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 19th
century, which takes the liberty of translating the poetic verse as prose.
Which makes it a bit simpler for telling the story.
You can watch
the first video here at this link: Based Christian
History.
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