We are living in the funniest timeline.
Emily Wilson is the translator behind the latest English publication of Homer's Odyssey. Wilson, a feminist scholar, was criticized for shoehorning modern feminism and woke intersectionality into the ancient story.
Anyway, this woke professor watched Christopher Nolan's version of The Odyssey and thought it was ... too woke. 😂
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[Nolan presents an] Odysseus who feels very bad about certain things that he's done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very -- I would say very modern, psychiatrised way. And he's struggling to process them and needs drugs to do so! For help with his recovery. And he seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much 'warrior-ing'...
[Nolan] has to make the protagonist a likable, all-American hero. Which is a real challenge if you're basing this on a poem where the hero is not necessarily motivated by romantic love, or being a nice suburban parent.
He wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! ... I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory.
A woman who translated The Odyssey through the feminist lens of modern secularism believes that the film leans too heavily into American modernity and therefore divorces itself from Homer and the culture of ancient Greece!
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What's even funnier is that Nolan himself praised Wilson's translation as his favorite, and it was the one that cast members referenced in interviews.
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Even ignoring the irony, this might be the most brutal critique of Nolan's film.
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