I was asked in the Q&A what I think about Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey. I’m not going to watch the film, and not for any political reason. The reason why I’m not going to watch is that, as invariably happens with Hollywood movies, the film is going to try to deliver some message. The entire three-hour-long experience is going to be about hammering home that message in an insistent and clumsy way. Of course, the message is going to be some shade of leftwing, but it’s not the point. I wouldn’t watch it with a rightwing message either. I simply don’t want to be preached at in entertainment. I understand that the majority of viewers want one simple, understandable, relatable lesson. But I don’t, which is why I almost never go to the movies.
Another issue is that the acting is going to be invariably bad. The breakdown in America is that TV actors are phenomenal, while movie actors are not actors at all. They’re pretty, plastic mannequins who are entirely interchangeable and always very boring. It’s as if, in order to get cast, they all slept with the same old necrophile who wanted people to resemble fresh, painted corpses.
So there won’t be an interesting, nuanced story that will give me something to think about, and there will be no acting worthy of the name. Instead, there will be a lot of very expensive special effects and all sorts of technological innovations that will be utterly divorced from the actual story. It wasn’t always like this, but in the past 20-25 centuries, this became almost every Hollywood movie. I sometimes go just for the special effects, like in Dune. But special effects are interesting in sci-fi, not in Greek mythology.
None of what I say is prescriptive. I have very specific watching requirements because I read so much, and taking time away from my reading has to be justified. If people enjoyed the movie, it’s great. I’m happy for them.
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