The Odyssey

Felt to me like the ending was too optimistic and straightforward relative to the poem's more ambiguous and enigmatic ending. In general it seemed like the film was flattening a lot of what made the poem special. Granted, not every adaptation needs to remain completely true to its source material. I get it though — happily ever after marriage plots sell tons of tickets at the box office and can be easily pushed onto the Netflix & friends cartel a few months after they’re released to generate more revenue.

The sensory experience was just way too much for me. Too loud and too bright in a way that felt painful to sit through. It felt like as I was watching Odysseus listen to the Siren song, that I too was tied to the mast of my theater seat and had to Enjoy! this IMAX film that is supposed to transcend all others, completely engulf my field of vision, superglue my eyes to the screen, transport me into a different world, and alienate myself from myself in an immensely pleasurable way that constitutes the best cinematic experience in existence today, an experience that is so pleasurable that it hurts.

Idk, I knew going into this that I don’t usually like many movies that rely heavily on shock value and on inducing an adrenaline rush in the viewer. But advertisements are one hell of a drug that I take way too much of.
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I love the Enlightenment. I love using facts and reason and logic to overcome nature and discover universal laws to progress toward freedom and utopia and, in the process, prove that humanity is distinctly unique from animality and those deemed dialectically “unhuman”, showing that human beings are exceptional and special, because humans can use facts and reason and logic and empiricism to conquer the frontier of nature and reveal the underlying Truth of the world.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that The Odyssey is one of the “earliest representative documents of bourgeois Western civilization” and that Odysseus is the first proto-bourgeois individual.

Lots has been written about the relationship between The Odyssey and the Enlightenment, so I won't go into how the poem relates to Kant or Hegel (although it is very very fascinating!). But I think this film intersects very sharply with two key chapters in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the chapter about the Odyssey, and the chapter entitled The Culture Industry (one of the best things I've ever read!).

In the context of both of those chapters, I think what’s unique here is precisely that we have a cultural artifact on our hands broadcasting en masse some of the Enlightenment's core tenets—mainly, those of rationality, empiricism, cunning, and reason— that have been drilled into Western civilization for centuries, and does so at perhaps an unprecedented, incredible scale with very advanced technology. Safe to say that I don't think the Ancient Greeks or anyone prior to seeing this movie, for that matter, has experienced this story like this, and that might have some important stakes.

It seems to me like the film reinvigorates the Enlightenment's myth and promise, that is, the promise that nature and its secrets are uncoverable and knowable through sheer rational calculation and reason. Moreover, it envelops this myth in a generational fabric living amid a historical moment in which the neoliberal paradigm and its emphasis on economization, individualism, and market efficiency have a firm grip on virtually every part of existence (according to Wendy Brown in her book Undoing the Demos).

This feels like a very potent source to theorize film and media today — what does it mean to take Western civilization's basic text, a text so central to much of what is mythologized about humanity's historical trajectory through the Enlightenment, and massively disseminate it among the body politic with an advertised emphasis on viewing the film through the most immersive medium at your disposal? To induce a new generation of filmgoers to project their egos onto a character forming a civilized European bourgeois subjectivity's foundational substance?