At least it shows fidelity, honor, and respect are still important.
But still, the product tie-ins we could have had . . .
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m angry about it. I might not even see it at all, so I can stay angry. Great foundational myths of Western civilization should not be sullied with stunt casting. Just the thought of it takes me right out of the mood you need to enjoy an escapist epic. I mean. I mean, come on: No one else could play Dr. Doom in the new Avengers movie but Robert Downey Jr.?
Oh, I’m sure there’s some multiverse crossover parallel-world explanation about why the Latverian madman looks exactly like the guy in the Iron Man suit, but we all know it’s for a payday and some sort of meta-meta way to get past Downey dying in Avengers: The Previous One. I just don’t want latter-stage Downey as Doom, all bitchy and quippy when he should be brooding malevolence.
You thought I was talking about The Odyssey? Fair enough. It was subject to much online Discourse for casting and accusations of Wokery, anachronistic speech, the fact that the screenwriter wasn’t blind, etc. You can see why some were annoyed: One of the product tie-ins was a popcorn bucket in the shape of a Trojan Horse. You stuck your paw in its belly to get at the kernels. Ridiculous. There was no popcorn in Bronze Age Greece. When people sat around the fire to hear a bard declaim the tale, they munched on dry fish-heads. Tells me all I need to know about the thing.
What other tie-ins did they consider? Recall that O-man and his hardy band escaped from the Cyclops’s cave by getting him drunk and plunging a sharpened pike into his eye — perhaps they considered a soft-drink lid that looked like an eye, with a hole right in the middle for your straw. Or THC candies in the shape of lotus flowers. Seems as if they could’ve done more, is all I’m saying. Call the frankfurters rotating on the rollers Argus Dogs, because like his beloved pet, they’re probably 20 years old as well.
It’s probably a good sign that we had futile online arguments about the movie even before anyone saw it, because it shows that fidelity and honor and respect are still important. Tales of valor and determination still resonate. A solid culture requires solid people who are proud of their civilization. If they’d made the movie in the ’70s, it would’ve had a pointless ending where Odysseus (Kris Kristofferson) gets home and finds his castle is full of victims from his colonialist war against Vietnam — sorry, Troy — and his wife (Jane Fonda) refuses to bed him until he apologizes for his involvement in the Military Pre-Industrial Complex.
Or, as those of us who grew up in the ’70s are constantly saying to everyone who whines online: Believe me, it could be worse. We know, because it was.