Catching up on my catching you up on my past few weeks. This is the second of two (4-)movie thoughts, with a third (3-4)book breakdown coming soon.

The Odyssey [4th viewing] (Christopher Nolan, 2026)
I said last time that I wasn’t planning on seeing it again until its inevitable rerelease during awards season… but this wasn’t planned: I found out 6 minutes before the 6 AM trailers started when I was awoken to my girlfriend saying that some people had canceled their tickets and there were two next to each other put on some pants let’s go. 

We got in as the alarms rang out signalling the start of the Dune: Part Three clip. (My proximity to the Lincoln Square theater is a non-zero part of why I pay more money than I’d like for less space than I’d like.)

And ya know what: this movie fucking rules dude. In the interim, I have watched multiple video essays about what The Odyssey is/should be/whatever (my favorite is Broey Deschanel’s), and it’s allowed me to understand some of the frustrations people have while also being thoroughly unbothered by them.

Yes, it certainly seems to the case that Nolan “Christian-ized” the story (he claims not intentionally). The Greek concept of “xenia,” recast as “Zeus’ Law,” does not come from precisely the same place as “Treat others the way you want to be treated”… but it’s close enough, and I think a story about violating that so-called Golden Rule is a lot more relevant right now than the lionization of a man whose hubris gets him in some trouble (and the people around him in a lot of it), but ultimately allows him to walk away more-or-less a champion.

And so I am actually more convinced than ever that the best way to think of this movie is as Nolan’s translation of the story rather than his adaptation. Each person who takes the material reworks it through their own lens to make it accessible to an audience. Nolan’s may be a starker departure from the original text than most, but it has clearly struck a chord with people.

People like me!

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
You think you remember how good Heath Ledger was in this movie and then you see it again and you’re just like goddamn dude what a loss. ☹️

Mostly because of the Odyssey discourse, I’ve been thinking about Nolan as a small-c conservative, and I agree with that discourse that The Dark Knight is very Bush-coded and indeed this whole take on Batman comes from that worldview, where torture is a means to an effective end, and spying on everyone is okay if it’s super duper necessary and also, of course, the tools are put in the right hands.

I don’t agree with those things. And I agree with them less than I used to, which is funny because in other ways I’ve actually moved closer to the film. The last time I saw it, during its IMAX rerelease in 2019, I had the same feeling I did every previous time: if they put me on one of those boats, I’d have been able to flip that switch and condemn whomever was on the other side. I wouldn’t feel good about it, but I could have done it.

I don’t feel that way anymore.

And why precisely that has changed I couldn’t say: I’m older now, and a guy in his mid-30s will see the world differently than a guy in his teens to late 20s, but I think it’s really the pandemic. 2020 changed things… forever (get it!!!), and I think it made everyone feel either more or less connected to humanity. I’ve already talked in this newsletter about how I no longer support the death penalty, and this is of a piece with that. I’m so tired of people dying.

And yet I keep watching movies about it!

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)
The Dark Knight Rises is, of course, the least good movie in Nolan’s trilogy, but that’s a pretty high bar, and the movie is still pretty dang good!

I don’t really even have that much worth saying about it other than “I liked it… except for the awful VOD mix,” because that puts Bane’s voice right in the center several decibels above everything else and so I had to keep raising and lowering the volume in order to hear other things without bothering the neighbors, and I would change the settings on the Apple TV to try to compensate but it really never sounded right.  

Which is especially frustrating, because Bane’s redub kinda sucks? This video comparing the prologue preview released in IMAX theaters and the final film really makes me wonder what could have been:

C’est la vie.

The Dog Stars (Ridley Scott, 2026)
The most interesting thing about a director with a filmography as long and wide as Ridley Scott’s is seeing how he’s framed in advertisements for his latest picture. For The Dog Stars, he is the director of “Gladiator, The Martian, and Black Hawk Down” and that’s a fascinating mix. But I think it’s not entirely unfair. Given that it’s a sorta military action movie kinda thing, Black Hawk Down is obvious… and there’s the post-apocalypse survival that I guess is somewhat adjacent to The Martian? Gladiator really seems more just a “Hey, you like that movie!” kinda pull.

In any case, The Dog Stars is not one of the better movies that could be associated with either its director or its thoroughly Oscar-nominated cast… but I liked it well enough. For most of the run, I was thinking “Yeah, this is fine” but then in the final quarter or so it takes an absolutely wild swing by sending Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce into a whacky fucking airport terminal full of whackos. This entire sequence plays out almost exactly like you expect it to, but Elordi flicking a lighter into a bottle of moonshine and lighting a woman dressed like a 1950s airline stewardess was funny as hell, and I like big silly shit like that. And from there to the end, I was like “Sure, guys. You’ve got me.”

But on the note of marketing, I wonder about some of the shots in the trailer that didn’t end up in the final thing. There’s are several scenes that we don’t see, but most of them are clearly just city exploration that got cut for I assume pacing reasons. There’s a moment in one of the trailers though where Elordi clinks glasses in the burning terminal with the lady who he set on fire who is not on fire… and I have no idea what the fuck that’s about but I wish it was there because I think it would be that kind of silly shit I wanted more of.

C’est la vie.