I stopped playing Absolum because I was waiting for cross-platform multiplayer, and I haven't seen The Odyssey yet because I feel like if they went through all the trouble to film it on these big weird cameras I should make the effort to see it on a big, weird screen. Is this edging? Maybe… Maybe I just like rules?
The movie has become such a Site of Conflict that I can barely avoid attempts to contextualize the film "properly." I must dodge and juke these attempts as though they were swooping birds. Strong maneuvers to define it preceded the film by a wide margin and have continued apace; a hunt for viral novelty and tweet performance has produced positions like "it is actually very conservative" and "because it's fiction alterations are irrelevant." Really just JV shit. Dumb crap, for stupids. It's shocking how fully people can demean themselves in service to their priors.
The one thing I will say is that Gabe liked it a lot, and I trust him, because to an almost pathological degree he is concerned purely with aesthetics. He is the Game Quitter, five minutes in - if you don't have a clear idea and a plan to get all the way through it he can smell it immediately. Its emphasis on trauma and the minimization of explicit divinity mark it fairly plainly as a lens for modernity.
Some part of the partisan rancor has to do with the suggestion by Nolan that he was inspired by Emily Wilson's translation, and beef with her translation begins at the very first line, if not with her plumbing. She describes Odysseus as "complicated" as opposed to "a man of many turns" or "a man skilled in all ways of contending." It only becomes more contentious from there. Who gets to define the past is a fairly ancient mode of reckoning, and if your project for the modern world is Spiritually Greek judging by your PFP I can understand why you wouldn't want this woman in your treehouse. She's not going to leave well enough alone.
But even as the ostensible midwife of the Goddamn thing, she feels like Nolan fucked some shit up. Judging from a recent interview, she found it incoherent in places and anachronistic in others. I'm gonna go on Twitter and see if that makes her based or if she's still some species of witch.
(CW)TB out.
