The Odyssey – A Reading

 

Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie is storming home at the box office. It set phenomenal first and second weekend box office numbers and is already one of the highest grossing movies of the year, and is likely on track to take in over a billion dollars.

And yet…we know that Nolan subverted it at many points. Which might be why the movie is succeeding in our society today. Nolan is one of the most successful directors of our age, he knows what audiences want, he knows how to get people to buy tickets. His last movie was an incredible success, and brought in nearly 1 billion dollars and won him many awards and proclaim.

Even though he has subverted this story, I thought it would likely succeed for several reasons:

1)     It is a Nolan movie, he has a strong fan base.

2)     It has an all-star cast.

3)     It is not a superhero movie. Very few superheroes get people to the cinemas today, compared to years past.

4)     Hollywood have pulled out all stops in production, promotion, and publicity, to sell this movie for some time now. Nolan is one of their biggest selling directors, if he were not to succeed, Hollywood would be in even worse trouble than it currently is.

Personally, I don’t think Nolan has made a good movie since Interstellar, and even that some people will debate over. And I think some of the subversion in the movie is deplorable, and hence I have not intention of spending my money to go see it.

We live in an illiterate age. An age where reading a book, especially an ancient one like the Odyssey, is far from the mind of many people. To those of us who love the classics, and spend a fair chunk of our time reading as many great books as we can, we find this situation deplorable. But, I thought, rather than rail against that reality, I would seek to meet people halfway. I would create a series of videos where I read the Odyssey on my YouTube channel live.

I have already done my first episode, on Monday night, where I read books 1 and 2 of the Odyssey. It was a fun actually, and one of my boys had a great time listening along while I did it, watching his dad read live in YouTube. I will aim to read the whole book in upcoming videos, either one or two books at a time (the Odyssey has “books” instead of “chapters”). I will not be doing all the other videos on my Monday night livestreaming time, as I have other topics that I would prefer to cover on that night. So, mostly I will choose another time to record and livestream the other Odyssey videos during the week. So, look out for those upcoming videos.

For those of us who do not like what Nolan has done to the Odyssey, we can at least say that this has presented us with an opportunity get one of the great classics of the western literary canon out before more people than we could before. Nolan has drawn eyes to one of the greatest stories of all time. A definitional story in our historical lineage. The Odyssey is not just a story, it is a genre all of its own, one that even Tolkien drew from for the Fellowship of the Ring, which itself is an Odyssey story of sorts.

The translation I will be using is the Samuel Butler translation, from the late 19^th century, which takes the liberty of translating the poetic verse as prose. Which makes it a bit simpler for telling the story. You can pick up this stellar Barnes and Noble version, or probably a free or very cheap version of the same translation on Kindle, if you want to follow along with the book.

 

 

You can watch the first video here at this link: Based Christian History.