiet art house stuff. Like, he. I think he is consistently aiming for a big audience for something that's going to be, like, widely popular and widely accessible. But he's playing, you know, he's playing with, like, Inceptions. He's got the whole, like, Matroyska doll, like, Brain palace thing happening. Like, he's. He's always trying to put a little twist on stuff that makes you. Makes you think a little bit. And you know something? Sometimes with those movies, do they work better in the theater when you're just like, mainlining them and you're not. You don't have time to poke at the. At the inconsistencies. Yeah, yeah, Often that's. That's how these work.

[B]

I honestly think that's an actual. That's a good point because it kind of dovetails with his current reputation. I think he's the head of the Director's Guild now.

[A]

He.

[B]

One of the things about the Odyssey is that it's the first film done entirely in 70 millimeter IMAX filming, which we can talk about some of that as we're interested.

[A]

But, like, Nolan is one of those guys who loves analog. He loves imax. We. We did not get to see it in imax or on 70 mil.

[B]

We.

[A]

We tried, but it would have been prohibitive towards drive at a weird time.

[B]

But he has become. It's.

[A]

We were sailing between the. The Scylla and Charybdis of. Of both of our sons and just trying to, like, care for both of them at the same time.

[B]

Which one is which? I don't know. I think.

[A]

I think Simon is definitely.

[B]

Oh, okay, yeah, fair enough. He. Yeah, he's. He's taken on a reputation as like, kind of a. His movies care about how they are exhibited in a way that not all blockbuster filmmakers care. Not all pop, you know, popular filmmaking, certainly in the Marvel era, cares about that.

[A]

I didn't look very hard to see if there was an interview where he complained about people watching movies on their phones. But I think that's the level of guy that he. Maybe he is.

[B]

I think it's actually more widely reported that he does not have a smartphone. Like, he. Like he's that far in that direction.

[A]

I don't even have A pocket tv.

[B]

No. And the other thing is, like, thematically, a lot of his movies have this, like, wounded, broken man trying to go home, sing muse with the guilt of what took him away from home. And I've seen some, like, takes on him as a filmmaker that, like, he is a family man. He is a wife guy. There's a reason that is, like, his producing partner is his life partner. Also, he doesn't want to be away from his family while he's making movies. And so he's making all these movies that are about, like, the worst, most terrible thing would be to be away from your family such that you, you know, created and did terrible things. Who knows?

[A]

Yeah. Movie maker wife, movie maker life.

[B]

Yes, exactly. So relevant to the Odyssey. I did find it was neat that he was attached to the 2004 film Troy, Wolfgang Peterson, the guy who did Das Boot and Air Force One, and a couple other things he had developed Troy, the Brad Pitt Trojan War film. That is not good.

[A]

No, it's pretty bad. And somebody came to Chris Nolan at one point and was like, take it, it's yours. And he tried to. But.

[B]

Well, he said, sure, because Wolfgang Peterson wanted to make a Batman vs Superman movie. And they said, no, thank you. He said, I would like Troy back. And Warner Brothers said, sorry, Chris Nolan, we love the movie you made with Al Pacino, Insomnia. We want to give you a big film, but it's not going to be. It's going to be Batman instead. Here, take Batman. And that's how he gets on the Batman track. Then he has his, you know, so then he has 20 years of, like. He says that the. His treatment of, like, the Trojan horse in this film, the Odyssey, which is a huge, much bigger part of the. The movie the Odyssey than the poem.

[A]

Because it's not in the poem at all.

[B]

Not really in the poem at all. Yeah, he came up with that for Troy, like, his. His. Like what it might look like, how it would have to be handled. All of that stuff was in his mind when he had started working on. On Troy. And he's sort of been like, sitting with some of these ideas for 20 some years. So then he makes. Oppenheimer has his big, like, you're king of Hollywood now moment. And he looks.

[A]

I think that, like, financially, that movie did fine.

[B]

No, it did. Well,

[A]

not relative to the Barbie movie.

[B]

I mean, I. Sure. And certainly not relative to the Odyssey. I think the Odyssey has already eclipsed Oppenheimer at this point. But we are recording this on July 28th. I say that. Because we're going to get into some discourse. And so, like, who knows.

[A]

Who knows where the discourse is gone since the.

[B]

Yeah, but he. He says that after Oppenheimer, he, quote, had options as to what he would do next, and he realized. He's looking around and realized that there had never been a big Hollywood adaptation of the Odyssey. That is correctamundo. Plenty of versions from other countries, some TV adaptations, some films that only treat like part of the story.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

There's Wishbone, obviously. There's Arthur. There's the Simpsons. You know, what treatment?

[A]

What Simpson. What, like, season 23 Simpsons episode did the Odyssey.

[B]

It's somewhere in the teens. There's like a. There's like a three classic tales. I. It's the Odyssey, Joan of Arc, and something with Bart. I don't know what Bart did, but

[A]

something with part.

[B]

I don't remember, but I think I. I remember suitors coming from Marge. That's what I remember. Remember.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And so he's like, oh, the Odyssey. There's a gap there. Let me go for it. He says he first, his process was he wrote down literally what he remembered about the story as, you know, what if I did it that way? Then he read some translations, including Emily Wilson's, and then he just tried to write it without, like, referencing any of those, which seems totally fair as a way to approach adaptation. Totally fine. And he also, you know, there's a big Time magazine interview with him where we can probably refer back to this for a whole bunch of things that we're going to talk about, but he's just, like, interested in this era, interested in kind of the context of the poem as much as the poem itself. And that seems to explain a lot of his choices. I think, like, he is interested in this. Something similar to Oppenheimer, which I think is why I bring it up, is this, like, a man makes a choice that changes history forever. And that's kind of what he's riffing on. You know, for Oppenheimer, Bobby Oppenheimer made a bomb and Odysseus made a horse.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So that's what he's working with here.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. And we can talk about the. Wrote a. It's a big choice. And Emily Wilson wrote a big thing in the London Review of Books about her, like, her response to the movie, which is. Generated its own little, like, storm of discourse.

[B]

Very frustrating.

[A]

Which is very. Which is very frustrating. And I don't want to spend the whole podcast talking about it, but I do. Like, I think the. I did want to sort of dispel, I think people who really like this movie who read her critique of it. I think like the, the sort of. Not even bad faith, but just like the. I didn't read the whole thing. A summary of what her piece is saying is like, oh, well, it wasn't enough like the poem. And she does, the way that that essay is structured, she does kind of start a section talking about like, this is what, you know, this is what the. This is what the poem does well. And Nolan's Odyssey doesn't quite do it well. And there's no, there's no real space in the essay where she sums up exactly like she. She starts by saying adaptations don't need to be a. A like a wholesale reproduction of the original work. That's not that what the point of them is, and that's not what I' need to be. But then most of the essay is just like the poem does this and the movie does it this way, and I like the way the poem does it better.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But yeah, what I think she is getting at in the, in the essay and which she, I think summarizes pretty a little more concisely in the Blue sky thread that she did about. It was just like the, the movie's like, messaging is a little bit muddled. And like, as an adaptation of the Odyssey, a lot of the like load bearing stuff in it is totally like discarding the, like the poem's understanding of what the characters are. A lot of that is, is that characters other than Odysseus don't really get served super well. Like especially, you know, we could talk about how we feel about Penelope, but I feel like Penelope's characterization in this is sort of. Sort of weird. I think there's some weirdness with like the Calypso and the Cersei depictions.

[B]

I think the Calypso and Cersei stuff, Calypso in particular, I think of those three gets.

[A]

I think. I think she. Yeah, she gets. She gets the closest. But. But yeah, Wilson's issue is that in. In the poem, these, these women get to get to get to say their piece a little bit more fully than they do in the, in the. In the movie. And that. That is. And that along with like this, this recasting of Odysseus as like a soulful, sad boy. Yeah. Is. Is kind of what makes it work less well as an adaptation. I was. And I was thinking of other adaptations of the Odyssey and I. I keep coming back to oh brother, where art thou?

[B]

I mean, oh, brother, art Thou. Yeah, that's.

[A]

That's a. And it's a super loose adaptation of the, of the Odyssey, but that's the way that adaptations are sometimes. But I think when you're. When you're thinking about Ulysses Everett McGill, played by George Clooney in that movie,

[B]

he's a dapper damn, man.

[A]

The thing that, the thing that the movie really gets about Odysseus is that he is the protagonist and he is magnetic and he is. He is very. He is very followable.

[B]

Like, he.

[A]

You. You want to see what happens to this guy. But also, he's kind of a dirt bag.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he's like, not a good person.

[B]

This is the. It's kind of how. I don't remember what. Where I was. I literally read this comment today, and I don't know where, but it's like, when we talk about charisma in D and D, we don't always mean that we like the person. Like, it's frustrating when you kind of limit it to, oh, it means they're really hot. And you. And you just can't resist what they say because you like them so much. It's like, no, there is a, like, wow, I just can't stop looking at this guy. Even if he is making me feel bad or making me feel frustrated. There. There is a lot of nuance there. And yeah, Wilson's arguing that there is not a lot of nuance to Odysseus in particular. And I think she gets a little over skis in some critiques of, like, the casting or the, or like the writing of the characters for particularly actors of color in the film. Because, like, I don't know, there's all sorts of issues I have with the writing of the script anyway, that she's attracting attention to parts of her argument. She doesn't need to.

[A]

There are way too many lines in this movie where somebody says something. I'm like, well, that's a stupid. That's a stupid line for them to have said. Or it's just like, that's a weird reading.

[B]

And I, and I. I saw like a London Review of Books, did a podcast with her. I have not listened to it yet. I saw a clip of it where she is talking about the historical accuracy and she's like, kind of praising the movie for not caring about that kind of stuff.

[A]

And she does that in the essay too. You know, she says, what is it? The costumes, armor, books, and architecture are a mishmash, which is in keeping with Homer's poem itself, drawn from many generations of storytelling and incorporating bits and pieces from different eras, dialects, and traditions. She also uses this as a way to praise the. The. The. The approach to. To dialect, like the approach to dialogue, the approach to, like the, the register that the movie uses. Yes, she says, despite the manufactured out online outrage, there's nothing inherently wrong with the movie's attempt to approximate contemporary American speech. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan's talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humorless and flat. Attempts at vigorous speech sit uncomfortably next to grandiose meditations.

[B]

I think, yes. And that is the thing. I watched her and she's so like. I think the, the written review comes across as really way more like.

[A]

I think it comes across as more frightened than she, than she maybe as

[B]

somebody who has talked to her, as people have talked to her twice. I just feel like she's like kind of having. Fair or not, I guess, having fun, like, being like, I don't like this. Like, she's. If you actually talk to her face to face, she's just gonna be more like, pleasant and jovial and charismatic about, like, this is what I think. I think it's like this. And I, I think there are things, yeah, the, the two things in the review that I don't quite agree with. One is like, she talks about the, the horrors of war stuff. I do think the movie is. Is working in that direction, but I see what she says where she's like, the poem makes more space for like, the victims of violence and, and people who the war affects more directly. And then, yeah, the stuff about the actors of color in the, in the film. I think I see what she's angling for and it just feels like it's not serving her argument. But by and large, I, I liked the movie and still agree with most of what she said.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's kind of where I am. I had a, I had a decent watch. I don't like. It's not one of my favorite films, but like, I did enjoy a lot of it. I did literally cackle out loud in the theater when the first suitor eats it.

[B]

Yeah. Yep.

[A]

I thought some bits. I thought, you know, I thought bits of it were silly that she liked. Like, she likes the Odysseus's musical bow.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And I'm looking at it and I'm like, the, the sound is like the, the, like the, the tension of the string resonating with like the, like the wood and he's holding that wood with his hand and that's gonna like, dampen all you're not gonna get this big listen fooling like room filling twang off of this boat.

[B]

Magical liar sound. It is a time of apparent magic that is what an sounds like. Sounds like the composer Ludwig Goranson says that when we all think of liars, we think of harps, and that's not true. So they put the liar sound on the liars.

[A]

You know who sounds like. You know who sounds like a liar right now is you telling me about how this musical instrument would work.

[B]

I think it's pretty cool. But no, you're continue with like your agreement with her broadly. I think, you know, like, stuff works, but it is also silly. But it is also like. I think the one thing that I responded to pretty positively in the movie that she is not as concerned with is just the visuals of, of the film.

[A]

I, I think it looks great.

[B]

I had issues with the editing at times, but I think the design with his, which is mostly Ruth De Jong, I think rocks. Just rocks. And she's just, it's, it's not as interested in it because she's so concerned with the language, which is totally your prerogative.

[A]

Yeah. I mean that. Yes, as the, as the trans. As the, the, like, the. Our era is like preeminent home. Eric Translator. Yeah, I think she, she's within her rights. But yeah, I, it's not like when I, and I don't watch a lot of Marvel movies anymore, but I, I, when I do encounter them, as when we watched the film Deadpool recently.

[B]

Oh, boy.

[A]

You were just constantly looking at the screen and being like, yeah, this is all like, fakey fake. Like, and it is, it is utilitarian fakey fake. Like, you know, I, I can, I can. I. Andrew, a moviegoer can be like, yeah, it would be easier to make this car crash in a computer than it would be to really crash a car. I get it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But there, there is nothing in this movie. Even when Cersei is like, molding dudes into pigs, where I'm thinking, where I'm just sitting there preoccupied with how fake stuff looks.

[B]

And it's.

[A]

I feel like that, that, that feeling creeps up on me the most when it's. When more mundane stuff is being pictured. Like, honestly, it's the, the kind of scene that usually hits me the weirdest is like, all the stuff in this movie where it's just like a boat is on water. And it would be so easy to just like, fake it and do fake everything.

[B]

No, they did it, though.

[A]

Water. Whatever.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And yeah, it all Looks great. It looks real and it all looks great. And I don't know if it was all real and it was all great, but it all looks like it was.

[B]

Most of it was real in some way, shape or form. And it. Some of it, I think too, is. His commitment to shooting on film means that there is a trick, you know, when it's. If you're going to transfer it to a digital projection medium, you're going to like, lose a bunch of stuff. Mm. And so.

[A]

Or.

[B]

Or vice versa. Like if you, if you are putting in digital effects and then you're gonna like, put it on to this, like, really intense film stock, that everything else looks super real. Like, he's very sensitive about how stuff is going to transfer between film mediums and he wants it to be as real as possible. And there's a lot of, you know, and there's all. All sorts of stories that you can read. Interviews about all the making of the. There's a really good breakdown on Vulture from Bilga Beery about some of the making of stuff. We might cite it as we go through our conversation, but should we take a quick break, Andrew, and then we can talk about the movie.

[A]

Like, much like Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey, this conversation has kind of jumped around a lot and did a little longer out of order, strictly needed to be. But yes, let's take a break and come back.

[B]

See you in Ithaca.

[A]

Hi, I'm Beck Bennett. I thought I was Beck Bennett. No, no, no, no, it's okay.

[B]

Kyle Mooney.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Sorry about that.

[A]

Exactly. No, all good.

[B]

All good. Thanks, buddy.

[A]

Yeah. And we host the show what's our podcast here on Headgum.

[B]

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

[A]

Squarespace is the all in one website platform designed to help you stand out and make you look like a kick ass person online. Like you're skateboarding through the Internet or you like you're surfing through the web. Squarespace gives you everything you need to

[B]

claim your domain, showcase your offerings with

[A]

a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. I like that it's all in one place. I don't. I like that I don't have to go around, you know, like different stores or something. It's just all, well, it's like, oh, do I need to go to, like, do I need another type of website to like, find the right pictures or like another type of website to upload? You know, it's all in one place.

[B]

The video or audio or like.

[A]

No, I want. It makes it easy. Make it Easy on me, please. Yes. And you can do all those things. Photos, videos, changing fonts, you know, I mean, the designs are amazing. They're catering to all your different needs. There are SEO tools, which. I know what those are. And their custom domains. Oh, let's come up with a domain right now. Let's see. I wonder if it exists. Www.friendsmeetingfriends friendsmeetingfriends.com that's an original thing that we came up with. Friends meeting friends. Anyway, so check out squarespace.com headgum for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code headgum to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

[B]

Hell, sounds easy.

[A]

Anybody could do it. For a small business owner, every day is full of surprises. Some great, some not so great, like when a client cancels their order at the last minute. But here's a surprise you will like. Progressive provides small business owners with 30 customizable coverage options to help keep their business going strong. So go ahead, surprise yourself. Get a quote in as little as 8 minutes@progressive commercial.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates and third party insurers. Coverage is not available in all states

[B]

or for all vehicles and coverage selections. Tell me, Andrew, about a complicated film. Is it complicated? I'm not sure. It is.

[A]

The film is complicated.

[B]

It is a film.

[A]

It is a film. I think some. Some of the characters it depicts are complicated.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or have been complicated in other depictions of them that. Do we.

[B]

Should we just go through your notes? Is that like a good way to. To maybe at least get started?

[A]

I mean, I. So I did. Yes, we can. We can do that. I did not. I just. I hand.

[B]

Sure you stopped at some point.

[A]

I mean, I was going the whole way.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I mean, the whole way. I stopped when the movie stopped.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Obviously I have not been taking notes this whole time.

[B]

Okay, fair enough.

[A]

My first thing was the wine dark movie theater joke.

[B]

That's funny. Oh, you're. You're just writing down jokes. I don't.

[A]

I know. I wasn't just writing down jokes. I was just writing down all kinds of stuff.

[B]

Okay, great.

[A]

The second thing that I wrote, and I am going to struggle occasionally read my own handwriting because I was writing in the dark with a pen. The movie does open with a black person and a trans person to maximally trigger the edgelords I wrote.

[B]

So. Okay, so that is Travis Scott, friend of Christopher Nolan. He is the bard or the poet, whatever, performing in Ithaca for Telemachus, Penelope and a Whole host of gross suitors, led by Robert Pattinson as Antinous and an amazing performance.

[A]

Robert Pattinson as Antinous is my favorite part of the entire movie.

[B]

Maybe my favorite character in a movie for a while.

[A]

Yeah. Like, he was. I think we can have a discussion about, like, who. Who. Whose performance struggles because the material is struggling.

[B]

I like Hathaway a lot, and I struggled with what she was given to work with sometimes. Right.

[A]

And I do not think anybody is doing a bad job with good material in this movie. I think anybody who is. Anybody who is struggling is struggling because the. Because of what they've been given to do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But Pattinson is the only one, I think, who transcends what he is given to do and puts his own weird stamp on it.

[B]

Yeah. Hamish Patel as Urilicus. Right.

[A]

I think he's good.

[B]

He's very good. Big fan of leaving Jeevan personally. And that is a character that. As friend to Odysseus is. That's kind of a reshape of that character, which is fine. You know, it's good to have a. Somebody that helps us like Odysseus and also helps us see somebody we like, not trust. Odysseus.

[A]

In the poem, Eurylochus exists mostly to be an avatar for Odysseus, for the crew.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And his. His function in doing that is mostly to make it make us the reader or the listener to the poem. Like, not feel that bad when they all die because they all seem like they kind of deserve it. There are moments of that with. With this Eurylochus, but, yeah, generally he is there to put more of it. He does seem the most like a. Like a guy who has seen a smartphone, who just happens to now be on the Odyssey with Odysseus. And he's always like, man, this is really what we're doing. Like, this sucks.

[B]

He does.

[A]

This is no good.

[B]

This is no good.

[A]

I did like him, though. I. I thought he. I thought he did a good job.

[B]

And I. And I like Elliot Page of Sinon. We'll talk about the Sinon invention or

[A]

kind of addition now if you want. It's kind of how. It's how the movie opens.

[B]

It is how the movie opens. You're right. It opens with the Trojan horse.

[A]

Movie opens with the Trojan horse on a beach. The Greeks have apparently left, and Sinon is there to say, hey, this. They made this horse as like a sacrifice to Athena and then they abandoned it.

[B]

This is played by Elliot Page. Cool casting. I think it's remixing Sinon like, it's my understanding from the Aeneid that Sinon is like a two timer, like a little.

[A]

A little more like Odysseus Duplicitous. Yeah, he's kind of a wily sort of trickster sort of guy. And yes, Sinan is not mentioned in Homer, but does appear in the Aeneid and other depictions of the Trojan horse story. Like the Trojan horse story, again, can't be emphasized enough. Is not in the Odyssey. Odyssey is not in the alien.

[B]

Nope.

[A]

Like it is in the Odyssey. I think it kind of gets mentioned in passing.

[B]

Yeah, but it is like, only as like a reference.

[A]

Yeah, well, also it's like a. You know, this is. This is a reference to another thing that I did that everybody in the audience would be familiar with, so we don't have to get into the whole thing.

[B]

Yeah, that's a fair point. But it's treated here as this, you know, and this becomes. It is the opening and closing image of the film the Trojan Horse. It is, you know, it is the nuclear bomb. It is the. It is the great trick that Odysseus pulled that broke the rules of society and civilization that portend the end of the Bronze Age of humanity in the Greek Mediterranean part of the world.

[A]

Like in a bad. In a bad way in like, we're ending the Bronze Age and it's gonna get worse because like, the Bronze Age, Bronze Age. I don't want to go back to that.

[B]

I don't want to go back. I want to get out of that part whenever I play Age of Empires. But Sinon was there. Sinon was in this film. Lied to about what was going on with the horse so that the Trojans would believe them, but they are still. He is still killed for it. And.

[A]

And in general, like, sin on not supposed to really be here at all in. In Troy at all. Because he's kind of like a lower class guy who's like going as a. As a stand in for Antinous Antenna's tricks.

[B]

Kind of like. Well, there's like, suppose this is an editing.

[A]

This is bad. This is bad. Trick and Emily. This is one of Wilson's problems with it. It's like, listen, when some characters do trick, it's bad. And when some characters do trick, it's good. When some characters do violence, it's bad. When some characters do violence, it's good. Like the movie's message is muddled in that way.

[B]

I also just think the clarity of storytelling around Antinous and Sinon, who gets. Who draws lots to go to the Trojan War or not, I think is edited a little wacky.

[A]

It's not. It's not immediately clear what is going on.

[B]

And what I believe is going on is that Antinous tried to swap his lot with Sinon.

[A]

Odysseus sees this happen, makes Antinous like swear to look after his family, Sinon's family, and like Odysseus own family, and

[B]

so as not to embarrass Antinous dad by calling his son a loser and

[A]

a liar, but then apparently expected Antinous to actually like be a good person.

[B]

Yeah. Little bit of stick there, dude.

[A]

Yeah. And I guess if society is firing on all cylinders, then sure you can believe this of people. But you did like, you did begin your relationship with this, with this man by catching him in a, you know, lie ception.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And then, and then it just is take sin on the noble kid off to war. Of course there's the tragedy of like, well, we know this is going to be a long war. We're going to take children with us.

[A]

I do like the, the depiction of the Greeks as like literally they were sitting on a beach in full armor for 10 years.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like there's always some question as to what exactly they were doing that whole time, but the, the movie's depiction is that they got there, they landed, and then they're like, well, now just gonna sit here.

[B]

And so Sinon becomes the kind of moral center of the movie where later in the film we encounter the shade of Sinon and Hades and it affects Odysseus understanding of his trick. He claims he had to trick Sinan so that the lie of the Trojan horse would work. Of course, Sinon doesn't love that. No, I do like his treatment of the horse. What do you think about the horse?

[A]

I think they should have made it easier to stand in.

[B]

Well, okay, so there's a lot of.

[A]

They made a very uncomfortable horse and then they left it in a stupid place where a lot of people would die.

[B]

Part of the thing with, I think why there was some wokeness discourse about this movie is that a lot of folks like that Nolan is like, really?

[A]

He's like.

[B]

He loves to depict things. He likes to like really dig into how things are and work and how they should. He's like doing realistic movies and then they see a trailer and there's like a bunch of armor from all sorts of times and they're like, ah. And so then, and then they see non white people in the Odyssey and they're like, ah. And he's like, doesn't matter, man. Like, shut up. And I just.

[A]

We. I don't want to devote a lot of air time to those people.

[B]

No, I do not. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

But like, it's not like they're clamoring for to have a bunch of swarthy Greek guys in this movie either. Like, they're.

[B]

No, they are not. No, they're not.

[A]

They're not actually interested in accurate.

[B]

Well, and then. And then going back to the Emily Wilson review real quick, there is like this weird cycle now where like a bunch of bad faith right wing complaints about this movie were like, oh, he's gonna base it on the Emily Wilson feminization translation. And now all the Nolan fanboys are like, she's making fun of our movie. And you're like, well, just like, just listen. Just read a review and then go like, watch the movie you love again. It's fine.

[A]

Anyway, this is just a wider critique of fandom in general where it's like, well, I'm. I'm sorry that anybody having a. Having a thought about your favorite thing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So ruins your favorite thing for you that you can no longer enjoy it.

[B]

But like, anyway, my. My thought.

[A]

This is what cultural criticism.

[B]

I know. Well, it's a problem that like all the newspapers and stuff, like, don't pay for criticism anymore and nobody reads it.

[A]

Newspapers.

[B]

Newspapers. I. What I. When I found myself really liking about the movie at times was Nolan's interest in like. But how would it work? Everything from.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

The dudes inside the Trojan Horse, how much that would suck. People would die in there. People would be peeing on each other in there. Nobody would be getting any food. It would be terrible. They would. And his. He said in one interview that like, if it had wheels on it, it would be too suspicious. So he did have to put it in the beach as like a little trophy peace offering.

[A]

Yeah, no, I do.

[B]

I totally.

[A]

I do totally buy that.

[B]

That's kind of interesting though, that. Go ahead.

[A]

I just like, if. If. If people were so if what. What the movie supposes is that do this big trick is kind of original sin for the Greeks and for Odysseus and for like all the bad stuff that sort of happens to everybody after this is all coming off of the way that they won this war. Right.

[B]

Yes. Yes. And which is a breach of Xenia hospitality. Zeus.

[A]

I just. I. If Zeus's law were such a baked in thing that like breaking it was this huge. This huge breach of trust that like, would. Would bring down civilization even if people

[B]

wouldn't have let Odysseus.

[A]

Even if you. Well, even if you put wheels on it, I'm saying people would not have thought. Fair enough crap.

[B]

Because they would just think, oh, they put wheels on it for us to

[A]

make it easy to move. Like they wanted to be easy to move to. That makes it convenient. It's cool.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

It's got this hatch on the underside that is probably just for maintenance. So you can go in there and you fix up the inside.

[B]

They probably put candy on the inside. Will bust it open later.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But no, like the scenes where they are dragging it over logs like, wow, that stinks. That stinks for everyone. I just look. It looks cool though. It looks like it does get out

[A]

of boats and the build quality on that horse to survive that process.

[B]

Yeah, pretty good.

[A]

Without breaking apart and revealing the gooey man center inside.

[B]

But all what I, what I was building towards a larger thought is that like.

[A]

I'm sorry.

[B]

No, no.

[A]

Interrupted your larger thought with my smallest.

[B]

This conversation is a Nolan movie which is, you know, stricken with non linear storytelling. The. When I was like jiving with the movie the most, it was with moments where Nolan's like interest in how things work was at the forefront. And that includes the Trojan horse. That includes his depiction of Hades, which I loved. And I loved that they did the thing from the poem where they have to drink blood to talk to Odysseus. Like that part rocks.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The stuff they found to make Cersei and her pig stuff. We'll talk about that. Like, I loved all that stuff. And so the same impulse that is at the root of people complaining about this movie before it came out is a lot of what I enjoyed about the filmmaking across this movie. But yes, let's keep working through the film here. So we've got the opening with. With. We set up Ithaca, we set up Telemachus, we set up Penelope, we set up the suitors.

[A]

Structurally, you just, just to back out for a minute to maybe like streamline parts of our discussion. Structurally, if you take out the parts of the poem that is literally showing the gods sitting around like playing people chess.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

The, the narrative shape of the movie is pretty similar to the poem.

[B]

Pretty similar.

[A]

Where it starts with. It starts in Ithaca. You got some Telemachus stuff, you got Penelope stuff. You. Telemachus or whatever it's called, the Telemachi, you, you establish that Odysseus has been home for a long time. Other people have come home, but Odysseus has not. Penelope has been. Is deciding who to marry Kind of. But is also kind of trying to put it off. Telemachus is just a little boy. He's not really ready to rule and is also running into tension with the suitors who are eating him out of house at home and like, threatening his position. And so his. What he needs to do to come of age is to leave and go out and figure out what happened to his dad. Like, is there news of his father that he can find?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He goes, yeah. And then you. And then you cut to. Then you cut to Odysseus and you. It is mostly like, here we see what. What has become of Odysseus now. But then through sort of flashback and time jump, we will tell in mostly chronological order, like, what. What has befallen him between leaving Troy and now. The things that the movie does intercut a little bit more Telemachus stuff in there that does not exist in the poem. But just like the broad structure where you do that part and then you get. And then you've caught up to where you are in time and then the rest of the movie happens mostly linearly, except for the Telemachus stuff and then the actual stuff at Troy that. That was not in the poem. That gets like, intercut.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I think, like, mostly the shape of the. Of the poem is maintained.

[B]

The one big structural change within that. I agree with you. The one big structural change within that is that because he's moved all of the gods off screen. There is Zendaya.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Zendaya is not Michi. She is Athena.

[A]

Well, she's still Michi. She's still me. You look at. You look at Michi and be like, you've got. You've got Athena. Has anyone ever said, you've got Athena's eyes.

[B]

You got wise eyes like Athena. She appears regularly to only Odysseus.

[A]

You have to be nice to meet you, just in case. She's a God in disguise.

[B]

It's true. Gives him kind of a I can't believe you face like five to 20 times throughout the movie. And then there's like a little kind of coup de teatra at the end of Zendaya's why Athena is depicted the way that she is.

[A]

That happens to me. But it's another version of me who is looking at me, giving me that you are the dumbest idiot on the face of the earth face that Athena gives.

[B]

She's very good at that face. But the big structural change, and it's not even that big, but it is because all the gods are off screen. We don't have anything like Athena asking Zeus to make Calypso give up Odysseus and like, Hermes shows up and like, makes it happen. That's how it goes down in the poem. Instead, Odysseus has been with Calypso for a long time. Odysseus, played by Matt Damon. Charlize Theron plays Calypso in a cool, like, fishnet shirt for a period of time. And she has just been feeding him lotus to help him forget what he has experienced.

[A]

I love it.

[B]

He does say, I love it. And we both laughed so hard.

[A]

She tells him to stop eating the lotus. And he's like. But I love it in the way

[B]

it like, it's like a child.

[A]

It's like we told one of our sons to, like, stop eating cheetos or something.

[B]

It's so funny, but I love it. It's so funny. There's not much that is funny dialogue in this movie. And that was very funny.

[A]

There. There, like, there are funny notes. I think that was funny unintentionally. I think funny intentionally is early in the movie when Telemachus says, well, I could be king. And Anne Hathaway, as Penelope gives him just. Sure you could, honey. Like, yeah, doesn't. Doesn't say. It just like, communicates exactly that with a. With a glance.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That does make me wish that her character had, like, just had more to

[B]

do more of that depth.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But in. In the poem, Odysseus leaves Calypso. He is shipwrecked by Poseidon and winds up with Athena's help with the Phaeacians and their princess. That's right, Nausicaa. And he tells like most of the. And all of the weird stories that my men experienced tales to them before heading home to Ithaca.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

In the film he is remembering them as Calypso is weaning him off the lotus.

[A]

Yeah. Because the film is. Is combining sort of lotus eater stuff and stuff into Calypso stuff. Yes, into one.

[B]

I think I was noodling on this because as I was watching the film, I was kind of distracted by it. Like, that seems like a pretty big deviation, but also one of like classic Hollywood economic storytelling. And I do think that Nolan's like. I think after our watch, you said that the movie took a lot of the. Some stuff that is like subtext or inference or theme in the poem and made a lot of it text. That is really how it treats the Xenia hospitality stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right. By just everyone yelling Zeus's law all the time.

[A]

That became A thing that became a major thing in our conversation was like, yeah, you should just be nice to everybody because they could be a God and they could kick your butt. But nobody, I mean nobody, they don't

[B]

say that the same way.

[A]

Not in that kind of almost transactional sort of way that we lay it out. I think people are thinking it, but I don't, I don't know that that is the only reason why they do it. But then in this movie it's like, well, that's Zeus's law. You treat others like you would like to be treated, but because they might be a God and they might kick your butt.

[B]

Well, and it's also, and I think Wilson and Nolan have both said it's like, it's a world where you journey by boat. You're assuredly, whenever you get where you're going, less provisioned than you plan to be.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The world does not work if we cannot treat each other kindly in those moments. And there's a lot of sanctioned violence in the world, I think is what one of Wilson's points and Wilson's other

[A]

thing is, you know, you're supposed to obey Zeus's law and be nice to strangers when they come to you in your home. But like universally, when Odysseus, when Odysseus and crew hit a new island,

[B]

they do not do that.

[A]

Yeah, they like, they, they pillage everybody like.

[B]

Well, again, that is why I think it's an argument in favor of Nolan removing the Phaeacians, to be perfectly honest, because he is trying to build a thematic world where Odysseus, by doing the original sin of the Trojan horse, has like, completely removed Zeus's law from the entire world. Like, the civilization is going to collapse because Zeus's law is now broken forever and everywhere. They cannot go anywhere. He cannot go anywhere where he is, like, well received and taken care of. And so you have to remove Nausicaa and the Phaeacians because you're not going to have Athena, like, forcing them to take care of him or any of that stuff. Yeah, because it cuts against the economic, like, theme storytelling.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But the rest of it, Wilson, on

[A]

the Nausicaa thing, says specifically, there's no room in this maximalist film for anything as charmingly mundane and small scale as Nausicaa's laundry and her girlish fantasies about a husband. Like she complains a lot about. Yeah, the. That there is every. And I think I, I think I agree with this. Like, everything in the, in the movie is like, so Big and so bombastic and. And like, it. It gets out to like, oh, this. This story is symbolic of like civilization falling. Which is not a thing that the poem is doing.

[B]

It is not. It is a context of the poem that is a thing that is a. Like a. It is a. It is a weird thing that Nolan's doing. Not weird. I. I understand the impulse that he's like, well, this is the context in which the poem is taking place. This collapse is impending. This poem comes a few hundred centuries after it. After the events, of course. What if. And I'm in a world where it feels like civilization is collapsing in a world I'm interested in making movies about that feeling. Let me lean into it. Like, I get it. But. Yeah, it does kind of, to Wilson's point, box out some mundanity and some, I don't know, smaller moments for anyone. Yeah, right.

[A]

We abandoned the thing where I read through my notes pretty.

[B]

Yeah, keep going.

[A]

I just. They do make the actual acceptance of the horse make sense. I don't think this is Nolan's invention. That it was. Was a. Was a. An offering to Athena.

[B]

No, no, no.

[A]

Behind.

[B]

That's what it was.

[A]

Telemachus is well cast.

[B]

I said, I think Tom Holland does a great job.

[A]

I do think that he does a great job.

[B]

I like when he says, my dad. I really like that he does the. And this is like in the moment, I found the Zeus. Everybody saying Zeus's law out loud. A little silly. I did not find silly. The way that Telemachus would like, talk to anybody and go, you have wise eyes like Athena. Because it harkens to the, like the poem's use of epithet, which is kind of fun.

[A]

Yeah. Gray eyed Athena, etc.

[B]

Yeah. Which the movie doesn't have a lot of it does. Nolan does like to repeat his own dialogue throughout a movie for dramatic effect. I love it. Nobody else. Like I'm saying, thinking more of the inception.

[A]

Like, he should have, like, forgotten that he said, but I love it. And then he remembers every time after that she reminds about the lotus. He's like, but I love it.

[B]

But I love it. No, I'm thinking more of the way that he and Penelope like, repeat the, like, sailing off to the west stuff.

[A]

Yeah. Even though they should have picked a different direction because that is too Lord

[B]

of the Rings of the Ringsy. No, I know that's like the way out because the straits are all closed now, so you can't go east out of the Mediterranean. But he. The way Telemachus uses that as A. Like, I really hope anybody might be a God. Like, I kind of want there to be more divinity in the world. That is interesting to me. I thought that was kind of neat. And, yeah, Tom Holland does a pretty good job. Continue through your notes.

[A]

And yeah, I mean, he does want that for his own personal gain so that somebody can help him find his dad.

[B]

But, yeah, that makes perfect sense. It works.

[A]

I wrote a real reimagining with three E's of Odysseus here.

[B]

Yeah. Tell me about your thoughts on Odysseus, played by Matt Damon.

[A]

That's the biggest thing about the movie. And we. And we talked about this as we were unpacking our thoughts in the immediate aftermath of seeing the movie. But Odysseus in both the Iliad and the Odyssey is. He's wily.

[B]

He's a liar.

[A]

And I don't know if you know this, but wily, the word, it comes from this character in a game called mega man called Dr. Wily.

[B]

Oh, I thought he gave me.

[A]

And the thing about Dr. Wily is that he's a trickster. He lives to deceive people, to make them think that he is working in their interest. But then he tricks them.

[B]

I did not.

[A]

With his robot masters.

[B]

I did not know that Wiley E. Coyote was based on a Capcom character. I didn't know that until today.

[A]

Most people don't. But Odysseus in the poem, in the. This dude lies to everybody even when he doesn't have to. And this happened. Yeah, he. He is just coming up with new little fibs to tell people, even when it is not necessitated by the circumstances that he's in. Because he. He likes doing it. He knows he's good at it. He knows that Mommy Athena likes it when he does it.

[B]

Correct. He has a patron God who loves that. He is clever.

[A]

He's just doing it all the time. And the Odysseus of the. Of the. Of the poem of both poems is the kind of guy who would come up with the Trojan horse. He would be like, look at me, I'm so clever. I did it. And I would do it again. And the Odysseus of the. Of the film is much more. Much more of a wife guy, much more introspective and like, yes, I did this, but now I'm gonna be haunted by the guilt about what I. What I did.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

It's a much more like modern character archetype than anything that. That exists in the.

[B]

I think we struggle with that a little bit in the Iliad because The Iliad has become certainly in my experience, I talked about it in our series that like the various treatments of the Iliad since have leaned into it as a potential anti war text. And like, even Wilson is like, that doesn't quite work. You can find that in there. But that's not quite what it's doing. Yeah, and I. And she's said the same of the, of the elements of the Odyssey that, that are very violent and yeah, it's just so. Nolan's comments on this in the press tour have been very interesting to me. I did not read any of this before the film. He said to Vulture that Odysseus needs to be a relatable everyman, but he also needs to be a superhero. He also talks about Odysseus as like, as written in the poems, can be kind of the Han Solo to Luke Skywalker, but not the main character. And that's like, I mean, he is the main character of the Odyssey. So like, that is a, that is a, an issue of your own raising, Mr. Nolan, because you think. And I, I don't. I mean he. It's a very successful film. He has decided to say that like the complicated Odysseus of the poem won't work for the type of storytelling he's interested in. I don't know that he is the filmmaker equipped to render Odysseus the way that he is.

[A]

In the poem I did, he talked about the different functions that Odysseus had to serve in the story that he wanted to tell. And he was talking about that in the context of casting Matt Damon, who

[B]

everybody, like, yeah, you're right.

[A]

I think everybody sees, you know, like Linus from Ocean's Eleven. Like everybody sees kind of a. Kind of a likable, sort of, maybe even a little hapless, a willing man

[B]

to not be the main character.

[A]

But then he can be. But then he can be Jason Bourne. And part of the reason why he can be Jason Bourne is because he can be so every man.

[B]

Yes, exactly.

[A]

And just like using those different part, like Matt Damon as a, as a Hollywood institution, you know, at this, like using those aspects of his, of his, of his personality, of his public Persona, like in your movie, as like a metatextual thing. I actually like a lot. Like, I like when, when people cast someone and then make them play against type or like subvert their type in an interesting way. Like, I think that's really cool most of the time.

[B]

And I enjoy just watching Matt Damon.

[A]

Like, I enjoyed watching Matt Damon. It's just like it's not Odysseus and like not any understanding of Odysseus than anybody has ever had. And I think if you, and even if you were trying to make like war is bad, deception is bad, like we, we have brought about our own destruction. Like even if you're trying to make those points that the movie is trying to make, I honestly think you could do it more interestingly if you made Odysseus be a big piece of garbage.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

If you leaned more into the unsavory aspects of his, of his character and made him more of an. Not even anti hero. Because I think, yeah, we don't even. An anti hero is still like inviting you to like him. And Nolan has already done, he's already done a lot of unfortunate work in that, in that arena.

[B]

He's done a lot of fortunate work also. But yes, fair enough. But. But he's also done a lot of just like, yeah, like tortured guys who are like, as I said, like trying to both repent and, or run away from the problems that they caused. I don't think that's totally out of step with Odysseus. And Nolan and Damon and Hathaway have all said that like it's the, the Penelope Odysseus stuff. There is an appeal, there's a romance appeal to that story, whether or not it is what the poem is really focusing on. But it is part of what works in the poem, which is this. Like, man, I gotta get, I gotta get back to love my life. Like that is the point. She's gonna hold out for me. I gotta get back there. And this movie is more about him like not being ready to go back than the poem is.

[A]

The movie is about. I'm not ready to go back for deep seated emotional reasons. And the poem is about. Well, I can't go back yet because I'm too busy banging every broad in the Aegean Sea.

[B]

And most of these broads are supernatural and keeping me here also that, I

[A]

mean, they're quote, keeping me here.

[B]

Yeah, fair enough.

[A]

It does not seem when Odysseus escapes from Polyphemus, he does it on his own timetable. I don't know that Odysseus has taken the first opportunity to escape from any of the hot rods that he's banging.

[B]

That's fair. Let's move into some of the sequences, Andrew. I think because we will go long. I know there's no way not to

[A]

do it, but we've already gone long. I wrote musical bow. I wrote it is going to Be satisfying to watch these guys get killed. Of the suitors.

[B]

The suitors, yep.

[A]

I did write stop eating the lotus quote, but I love it.

[B]

But I love.

[A]

I wrote about Darth Vader. Agamemnon.

[B]

Yeah, that armor looks pretty cool. Benny Safdie's. Agamemnon looks pretty cool.

[A]

But what, what other. What else do you want to. What do you want to talk about?

[B]

Well, yeah, I want to kind of go, so like, then what happens? And Wilson has said this in at least one interview, is like kind of impressed with how much of the episodes of the Odyssey kind of make it in.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I do there. I. I can't remember. Might have been Susanna who kind of said like, yeah, the middle movie is just a bunch of stuff that happens.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's a sort of episode. Little, little bits of stuff. Like you go to an island and you, and you. And you meet the, this island's type of guy and then you leave the island and you go to another one.

[B]

So like the, the main trip that they go on and I. The Is that they leave Troy. Odysseus is like, I don't want to follow Agamemnon. I've been doing that too long and go my own way. I'm going to go my own way. And they go to an island first they raid a village or they go, I guess they go to like ask for provisions and the village has pre. Burned itself because of the sea people who are coming, which is important later, and they're like, okay, whatever, give us your food. And then they go, and then they go find a cave that has some wall cheese in it. And Odysseus eats the wall cheese and

[A]

he's like, it's pretty good.

[B]

Pretty good. There's a couple shots of that. The wall cheese is very high. There are sheep in the cave. And then Polyphemus the cyclops shows up. I like how the cyclops are. Looks a lot.

[A]

I like how the cyclops looks. I thought that the whole sequence was a little bit weird because it's just, it's just Matt Damon like intuiting like the cyclops acts the way it acts so that they can get out the way that they get out. Do you know what I mean? Like, it just. It doesn't. None of it feels very organic and none of it, none of it feels like it would have been more interesting to have a cyclops who's more like he is in the book where he is a. He's a being who can be. Who has his own motivations. And can be, like, spoken to and not just like this weird creature that's like acting solely on instinct. And then you need to, like, instantly intuit what the instinct is and then get out. Like, it's. I don't know. I think I found that. I found that not. I found that not compelling.

[B]

I think I broadly agree. Agree. I'm, like, really taken with the visual of the cyclops. The visual of the cyclops is cool

[A]

because it looks like he has, like, a sideways face.

[B]

Yeah. And I love, like, they kind of based him on that, like, painting of Saturn eating his sons or whatever. And I love Bill Irwin, who did all of the physical performance for the cyclops.

[A]

I did write in my notes, we never see the cyclops donger.

[B]

We don't. Pretty strange, given how much else we see.

[A]

We see a lot of him, but we never. The movie is edited so that you never see his donger.

[B]

But the key thing from the poem that is. That is missing here is that there are other Cyclops on the island. And that when. Because they've already been talking a whole bunch when Odysseus tricks the Cyclops by doing the whole no man or nobody wounded you thing. That just can't happen. There can't be other side. Like, it is my understanding that Nolan claims he tried to write versions of it that kept that. That no man trickery in it, and it just couldn't make it work.

[A]

I mean, I guess, Susan, I were talking on the. On the drive home might feel hokey. Yeah. I think if you were writing for an audience that you assume has some vague understanding of what the Odyssey is, but is not coming in, even to the extent that a Harry Potter or a Hunger Games thing can expect somebody to have read the book. You were speaking to an audience like, oh, yeah, the Odyssey, it's got. This guy needs to go home. There's a Cyclops, you understand the big story beats, but you don't remember everything that happens. I don't know that you can bring a modern audience along for the nobody thing. I think, I think, you know, I. I think it. I think it reads too stupid.

[B]

Yeah, But. But what it does lose, though, I think to kind of Wilson's argument is that it does. There's a. There is a hospitality vein in there, but, like, we actually lose a little bit more of Odysseus's hubris. You do, because this whole thing is

[A]

like, oh, yeah, I tricked you and I'm so clever that I'm going to announce it from. From the boat as I escape. And that is going to be my undoing. Like yeah, yeah.

[B]

Then they go to the island of the big swinging guys.

[A]

I want more. I, I do want more like boastful Odysseus. I think if, yes if he starts the voyage being boastful Odysseus and then morphs into mournful Odysseus over the course of of the movie, I think I maybe enjoy it more than. Well, I like the way that the movie depicts. It is like he's like regretting the Trojan horse thing from like the minute he does it that like the minute that it succeeds he starts feeling weird.

[B]

I am probably, I can't say for sure I am interested to see this movie again. I hope to maybe see this movie again in theaters. If only to see theaters just because of the, I would love to see the IMAX if I can just because I think I really enjoyed.

[A]

Maybe we can find a way to see the imax. We can lose, lose the, lose the wives.

[B]

Maybe. Maybe we could.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But I, I, if I see that syllabus it might be, if I see it again, it will be, it will only be because I can see it in imax.

[A]

We'll record a podcast that you can only listen to on a really big phone about that

[B]

expert that, that Christopher Nolan will never hear. But if like one big thing I'm not quite satisfied with is what you're just saying, which is like when is Odysseus. When does he discover what he did was bad?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is a kind of a muddiness in the movie that I didn't feel coming out of. It worked for me. Is it maybe there and I just kind of like wasn't picking up on it. It's possible.

[A]

No.

[B]

I feel like even I have been, I have been more satisfied by other Nolan films in the past. So I was pretty trust. I'm trusting my reaction mostly. But a lot of people really like this movie and so I'm like open to the idea that I missed something or that just upon re watch I would get a little bit more out of it.

[A]

I don't, I think it's, I think it's a movie that you need to, if you're coming to it, like being intimately familiar with the text. I think you're, you are. I think this is basically where we are is you're kind of liking it in spite of the, the differences of the differences. Liking it in spite of what you think of as maybe the missed opportunities of it. But yeah, I think it is the, the version of Odysseus I'd like to see is. He's boastful at the beginning. He's like. He's like, really high on the success of the Trojan Horse. At the beginning.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then he goes through all the. He goes through. He travels across all these islands and he gets treated this way by all the people of these islands because they're all worried about the people from the sea. They're all worried about, like, these. These people who don't obey Zeus's law and, like, the fraying of the bonds that ties together. And then through that process, he starts to rethink, oh, maybe this thing that I did with the horse is bad. Like, even before you get to the. The end twist where Odysseus was the people from the sea all along, which, like, fine, whatever.

[B]

But, like. But in that monologue, it's like he's already known it the whole movie.

[A]

Yeah, he's already known the whole movie.

[B]

And the. At best, I think my current understanding of the film is that, like, he can discover some of that in real. Like, maybe he discovered some of that while listening to the sirens. I liked, visually, the whole siren sequence, that sort of seems to be what happened, but I don't know for sure and. Or it's him, like, coming out of the lotus and remembering. But yeah, some of it. It just being like, the way that all of that Troy stuff is shot is like, he is remorseful from the second that it happened.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And that just doesn't quite work for me as someone who, especially in older stories, especially, like, it's my own predilection that, like, why, like, the Wilson translation so much like, her background in Shakespeare and stuff. Like, I'm just so much more interested in characters figuring stuff out in real time as. Especially in kind of heightened storytelling where there's verse or whatever that, like. I was not particularly moved by the closing Daemon monologue to Penelope. I thought the action sequence was really compelling.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

That I was watching. But the we are the Baddies monologue that he was delivering didn't quite land with the oomph that I think the movie wanted me to experience. Maybe because I was as, you know, distracted that I had not been living with the Odysseus that I. That I thought I was gonna get. You know, I don't know.

[A]

And, you know, maybe. Maybe that kind of journey of Odysseus, maybe it's too hard to show and not tell. Maybe it's. Maybe it's just like even further muddles things. I don't like, he's also just way

[B]

more interested in this concept of civilization collapse and, like, than the poem ever is.

[A]

I just. I just think if you find a way to give Odysseus more of an arc in that way, I think you. It reinforces rather than takes away from all the stuff that Nolan is interested in talking about.

[B]

Yeah, a little bit. Yep.

[A]

And also makes for a more dynamic Odysseus, who is simultaneously, like, you see Nolan wanting to make an Odysseus that a modern audience will sympathize with. Like, a modern. Like this. Odysseus is concerned with the. The kinds of. Of things that we would be concerned with. I think it's a way to reconcile, like, from the poem Dirtbag, like, pulled from the pages of the poem Dirtbag Odysseus with this. This more like soft boy Odysseus, which, while still. While still serving the themes that he wants to serve, you know.

[B]

Well, and I think it is also, he has said, too, that somebody point blank was like, hey, this movie's feeling a lot like Oppenheimer, huh? He goes, yeah. I mean, if I make a movie, right. I come out of it thinking about it a lot. And yes, there is stuff in this movie that is me still, like, pondering the themes of Oppenheimer. I do. I personally couldn't, like, shake the inception totem stuff of a lot of the. Like, hey, here's a pin.

[A]

I gotta have a little. I gotta have a little thing I can look at.

[B]

Here's, you know, here's the. Here's the lot from when Sinon went to the Trojan War. Like, some of that felt a little. I get it. I know it is useful to have these, like, really clear and distinct stories.

[A]

I have to have a.

[B]

A little.

[A]

A little. A little tiny physical manifestation of this idea that people can just kind of, like, pass around and look at.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So that the audience doesn't get too confused.

[B]

Yeah. And again, like, I've loved plenty of movies that have this kind of thing in it. It's something I'm thinking about.

[A]

Yeah. Like Solo Star Wars Story, where he's talking about, oh, my God. What? You love Hans Lucky Dice.

[B]

Han's Lucky Dice. Don't ever. If I. Listen, Andrew, there's a high chance. There's a high chance. Roll the D20.

[A]

I knew. I knew I was gonna get you.

[B]

High chance. That if I exit this mortal coil before you do that, you have an opportunity to speak at whatever service people arrange for me, whatever remembrances happen. I need you to tell people that I hate Han. Sucky Dice.

[A]

Oh, I thought you were gonna. I thought you were gonna ask me to invent a totem for you that you always cared so much about. And then everybody at the funeral was gonna have to pretend that they always. That they'd always seed you.

[B]

That's fine. If you can make that happen. I will give you that gift. If you can gaslight all of my family and friends into believing something about me, you should do that. But do not let it be Hans Lucky Dice. I will.

[A]

Not that specifically. I would find something. I would find something more believable, but

[B]

I like the big swinging guys. I liked the sirens. I liked Cersei. Even though it's pretty different from the poem in some key ways. The Cersei stuff is really cool. It's shot awesome. It looks great.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I love how she transforms them into

[A]

pigs because I was expecting it to be like a. Like a transformation where, like, you see them and then, like, the camera cuts back to them and they're, like, standing in a pool. They're their own, like, human clothes, but they're pigs. And. No, she is. She is working them, like. Like clay into wild animal shapes. It's pretty unsettling and cool.

[B]

Samantha Morton's Cersei kind of rocks. She's just like a lady living on a hill who hates men. Because this is something that Nolan said in an interview when he was talking about the changes to the ending of the film. Also, is the ending of the film where they, you know, kill all the suitors, but also kill all the slaves who slept with the suitors, which is something that Wilson is very pointed about, including.

[A]

Yeah. Not as much like in the poem. I recall that nobody got any mercy. And the movie makes a point of being like, well, some people kneel down to, like, signal their surrender and they don't get killed.

[B]

Correct. And Nolan thought that the killing of the women who slept with the suitors was, like, way too violent and misogynistic to end a movie on.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So instead played that up in the Cersei sequence is his rationale is that, like, Cersei sees men coming and assumes the worst about them from the jump and will not be swayed from that belief about them.

[A]

I get it. I mean, and listen, in. In her defense, I think it. When a. When a full party of guys.

[B]

Oh, I think it's pretty rad. I think.

[A]

Who have not invented scouting yet, apparently.

[B]

That is funny.

[A]

When every single dude on this boat shows up to your house in full armor and is like, hey, I come in peace. Like, yeah, it's hard to. It's hard to believe them when they do that.

[B]

There is a funny thing about this movie where it's. It's only until pretty late that they invent scouting ahead.

[A]

And also before then, it's like, okay, every single guy get off every single boat and we'll all just walk in

[B]

a street, follow Odysseus. And like, the whole point is like, instead of, like, trickster Odysseus, it's. Everybody understands that he's just a smart guy, so he's up in front and he'll tell us what to do. And then also, most of them end with a Monty Python runaway.

[A]

They do all end with.

[B]

With like, even when they go to Hades, which also rules and was shot in Iceland and looked awesome on the Hades where all of the shades are emerging from the sand. I missed Achilles. I would have liked to see Achilles. I didn't need to see all of the people that Odysseus sees, but I was kind of hoping that we would get an Achilles because the whole, like, dying in glory stuff is, like, part of what I think about a lot. When I think about the section of the Odyssey.

[A]

I just. I think you need to leave room for the. For the sequel.

[B]

Prequel, maybe. Fair enough. That part looked rad as heck. And then you get Silla and Cryptis. The. The. I think some of the. The thing that the. The movie is doing different from the poem is that Tiresias lays out specifically that Odysseus knows what's going to happen at Scylla and Cryptis. And then in the film, by that point, they're kind of. They don't want to listen to him, and so they do their own thing. And then he. They're mad at him for knowing what was going to happen.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think, like, I don't think that note. I think that note is fine in the moment, but I also, like, it doesn't really change a ton of stuff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like, narratively for anybody.

[B]

And some of that is, like, it's a part of the poem. And then Nolan has to solve, like, why. It's like an interesting trolley problem for Odysseus. I suppose. You and I both laughed when they get to the island with the. With. With Helios's cows, and they're all just standing. They're just right there on the beach.

[A]

All just standing there on the beach, like, wiggling their butts, you know, in the, like. In the. Those drawings of, like, cows or pigs or whatever where they have all, like, the dotted lines and.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's all the cuts of meat labeled, like, all the, all the cows are, like, pretty fun.

[B]

It's pretty fun. And they have a secret barbecue of the cows. And then, of course, they all get killed by Zeus in a. I do

[A]

like Odysseus being like, did you think that by doing this in a stupid hole that the gods did not see you do this?

[B]

All of the boat stuff was filmed on a real boat called the Drakken, which is like a Viking longboat that they dressed up as somewhat Greek.

[A]

Release the dragon.

[B]

And they did do some of the filming by, like, they would take them out in not great weather, but they would bring, like, firefighting boats to just spray them with water.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Rocks. And then. Yeah, then we get to Odysseus, kind of winding up with Calypso. She's like, I guess you got to go home now. You got to trust Poseidon. So you got to make the worst boat imaginable.

[A]

Yeah. Make this bad boat. Make this. Make the Tom Hanks castaway boat and

[B]

lay down and, like, let Poseidon take care of you. Okay, sure. And then he goes home. We get this whole thing with him and Telemachus first. We haven't really talked about John Leguizamo. Do you have anything to say about John Leguizamo as your Mayus?

[A]

I. As you may. As. I think he's, I think he's fine. Like, I.

[B]

Fun. I enjoyed him.

[A]

It's. Yeah, he, he's fine. Like, I don't. I, I, I liked him. Like, I thought that he.

[B]

I, I liked when he was on screen.

[A]

I liked when he was on screen. When he was on screen, I was like, oh, you, you may.

[B]

Us.

[A]

Like, I, I was, I was, I was thinking of him in the second person, the whole

[B]

Clever, clever.

[A]

I thought he did a good job.

[B]

There's the whole like. So in the poem, Athena keeps Telemachus safe from the suitors after he hangs out with Menelaus. I liked Jon Bernthal as Menelaus. Yeah, he was fun faces.

[A]

He was pretty good.

[B]

I liked Lupita.

[A]

What if you just. What if you transplanted somebody from, like, a Fast and the Furious, the Odyssey?

[B]

I liked Lupita as Helen. And Clytemnestra, of course, the way those roles are written, they're very, very small, so there's not much for her to work with, but she is very compelling. And there is this whole thing invented for the movie where Telemachus gets attacked by people hired by the suitors. And Odysseus helps him fight them off. That's not in the book or whatever. And then they go back and then they do the trials. There is this like whole. We get Argos the dog. Yes. Argos the dog happens.

[A]

I like, I listen. The Argos. Yes, yes, the Argos the dog scene was cheap, but also, but also it's

[B]

the original cheap dog scene. But yeah, from thousands of years.

[A]

Yes. It is the most direct adaptation of anything that happens in the poem. And I was fine with was it was the only part of the movie that made me like feel anything emotionally.

[B]

Sure. Okay.

[A]

And mostly that is because I went into the movie being like, listen, I need to record an hour of something off of this.

[B]

And another reason why I'm interested to watch it again. Maybe.

[A]

Yeah, maybe.

[B]

Yeah, maybe.

[A]

Having already recorded our hour of something.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I like the Argos scene.

[B]

Yeah. And then that's what I have to say about it. Odysseus goes in with the, as a, as a beggar. He's among the suitors. He is claiming to be. He calls himself Sinon to kind of drive Antinous a little nuts. And he has his conversation with Penelope where he says we're the baddies. And we get this like long flashback sequence of the Trojan War. Andor and I have already talked about our thoughts on how that is kind of muddy. I visually thought the Trojan War stuff was interesting. The fact that all the Trojans are behind masks is like a choice.

[A]

Wilson Wilson calls that out in her critique of the movie. And it's part of her broader thing about like the movie wants us to feel bad about what happened to Troy. And it does that through showing it through the person who did it feeling bad and not through showing us the people who had happened to. Part of that is putting all the Trojans in masks and never letting it like we never meet, you know, we never meet Paris, we never meet Hector, we never meet, meet any Priam, we never meet any of the A counter

[B]

argument to that is the, the march that we see through Troy where they are like tearing women apart left and right. Like those are not masked people. They are screaming. It is awful.

[A]

Yeah, sure.

[B]

I, I, I'm not saying that to wholly dismiss her point though, because I think across two translations I see what she's getting at. I think Nolan is doing it a little more bluntly than the poems do. And, and I think, yeah, the like all of this opposing army is in the middle of the night wearing masks for no reason is a little strange. Like that part, it doesn't really make sense unless you. You have to.

[A]

Unless you're just trying to obscure their identity.

[B]

Yeah, the. The. The like most charitable read I can give it is that like it's from Odysseus perspective. He never cared about them. Like you have to do some kind of like additional work work to justify. I mean when you're doing it again, I don't think the movie's telling us

[A]

that's what's happening in a movie. It's not like, oh, we're seeing things through Odysseus.

[B]

Yeah. It's harder to do.

[A]

It's like hey, you're. You're depicting this the way that you decided to depict it.

[B]

Yeah, well. And you're right as. As a movie that is full of a guy telling tales. The. And I think the poem does this too. Like it's never doubting the veracity of those stories tales. Unless the poem is like the poem sometimes tells us when Odysseus is lying such that I am left to believe that anytime that it is not telling us he's lying that he's telling the truth. And so the. Any of the. This is not the movie Big Fish where I'm led to believe that like

[A]

a lot of you're right. It's not the movie Big Fish where

[B]

I'm supposed to understand that these are exaggerations and allegories. Like. Right. Like I am supposed to believe that it is a time of apparent magic and after the Trojan War Odysseus poked a big guy in the eye and like got attacked by big swing and Vince McMahon soldiers and almost got turned into a pig. You know like those things are real and they happened and their evidence that he broke the social contract by creating the Trojan horse, AKA the atomic bomb. And he. He cries about it in front of Penelope without revealing his identity. We learn this is like the I'm which whatever spoilers. It's a movie. You can. If you don't want to know.

[A]

We've been the whole time my dude.

[B]

The Zendaya Athena thing. Is she Athena? Is she a priestess who was killed Athena, Temple of Athena in Troy. And that's why he is equating her. Who knows? Maybe both. Why not?

[A]

She could have been a priestess and also been Athena. That's Zeus's law, man.

[B]

Why not? And so then we get Jason Statham action sequence where they lock up all the weapons and he does the cool Odysseus trick with the bow after none of the suitors can do the bow. I do like when Nintendo is Is like, Penelope, none of us could do the bow. We can't just marry one of us.

[A]

I get the point. I get the point that you're making. He tries to say. And she's like, literally, I want one of you to string up the bow.

[B]

I. I did like the Antinous Penelope scene more than the Telemachus Penelope scene. That is earlier in the film.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You're looking at kind of like inventions that are not quite in the poem.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's mostly because I loved Pattinson.

[A]

Yeah, he was pretty good.

[B]

He's really good. And. Yes, but Andrew. And if you. If we didn't have the scene with Telemachus fighting a guy in a room with a hole in the floor, we wouldn't have Antinous going like, spears, spears, shield. To get the shields. It's like hugging a column. Like. Like, he is just, like, yelling at Megatron.

[A]

Like, it's like he's yelling at something that's happening on the tv.

[B]

Basically. Really fun. And I like when Odysseus kills him. It's funny and funny and satisfying.

[A]

Odysseus kills him. It's. It's funny when Odysseus kills everybody. It's funny when he is just, like, when he's got arrows sticking out of him like a pincushion and he's just, like, murdering everyone. Like, that is. There's a reason why Jason Statham can Release 2 to 3 fully identical movies in the space of a calendar year. And it's because of stuff like this. It's because this kind of thing is fun to see.

[B]

I thought some of the choreography worked for me. Some of the editing in that sequence was, like, a little muddy because I would kind of lose track of where Matt Damon was at times. But I generally liked the inventiveness of how is he gonna deal with all these guys with the tools at hand. And then we get a quick like, is he dead?

[A]

No. No, he's not dead. So they're.

[B]

No.

[A]

Even though they'd barely invented. Even though they didn't know about germs or infections or anything. No, he's not fine. Come on.

[B]

And so then they do this wholly invented Nolan thing.

[A]

That is, they sail off into the west and remain glad. Real. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. They sail off into the west in exile. The poem ends right with. I reread this this morning. Like, they kill all the suitors, and rightfully, Ithaca is like, don't like that. You killed all these guys.

[A]

Well, even in the poem, it basically ends with Athena being like, listen, we're Done with this. Like, you don't. Like. Everybody just chill out.

[B]

Athena gets permission from Zeus to, like, show up and chill everyone out. Like, that is exactly how it ends. And I get that you can't quite end the movie that way. So instead, Odysseus is like, hey, we're gonna sail away. Because I did dishonor a bunch of dead people.

[A]

Yeah. Hey, Telemachus, could you put on the stupidest crown I've ever seen?

[B]

Put on a. Put a belt on your head. You're the king now, and I am going to sail west.

[A]

We can have. We can have a gold circlet. And that is all that it is. We cannot afford any ornamentation. There's no gems.

[B]

I am not like, what if you

[A]

wore a big ring on your head?

[B]

I'm not going to tell my wife about all the time I spent sleeping with Calypso. I am going to tell her this thing that no one else in the movie has mentioned until this exact moment, which is that because I caused the collapse of the Bronze Age, people will only be able to sing about Troy because no one will know how to write anymore. Which is like, such a specific line that he says. It pulled me out a bit because, like, the notion that this is a civilization that prizes the written word is, like, so not a part of the movie.

[A]

It's so not a part of the movie at all. I don't buy even for one second that Odysseus is, like, concerned about that, concerned about that, or a kind of guy who even is concerned about, like, the development of civilization. Like, the, like the kind of timescale that he's suddenly talking about is like, well, civilization is dead, but it'll. It'll rise again. Like, I don't like, that's not. It feels so incongruous and weird because it's not been. It's just not. It has not been worked into the rest of the. The film. I think it isn't convincingly.

[B]

I think.

[A]

I think this is why I want Odysseus to have more of an arc.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because I think if he has a personal arc that then leads him to a larger realization about what his actions have wrought for society. I think it makes the, well, I guess society is going to collapse now stuff more resonant.

[B]

It and it. Again, it. He's delivering it as kind of like voiceover. Where to your point, Andrew? I think, like, I just want a scene where he kind of just has

[A]

the realization it's not an episode of Scrubs. You can't Just you can't just like summarize everything with a new voiceover at the end and make it work that way.

[B]

And I think Nolan breath.

[A]

What if Zach was Odin Odysseus?

[B]

I do think Nolan maybe thinks. I don't know. I. Maybe I need to watch a movie again.

[A]

I think Zach Braff was Odysseus and Donald, that was Penelope way.

[B]

Well, that's different. I do think. I wonder if Nolan thinks some of this happened at Hades with the Sinon stuff or with the Sirens. I do like some of the writing around the Sirens about like what they give to you, what they what, like what they make you feel. What you most want is what you most can't have. And what you most can't have is what you already had and lost. Some. It reminded me of some of the stuff I like most in the Percy Jackson treatment of the Sirens. Like just that there's a really powerful allure of your biggest desires that's going on there.

[A]

But yeah, when anytime you do a biggest desire thing, there's a. There's a chance to do like. Well, it's. It's something you haven't even thought about like.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

It's something that you're. It's something that your heart desires that you wouldn't like if somebody point blank came up and asked you what do you desire?

[B]

You wouldn't even say something. Never say to yourself.

[A]

But yeah, but it's like a deeper truth or whatever.

[B]

Yeah. And I think, yeah, I was just missing the like discovery of where Odysseus landed at the end. I don't think it's a, like a, an uninteresting choice for how like what you're concerned with in like setting the Odyssey in this era.

[A]

I don't, I don't think it's an interesting choice thematically.

[B]

It's kind of cool.

[A]

Yeah. Just. I just, I think you could have then you could have thought about the choice you want to make the end of your movie and then you could have made more of the middle of the movie. Be like sort of building toward that choice in an interesting way. And that is if I have a critique of the movie, I think that's where it is, that the ending of doesn't quite come out of nowhere. But it is leaning really heavily on that one conversation between Odysseus and Penelope about like, hey, we could just run away from the war.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like it leans on that way too heavily to create like it's its visuals and it's, you know, what, what the characters are thinking when they do it. I think it could have been integrated more like, it could have been integrated better into the rest of the points that Nolan is making about, about, about. About war and about the bonds of, of humanity breaking and about what happens when we discard these rules that have been agreed upon, like, mutually.

[B]

Yeah. I also feel like I needed something a little earlier in the movie that was like people concerned about civilization because, like, there is, there is like a thread of like, oh, what if the sea people come? And I, I have read some takes on like Nolan since Brexit. That is like, he does not. He's like bad news bears. We should not have done that. We are inventing boogeymen.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like we, we are just owning ourselves as a society over this, like fear of a made up other kind of stuff.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And I think that's all here. I don't think it's like a. It's not well integrated in the beginning part of the film. To your point, Andrew, I don't think it like, doesn't feel like a payoff. It feels like a Odysseus sharing something he thought of while the rest of the movie was happening. And then I'm like, oh, I guess that's what you were thinking of the whole.

[A]

You were you as a viewer of the film, you are never given any convincing alternate for what the sea people could have been.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, it's always a thing that gets like shoehorned into a conversation between two other characters. And then at the end we find out that it's like the thematic linchpin of the entire enterprise.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. And I'm not asking for a bunch of weird, ominous scenes where we like, pretend that the sea people are something else, I guess, but like, you're the one who brought up the sea people in the first place. Do something else with them.

[B]

And it's happening at the same time that we're doing the guilt over the Trojan War stuff, which, like, I get that he's trying to piece those two together. It just. It feels like it's like a Lego and a Duplo. You know what I mean?

[A]

Maybe it would work better again. Maybe. I mean, maybe we do need to see. See this movie again.

[B]

Maybe.

[A]

I think if we talk about seeing it again this many times, that it is a business expense if we do it.

[B]

Yeah. I don't know. I thought overall, I really liked how the movie looked. I really loved how the movie sounded. I think the stuff where he used a soundproofed box IMAX camera so that Even when they were doing dialogue scenes, they had to set up mirrors so that actors could talk to each other is pretty silly and cool. And there's a lot of. I. All my gripes about the Odysseus treatment aside, I was still interested to watch Matt Damon and I was.

[A]

I always like watching Matt Damon and stuff.

[B]

And I was.

[A]

That's part of what Nolan is playing on. When he cast Matt Damon.

[B]

I was even more interested to watch a lot of other people in the film. And I'm glad that I got a chance to. To.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So is that our. Is that. Is that the Odyssey, Andrew?

[A]

I think that's gotta be the Odyssey.

[B]

Gotta be the Odyssey, right?

[A]

Can't imagine what else it would be.

[B]

We've talked about all of it. We've covered everything.

[A]

Sing Muse of a An Overtired Man.

[B]

Thanks everybody for listening. If you have thoughts on the poem on the movie, send us an email. Overdue podmail.com hit us up on social media at overdue pod. Our theme of song was not composed by Ludwig Gronson. It was composed by Nick Lauren, just who is also good at composing. Andrew, if folks want to know more about the show, where should they go?

[A]

Overdue podcast.com is the Internet website where they should go. Up there we have the schedule for the reg. For the. I mean, I guess this is a regular show. I was. I was stuck in homer time mode.

[B]

Nope, this is a regular show.

[A]

But this is the regular show. Up there we have the schedule for August. Craig, you want to tell them? Well, I guess we aren't done yet, huh? And I guess that's my fault.

[B]

I can tell them. I can tell them that next week I will be talking about Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Straut and the week after that Andrew's going to talk about Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldry.

[A]

And then there's probably another book in there.

[B]

There's at least another book in there. So find us, find the schedule on

[A]

the socials, you'll find patreon.com overduepod is the other URL you should know about. That's the way you can kick us a little bit of financial support and then get bonus stuff like access to our Discord community. Long read projects like Tokyo Drifters like Stop Homer Time. Like the next thing that we're going to announce that we know what the book is, but we haven't named it or anything yet, so we're probably not ready to talk about it.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And newsletter and other bonus episodes and other things. Patreon.com overdue pod. Craig, are we good?

[B]

Bump, bump, bump. We're good. Bump, bump, bump. A podcast. Bump, bump, bump. It's over.

[A]

All right, everybody, thank you for listening to our show that is about movies now. But then later it will be about books again.

[B]

Okay, great.

[A]

And until until then, everyone, please try to be happy. That was a Headgum podcast. What's up, everybody? I'm Kyle Mooney.

[B]

And what's up, everybody?

[A]

I'm back behind and man.

[B]

Oh, I got.

[A]

We got something to tell you. Oh, yeah, we definitely do.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It's a brand new podcast on Headgum.

[B]

That's right. And it's called what's Our Podcast? Yep. And that's because we.

[A]

We don't have a single idea what our podcast should be about.

[B]

Yeah, we don't.

[A]

So we actually have guests come on and they tell us what they think

[B]

our podcast should be about, and then we try it.

[A]

Yep. Guests like Mark Maron, Jack Black, Brittany Broski, Kate Berlan, Bobby Moynihan, Meg Stalter. And Tim Boss, Landon Axler, Joanie McGree. And Dender. And Dender. New episodes release every Wednesday, so subscribe to what's Our Podcast? On YouTube or any of your favorite podcast platforms.

[B]

Forms.

[A]

Yeah, I'm going to go do it right now.