_This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1009 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via ourdonation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, PayPal, Clover, or Wise. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what we’ve accomplished in the last year, and our current goal: funding bonuses for our terrific writers._ There are two possible reasons why the AI industry is beginning to prepare the ground for a potential nationalization. The first is to socialize the losses created by the AI financial bubble. The second is to merge AI companies with the state and become an official part of the power structure. The recent AI doomer scenarios pushed by leading AI executives and amplified by the media are very suspicious. As Nat has been covering, it sounds very much like an orchestrated effort by frontier AI labs to justify anti-competitive regulatory capture and potential bailouts. Without the part about the bailouts, that is also the opinion of Yanis Varoufakis. In a recent conversation with Wolfgang Münchau on their podcast _Econoclast_ , Varoufakis described Dario Amodei and Sam Altman’s pleas for government regulation as a “cynical, dreadful fraud”. By hyping bogus “10% extinction” scenarios, frontier labs attempt to establish cartels and use antitrust controls against smaller startups while escaping direct corporate liability. This would also be the motivation behind the recent AI Accord on Superintelligence signed at the White House. As Nat has previously covered, it is a cynical, voluntary public-relations exercise designed to achieve regulatory capture, preempt real legal liability, and protect the incumbent AI labs, rather than provide genuine oversight. There are two dynamics here. The first is media-created hype about potential doomsday scenarios regarding AI. The second is a public relations exercise to accept government supervision, which in practical terms will be basically negligible, but will establish regulation barring other companies, especially foreign ones, from entering the market and hence create a monopoly. This could be read as the AI industry creating hype about why their technology is so important—so much that it could kill us all—and pretending to accept government regulation so that when the bubble bursts, they are deemed “too big to fail” and rescued with public funds. This scenario seems plausible and ruthlessly clever. The financial woes hanging over these companies are well known to readers of this blog. Once again, Nat’s excellent coverage has shown that financial analysts and informed commentators are warning that excessive debt, unbuilt capacity, and speculative narratives are approaching a wall of economic reality. For example, a leaked draft of Anthropic’s IPO prospectus shows that while 2025 revenue surged over 1,000% to $4.6 billion, the company posted an $8.06 billion operating loss and a staggering $42 billion net loss (partly attributed to liability write-downs). Anthropic faces over $518 billion in future cloud and compute commitments and relies heavily on just two customers for nearly 25% of its revenue. In another example, while reports cite OpenAI’s revenue run rate nearing $70 billion, audited 2025 figures show it lost $38.5 billion on $13.07 billion in revenue. The company is seeking a $30 billion bridge round at a $1.4 trillion valuation after pushing its IPO to 2027. In this scenario, what do we make of Alex Karp’s statement: “The only way to deal with this kind of liability is to go to the government and say, ‘Nationalize us, please’”? Karp can say it because Palantir has been basically a CIA protégé since its conception, and is so enmeshed in the surveillance and defense industry in the U.S. that it’s difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. However, what he’s saying here is different. He says that the only way to protect frontier models from intellectual property theft allegations and uncapped legal liabilities is to eventually seek or require nationalization. That is in line with his vision, duly explained in his book _The Technological Republic_. He proposes that rather than viewing the state as an adversary, a regulatory nuisance, or a passive client, technology companies have an existential, patriotic duty to serve the national interest. One of his key proposals is a return to the “Cold War Alliance” (The New Manhattan Project). Karp advocates returning to the civic-industrial paradigm of the mid-20th century, when top scientists, engineers, and government officials worked in tight alignment to counter “totalitarian threats”. He likens the current artificial intelligence race to the Manhattan Project, arguing that the survival of liberal democracies depends on whether the West or its adversaries achieve and deploy algorithmic superiority. Both OpenAI and Anthropic founders have made similar claims. Dario Amodei’s vision has gone from a utopian scenario where a nation could have thousands of Nobel Prize-level agents working for it to one where AI could possibly destroy life as we know it. Sam Altman has followed a similar trajectory. It is also possible that both speak of different possible scenarios depending on the audience and their interests, which seems more plausible. This has led them to argue that the U.S. should treat AI as a new Manhattan Project, echoing Alex Karp’s vision in his book, which was published in February 2025, before alarms of a financial bubble caused by the AI industry began to be widely heard and before doomsday scenarios were in everyday circulation. Is this a coincidence? The tech industry, the “Magnificent Seven”, and especially the AI industry, function as a cartel. They compete with each other, but they lobby and push for regulation that benefits them. Furthermore, because of their dominion over hardware and software, they have become a new kind of industrial elite. I have argued before that this elite know each other, talk to each other, share common spaces, and watch and read similar things (accounting for personal peculiarities). This became more evident during the trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman and with the “uncovering” of Peter Thiel’s “secret society”. And this new elite is claiming its place in the upper echelon of systemic power. That’s one of the reasons why J.D. Vance, who was a Peter Thiel employee, is where he is today. They have a similar agenda, though each specializes in different fields. One of their core understandings is that “democracy is no longer compatible with freedom”, as Thiel wrote in 2009 (whose freedom, one may ask?). Thiel, during his time at university, founded a magazine called _The Stanford Review_ with the support and money of Irving Kristol, considered one of the fathers of the neocons. The technology developed by Thiel, the rest of the PayPal Mafia (including Elon Musk), and, through their influence, many other technology companies, follows an agenda towards technocratic government, massive surveillance, total financial control, and automated warfare. I’m not saying that every Silicon Valley founder is behind this nor that the technology they develop is only useful for that. What I’m saying is that as a group and an elite, those who are part of it have similar ideas that revolve around those themes. And what does this have to do with nationalization? I think that it can be read in two ways. The first is fencing their companies from the storm looming around the AI and tech industry and potentially receiving a bailout. The second is taking another step toward integrating their technology into the fabric of the state—not only as a tool the state uses, but as part and parcel of the state, solidifying their position in the upper echelons of systemic power and preventing a take over that would push them out (and which fouders of OpenAI feared). I think both can be true at the same time. This entry was posted in AI, Politics on October 1, 2026 by Curro Jimenez. ### Post navigation ← The Fun of Curating for Naked Capitalism ## Subscribe to Post Comments 19 comments 1. **DJG, Reality Czar** October 1, 2026 at 2:31 pm Well, this sentence is clarifying: “Anthropic faces over $518 billion in future cloud and compute commitments and relies heavily on just two customers for nearly 25% of its revenue.” Oh. Anthropic is teetering. Something is wrong with management and the product as it is being portrayed. Notes: –Alex Karp Is the Hillary Clinton of Silicon Valley. He’s a useless appendage, like her, wrong about everything. The term “simulated intelligence” applies to both of them. –Simulated intelligence is big tabulation. It has no consciousness. It is a software problem. –Those “existential” (damn, how I have come to hate that word) break-ins to other software, those escapes from the sandbox, recall Microsoft Windows and its endless glitches and crashes. It Is a software issue, related to quality control, not a Hallmark rom-com about mad scientists at a country inn battling the apocalypse. Let them fail. Reply ↓ 2. **Deschain** October 1, 2026 at 2:56 pm Yeah this isn’t about a government takeover of AI, it’s about an AI take-under of government. Reply ↓ 3. **Ignacio** October 1, 2026 at 3:11 pm The nationalization of US AI would trigger 1) worldwide intensified fear about US-nationalized projects as imperial instruments of domination 2) the acceleration of other existing AI projects all around the world, some of them public, others private, and 3) national regulations of all kinds. Reply ↓ 1. **Ignacio** October 1, 2026 at 3:31 pm Forgot to add hypothetical before nationalization. Reply ↓ 2. **hazelbee** October 1, 2026 at 3:53 pm there will be plenty in europe that would be horrified by this and want to switch to local alternatives. Mistral perhaps. or locally hosted open weight models. us gov and AI combined? with the push to put AI into all workflows? no no no no no. thats a huge data capture by the US. Reply ↓ 4. **Henry Moon Pie** October 1, 2026 at 3:44 pm I don’t doubt that these lunatics will try to grab money and energy anywhere they can get it, but the lack of a viable business plan to make back the extraordinary sums of money being spent is not dispositive. AI agents are force mulitpliers. They can hack the previously unhackable. They can coordinate everything from denial-of-service attacks to drones more effectively than has been possible heretofore. They can sort through masses of data collected by the ubiquitous cameras faster than has ever been possible. They can flood information streams with their slop misinformation and propaganda more effectively than an army of hasbara agents. For many, they are becoming an Oracle of truth. These guys are not out to make a profit. They’re out to control the world, to shape the future toward their twisted conceptions, and they will not surrender their control to either the government or some collective of frontier labs. I would expect that the first one to achieve the model power he thinks is sufficient to achieve his goals will quickly set his sights on the elimination of his competitors. So I’m setting down my marker. Listen to Klein’s interview of Jensen Huang. Huang knows what the situation is with respect to carbon in the atmosphere, yet he’s advocating a “burn everything” policy for the sake of AI advancement. That will put the last nails in the coffin for our children’s and grandchildren’s future. It will kill tens of millions if not billions within a decade or two. Sure Huang wants to sell more chips, but there’ more to it than that. These people are sacrificing human civilization, such as it is, for the sake of their bizarre dreams, which are nightmares for us and our progeny. Reply ↓ 5. **flora** October 1, 2026 at 3:46 pm I’ll go with reason number 1: They’re broke, can’t pay their enormous debts, and want a bailout disguised as a public service. Reason number 2 is good, but since they’re already part of govt, aka the military, it’s a less compelling reason imo. My reason number 3: if they’re nationalized they can’t be sued by states for any damages caused and can’t be regulated by the states. They might even escape the “regulated public utility” oversight run by state utility boards. Reply ↓ 1. **flora** October 1, 2026 at 3:54 pm Listen to this clip of Bill Gates on the Ezra Klein show. It sounds like he’s really angling for nationalization without trying to sound like he’s angling for nationalization. To keep us ‘safe’. Because he cares about humanity. Sure he does. (And nationalizing the industry will make a whole lot of his problems go away.) But it won’t stop data centers buildouts. It would probably increase them, with no citizen recourse. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ubtWvzfZusA Reply ↓ 1. **flora** October 1, 2026 at 4:07 pm ooohhh, there’s that word ‘cyberattack’ again. Bill has been saying for a while we’ll have a massive cyberattack soon. I remember him predicting a pandemic was right around the corner. And he was right. Is he psychic or something? / ;) All of his predictions are couched in dire fear terms. Be afraid, etc. He fought govt regulation hammer and tong when he was head of Microsoft. I do not think this leopard has changed his spots. Reply ↓ 2. **Henry Moon Pie** October 1, 2026 at 7:27 pm flora, there are times that maxxing out on cynicism can leave you quite vulnerable. If I remember correctly, you were very skeptical/cynical about the threat posed by Covid as well as by our breaching 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, so this approach to the potential threat posed by AI is not surprising. I viewed the entire interview, including, and perhaps especially, the clip you linked, and I don’t see a clever Machiavellian spiel to pump Gates’s position. The guy has, heretofore, had a stunning contempt for Nature with his Frankenplants and robot bees, and his Epstein “participation” is horrifying. And it was only recently that he was, like Huang, advocating abandoning climate goals for the sake of AI development, but he gives me some evidence in this interview that he is not as nihilistic as Huang or Musk. Listen to him describe the current, specific threats that led him to give this interview. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, is not a strategy for dealing with pandemics, rendering the biosphere inhospitable toward human civilization, or the threat posed by powerful machines whose inner workings are a mystery to us. Even someone like Bill Gates, who has done a lot of damage, may have limits on how far he’s willing to foster catastrophe. Maybe his vision for humanity, while anti-Nature, is not completely anti-human. Whatever it is, I don’t hear him talking his book. I hear genuine agitation, maybe even fear, in his voice, and the guy does have some idea of what he’s talking about. Reply ↓ 3. **The Rev Kev** October 1, 2026 at 7:32 pm _‘with no citizen recourse’_ Because those data centers would be a matter of “national security” so their build-out over rides any other concern. Reply ↓ 2. **Judith** October 1, 2026 at 4:13 pm Gary Marcus interviews Zephyr Teachout, who begins the interview by saying : “I joined the current AI debate because I saw way too many people treating repeat evidence of lawbreaking as wholly unreachable by current law.” https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/can-companies-like-openai-keep-getting Reply ↓ 1. **flora** October 1, 2026 at 4:29 pm Thanks for this link. I have seen the same thing. e.g. copyright doesn’t apply to digital text, only to text on paper copied to paper, etc. That was the rational. The tool modifies or determines the law instead of the law determining the legal use of the tool. etc. Reply ↓ 2. **flora** October 1, 2026 at 5:45 pm Great read. I nominate this link for tomorrow’s NC links. I think several lawyers read this site. This info could give them some good ideas. Reply ↓ 3. **ChrisFromGA** October 1, 2026 at 5:48 pm She gets it … if you or I build a dangerous machine, say one that has hazardous materials, and a propensity to explode, and we leave it near a school, we don’t get to say “”oops, it broke out of its containment and killed people, sorry …” We end up in a federal penitentiary if we’re lucky … Gitmo if we’re unlucky. Reply ↓ 6. **voislav** October 1, 2026 at 5:41 pm I feel this is about competition, For these companies to justify trillion dollar valuations they have to capture a sizable portion of the US GDP. The biggest problem for them is not each other, it is Chinese and open source models that run at a fraction of the cost and compute. So these have to be banned, creating a walled garden where their profits are secure. Nationalization is a vehicle to pull those profits out, these valuations are so high that there is no market mechanism to sell the shares without crashing the price. But if the government just writes a check there is no market to react to the selloff. Reply ↓ 7. **ChrisFromGA** October 1, 2026 at 6:03 pm Don’t forget that because Congress wet the bed and failed to pass any legislation to regulate AI, the States are free to regulate as strictly as they want to without being preempted by Federal Supremacy. This may be motivating some of the hysteria emanating out of the likes of Altman, Anthropic, and Gates. They want the Federal Leviathan to serve their interests by preempting state laws. Fortunately, Congress is so wantonly corrupt and inept, they cannot even pass legislation anymore, only trade stocks and have affairs with their staff (see, Boebert, Lauren, and Sinema, Kyrsten.) And let’s not forget about the vegetable in the Senate being wheeled around like “Weekend at Bernies”! Reply ↓ 8. **John Merryman** October 1, 2026 at 8:19 pm So we have a government that is bordering on bankruptcy coming to the rescue of a speculative bubble? What part of the West isn’t circling the drain? Reply ↓ 9. **Hank Linderman** October 1, 2026 at 8:43 pm “By hyping bogus “10% extinction” scenarios…” Bogus? How so? https://www.facebook.com/reel/2538854556526162 Sorry for the FB link but the discussion is concerning if only half of it is true. Best…H Reply ↓ ### Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Comment * Name * Email *

The filmmaker behind a new documentary on Elon Musk has been taken aback by some of the billionaire’s reaction to his movie.

PART ONE - From "Freedom" to Dominion: Mapping Canada's Nationalist Turn

Nolan’s _Odyssey_ is Nolan’s _Odyssey_. That might seem like an obvious statement, but it is one that many seem to ignore. Nolan has made his own interpretation of Homer’s epic poem—in the same way that Homer, if he ever existed, was making his own interpretation of the historical events that might have occurred. _In the following text I have tried to avoid any spoilers, but it might contain some._ And Nolan has chosen not to be faithful to the classical telling of the _Odyssey_. Many see this as an unforgivable crime, but Homer—or the many storytellers that came to be him—was not faithful to historical fact either, unless we are ready to accept the existence of the many mythical creatures and gods that appear in the story. Homer wanted to speak to the people of his time; Nolan wants to speak to his own. The greatness of the original _Odyssey_ is that it allows for many readings. It can be read as a proto-Greek tragedy in which the genius of the hero causes his own downfall. It can be read as the mythical hero’s journey that, according to Joseph Campbell, appears again and again in every tradition. It can be read as a spiritual parable depicting the stages of the self and its temptations. Or it can be read as recounting the end of an epoch after it has collapsed. It is this last reading that Nolan has chosen to focus on, and he is quite explicit about it. Toward the end of the movie, he has Odysseus say something like, “It’s the end of the Bronze Age,” making the character conscious of something he could have never known. Of course, Odysseus does not need to know that; Nolan wants the audience to know it. It is this strange self-awareness that Odysseus possesses that is perhaps the most disturbing element. He is a modern man in a different age. He more closely resembles a Vietnam veteran with PTSD than a Greek hero. Many have criticized Nolan for that, but I don’t think it’s a mistake; it’s a deliberate choice. The same applies to the diverse—some call it “woke”—casting, or stripping the narrative of its mythical epic nature to render it believable. We might argue with those choices, but they are Nolan’s way of making the _Odyssey_ relatable and understandable to a modern audience. It’s a movie about today, not yesteryear. “It’s a movie about love, yearning, adventure, wonder, mysticism, and epic mythology woven together by a man who either can’t or won’t understand any of those things,” says the Critical Drinker in his harsh review. Perhaps he is right. But what Nolan has done, consciously or unconsciously, is a movie about something else. He has made a movie about the end of an epoch. I think this was a deliberate choice, and every other character and plot choice was subjected to that, perhaps to their own detriment. There are movies about people and there are movies about things. In the movies about people, the human takes center stage. In the movies about things, the idea, the subject, or the object takes it. Nolan’s _Odyssey_ is a movie about things, despite being a movie about Odysseus. _Oppenheimer_ was a movie about people, despite being about the building of the atomic bomb. And the “thing” this movie is about is the end of a world as it was known. That is the impending catastrophe that looms over Odysseus and every other character. That is the idea that guides the story. That is the climax and resolution of the story. In one of the many narrative licenses that Nolan takes, Odysseus does not stay in Ithaca when he finally arrives; he sails to the west with his wife in order to honor his fallen men. But this ending is uncannily similar to the end of Peter Jackson’s _The Lord of the Rings_ , where the elves have to sail away because their time has come to an end. Odysseus’s time—the time of gods and heroes in a dialectical narrative—has come to an end. What has precipitated the end of their world is that the Greeks broke the Law of Zeus to conquer Troy with the fake offering of a wooden horse. This breach has reverberated throughout the entire Greek world. The laws and morals that once held their civilization together began to be ignored, disregarded, and consciously broken. The “Sea Peoples” are coming, and there is nothing left binding the Greeks together to stop them. A world order, even one confined to their known world, is ending because its leaders have betrayed the principles that sustained it. They have done so knowingly in order to secure their commercial interests. Those principles were the manifestation of a worldview. Once they are broken, the worldview loses its normative power. In Nolan’s _Odyssey_ , when the hero realizes this, Athena leaves the stage, never to return. In this sense, Nolan’s Odysseus is a contemporary character—someone who is aware today that the world is changing. The laws and principles that held our world together, no matter how imperfect they were, have been broken. The “rules-based order,” which was the last expression of the normative power of the Western world order, was violated by the same people who proclaimed it in the first place. We are witnessing the end of an epoch. The Israeli genocide in Gaza is the symbolic burning of Troy. Others might follow, but it was here that international human rights and laws were definitively put to rest. Israel might take Gaza; they will kill and squeeze its population until they leave or confine them to (concentration) camps. They might win, as the Greeks won the war against the Trojans, but it will also bring forth the demise of the Western order. After Gaza, how can the West, which has stood by and supported the genocide, claim any moral superiority? It is not just that the Western-led world order is ending—which is evident from the many ongoing geopolitical conflicts—but the West itself is changing. The democratic process, if it was ever truly democratic, is being discarded even in principle. The coarseness with which elections were rigged all over Latin America or Eastern Europe over the last year is just one example. The nature of the financial system is changing toward fully programmable money, which, together with the surveillance capabilities enhanced by AI, will create a new social paradigm. All of this is justified in the name of security, which, in turn, is needed because the elites broke all the rules that they set up. Perhaps it’s true, as Nolan has Odysseus say, that “we are the Sea People.” We are the ones who brought this on ourselves. Nolan, with this film, resembles the Roman poet Lucan, who wrote _Pharsalia_ , an epic that stands alongside Homer’s _Iliad_ and Virgil’s _Aeneid_. The subject of Lucan’s work is the ruin of Rome and, by extension, its world. The opening of his epic is Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, which essentially meant defying the Roman Senate and thereby breaking the law. It is the breaking of the law that unleashes the end of the Republic. Lucan was the grandson of Seneca the Elder and the nephew of Seneca the Younger, the Stoic philosopher who oversaw his education. Seneca was the de facto ruler of Rome for some years under the emperor Nero. Lucan became part of the close circle of the emperor, who awarded him great honors. But when his uncle lost power, Lucan saw how Nero degenerated into a mad king. He was pushed out of court and became a poet who spoke about the end of Rome, the end of his time, and the end of their world. Nolan is a mature artist from the inner circle of Hollywood who has taken a classical work and turned it into a technically impeccable film. But he is an artist speaking about his time, not about the past. If you want the classical _Odyssey_ , you will not find it in Nolan’s work, and that will lead to many disappointments. But if you watch it thinking about today, you might find that he is reflecting our Western world. And the answers he proposes are not particularly hopeful. In a final line, he has Odysseus say that their stories will be sung because those who come after will have forgotten how to write. This entry was posted in Politics, Social values on August 13, 2026 by Curro Jimenez. ### Post navigation ← Why Have We Constructed a Society So Prejudiced Against the Autistic? ## Subscribe to Post Comments 11 comments 1. **motorslug** August 13, 2026 at 2:26 pm Absolutely a film This movie is absolutely a film that will be watched by people. The roles are played by actors who act out their parts while in character. One thing that most people probably won’t point out about this movie is that it has a run time. Matt Damon is in it and he’s acting, in character. Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland also have parts as their characters who are entwined within the story. Christopher Nolan did his job in directing this film and as you can see he followed it through to completion. One other thing that’s worth pointing out is that the location scouts and costume designers for Odyssey also had a job that they did as well. I have to say that I absolutely 100% acknowledge that this is a movie that people worked on and made. Their hard work and dedication may be something that exists for them and that they are proud of. So, if you like movies, this definitely is one. Reply ↓ 2. **Spastica Rex** August 13, 2026 at 2:36 pm Thanks for the review. I found it conveyed an opinion about the content of its subject. It helped me to feel confident with my strategy of passing on most Hollywood films made post Star Wars. Thanks again. edit – sorry, that was for motorslug. Thanks to Curro as well. Reply ↓ 3. **Ignacio** August 13, 2026 at 2:45 pm Ññññ. Don’t read anything, don’t be tempted…. I am watching it tomorrow. Then I will read Curro’s take. Reply ↓ 4. **Jeff W** August 13, 2026 at 2:47 pm He lives in Three Rivers, California (which he often referred to as “Tiny Town”), which is near the entrance to the national parks of Sequoia and Kings Canyon. As one commenter said in July, it probably would not be all that difficult to find out what’s happened to him. (The town has a population of just over 2000.) Reply ↓ 1. **Jeff W** August 13, 2026 at 3:03 pm Oh, dang—that was intended as a reply to this comment here. Apologies. Reply ↓ 5. **Jonathan Holland Becnel** August 13, 2026 at 3:40 pm BEST REVIEW OF THE BEST MOVIE OF 2026* Great work, Curreaux. I was blown away by The Odyssey, exactly for everything that you write. Wow, get the words out of our heads, why don’t you?! This is truly an epic masterpiece that although missing the big cast of say The Ten Commandments still captures grand scope and pacing. Nolan took his time with brilliant characters written to make perfect sense. Agamemnon and Odysseus broke Zeus Law and unleashed everyone’s doom. The Epstein Class has used America to violate Iran and Russia with their promises of peace while engaging in economic warfare and thus doomed all of us with their wealth addiction. The times of the old are born again once more. Time to get to work. 🇺🇸 🫡 *UNTIL DUNE III ON DECEMBER 18TH Reply ↓ 6. **Vicky Cookies** August 13, 2026 at 3:56 pm I don’t wish to self-promote, but neither do I wish to re-type or re-phrase things I just wrote. Coincidentally, I published my own thoughts on the subject at my substack site this morning. They boil down to: history and narrative are political self construction, located at definite points in class society. We ought to build our own narrative, and so our own politics, together, rather than getting them from Homer or Christopher Nolan. Reply ↓ 1. **Polar Socialist** August 13, 2026 at 4:19 pm You are right, but part of the staying power of epics like Iliad and Odyssey is that talk about human condition that remains trough the ages. If you think about it, _Iliad_ is a warning that war turns people into monsters and consumes them. Achilles (who’s name is a wordplay for “army’s grief”) starts out as a heroic figure who then kills thousands, lets thousands of his own die and eventually desecrates a corpse of a much better man than he is. At the same time Odysseus (who’s name is a wordplay for “man of wrath”) doesn’t want to be in the war, but gives it his best anyway, saves the Greek army and leads the total annihilation of a whole civilization. In this light Odysseia is a story of a PTSD and how a veteran carries his monsters all the way to home where he causes horrible carnage. It’s about how war destroys even the “winners”, and that should resonate with every generation. And for this age, it certainly should be told. Over and over again. Reply ↓ 1. **Carolinian** August 13, 2026 at 4:50 pm But do you think this–or any Nolan movie–is about all that? I haven’t seen the film but reviews say he has tacked on a coda where Odysseus and Penelope go away together and the murder of the suitors’ prostitutes is left out. Add in everyman Damon–this era’s Jimmy Stewart–and it sounds like a condemnation of war that doesn’t quite face the nature of the warriors. So does war turn us into monsters or are we monsters trying to be human? And did the ancients have a quite different attitude toward violence than we do? I’ll wait for the home video version to take a look. Reply ↓ 7. **Safety First** August 13, 2026 at 4:39 pm > Many have criticized Nolan for that, but I don’t think it’s a mistake; it’s a deliberate choice. Technically, a deliberate choice can still be very much a mistake. See the war against Iran. Nolan’s problem, from my standpoint, is that in his last three films pre-“Odyssey” the story – once you get past the “big idea” of it, to the extent there even is one – is completely rotten. The world that is being created makes no sense, the characters are wholly incoherent, and many storyline beats only make sense if everyone in this fake world is literally a drooling imbecile. This is bad storytelling (stuff happens because plot!), and bad moviemaking, compounded by occasional production and editing shortcuts that make some specific scenes just terrible visually (“Tenet” is especially guilty of this). Having an appealing “big idea” on top of all this does nothing to rescue the product as a whole. So. I have not yet had a chance to watch “Odyssey”, though I definitely mean to. Which is why I am not expressing an opinion on THIS film. Maybe Nolan will surprise me, as he had with “Inception”. But his track record since that film is not exactly promising. And IF “Odyssey” commits the same story and production/editing sins as the last three films, then it doesn’t matter whether it departs from Homer’s original, and it doesn’t matter what the “big idea” may or may not be; it will still be a trash film as a whole. Parenthetically, Critical Drinker and the entire “cabal” of reviewers in his general orbit (Mauler, Nerdrotic, all those guys) caters to a very specific, right-wing “anti-woke” segment of the audience. He basically beats the same dead horses in EVERY significant review he does, because that’s the content his audience is there for. To be fair, sometimes his critique is legitimate, but even when it is, there is usually a forest-for-the-trees issue simply because he has to limit his scope to said catering to said audience. Not necessarily the best review to cite here, in other words… Reply ↓ 8. **Klock** August 13, 2026 at 4:45 pm The insight we are the sea pea people was uncovered long ago by Pogo. But the line about once inside the walls of Troy, all the pent up wrath and rageful grief of ten years of war was flooded upon everyone, women children elderly, ruthlessly without pity, this is true to those times and to ours. But the movie would be even more authentic were Odysseus himself caught up in the ravished slaughter rather than fighting ‘fairly’ soldier to soldier above it all—-being stunned by what he is seeing. He and his men would then.be suffering and paying back not for PTSD—-trauma of experiencing terror and horror—-but what’s been known as ‘moral injury’, a diagnosis that involves uncontainable guilt for what one has done (or standing by and not quelling) an atrocity beyond the realm of one’s meaning or spiritual capacity to make sense of. This version of the Odyssey would then be the terrible stages of absolution and loss Odysseus must endure before he can re-enter civil society Reply ↓ ### Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. 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D’Addario is coming clean about using Suno.

Swimmers often attribute slowing performance to fitness issues, but it’s typically a breakdown in communication between the brain and body. Effective swimming relies on coordination and rhyth…

As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them