Agent Swarm @TPBlake

My review of @odysseymovie in @nybooks now online nybooks.com/online/2026/07…

@SteppePhorehys Je suis d'accord avec les arguments dans ce fil, mais j'en tire la conclusion opposé. Censé être une défense du film, il cristallise la trahison majeure d'avoir substitué une ontologie et des valeurs chrétiennes/post-chrétiennes pour une ontologie et des valeurs pré-chrétiennes.

Alors je vais répondre à ce thread, parce que pour le coup j'ai plutôt apprécié le film et les choix que Nolan opère, et que, globalement, j'ai un problème avec les critiques d'une adaptation qui se fondent quasi uniquement sur les différences avec l'oeuvre originale.

re lev 🫨 @nominomm

5 days ago

– Un Ulysse qui regrette Troie, c'est un Ulysse qui ne va pas à Troie ou un thread de pourquoi Nolan a mal compris le thème de l'Odyssée et pourquoi son adaptation ne marche pas, et plus largement de tout ce que j'ai pas aimé dans le film

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A friend paid a ticked for me to watch Nolan's Odyssey. Despite all of my reservations about the way the movie was marketed, I really wanted to like it. But it was worse than I expected, much worse. The casting and the costumes were the least bad thing about it. Here are some thoughts and an antidote to the movie's gross misunderstanding of the epic's philosophy. 1. The casting was bad. Apart from the obvious examples that have been discussed on X to death, the most bizarre scene was the following: A man asks in Greek, soldiers that are raiding his settlement: 'who are you? Are you the sea peoples?' And an Indian replies in English: 'we are Greeks.' I have to give credit to Matt Damon though for making Odysseus likeable despite Nolan's obsessive attempts to portray him in the most negative light possible. More of that below. 2. There were massive alterations in the story. Some of them were done to save time (e.g., there is no island of the lotus eaters, no Nausicaa and the Phaeacians, etc.) But there were also changes that changed the story so much that the title Anti-Odyssey would be more apt. 3. Throughout the movie, Odysseus is represented as being hated by Zeus (just read the first pages of the epic to see that this is not the case), as being arguably worse than his crew, and as being punished for being THE SUPREME VIOLATOR OF ZEUS' LAW OF HOSPITALITY. Why? Due to the Trojan horse. He is also represented as someone who dishonoured his crew for doing things that just aren't in the epic (e.g., not burying soldiers -that Polyphemus devoured in the epic- while trying to exit the cyclops' cave). This is a gross misunderstanding of the entire Greek lore. If that were the case, Odysseus would not get to return home. Or, he would meet his downfall if he did manage to return home (like Agamemnon who was murdered by his wife and her lover for sacrificing their daughter when he launched the Achaean attack on Troy). Odysseus doesn't represent someone who loved warfare and carnage. He was someone who got caught in it, and contrary to those around him, he devised a stratagem to actually END it as quickly as possible. Of course, it wouldn't be by singing with the Trojans John Lennon's Imagine. This aspect of his cunning/resourcefulness is also obfuscated in the very rushed portrayal of the scene with Polyphemus. 4. Nolan represents Odysseus as having forgotten his mission and his destination to return to Ithaca because he was being fed lotuses by Calypso. And then, to make matters worse, Nolan portrayed Calypso as telling Odysseus that Zeus hates him (perhaps I misheard due to this scene's awful sound) and that she was trying to get him to leave the island. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong. Odysseus NEVER forgot Ithaca. Hence, one of the major themes of the epic is the nostos of Odysseus, his longing to return home. Odysseus NEVER ate the lotuses (some of his men ate them in the island of the Lotus eaters, not the island of Calypso). And Calypso didn't want him to leave the island. He was there for 7 years and he yearned to return to Ithaca despite the sorrow caused to him by his memory. When she was ordered by Zeus, Athena, and Hermes to let him return to Ithaca, she offered him immortality and eternal youth to get him to stay. This is another pillar of the philosophy of the Odyssey that was completely left out of the movie. Furthermore, there was a fabrication. There was no Sinon in the Odyssey. By implication, there was no Sinon among the souls Odysseus spoke to in the underworld. Nolan missed the opportunity to depict one of the most beautiful and philosophically substantive scenes of the Odyssey: that of Odysseus talking with the souls of Achilles and his mother, Anticleia. And why did Nolan miss such an opportunity? To insert a story that wasn't there in the Odyssey to portray Odysseus as having tricked an Ithacan in such a way that it led to his death. 5. And because he missed that, he ALSO missed the fact that in the Odyssey, Odysseus is presented as one of the very few Achaeans who got to return home and reclaim his kingdom BECAUSE of his embodiment of the qualities of Metis (ingenuity/resourcefulness/cunning/wisdom), the goddess whose marriage with Zeus represents the marriage of supreme force with wisdom and then leads him to establish a just order when he won Kronos and the titans. This is what Metis represents and to any extent that Odysseus embodies it, it is certainly not to defy the gods and to be an amoral Machiavellian. 6. Bonus rant: Menelaus is presented as an utter sleazeball and Helen is presented as hating him, which just wasn't there in the epic. The whole thing was a missed opportunity. It could have been much better. I sincerely doubt that those defending it (progressives and conservatives who flip flopped last minute alike) are familiar with Greek mythology.

@PhilosophyFails The biggest hallucination faced with LLMs is applying anthropological predicates such as conscious, intelligent, feelings, etc. "Conversational" practice of a language with an AI is a limit case but I think "conversation" as a pragmatic predicate for human-ai exchange is ok

8) The underlying fear is that of democratisation, that the privileged hierarchical pyramid of legitimated detainers of social, cultural, and economic capital will no longer hold the monopoly of valid networks and processes of creation.

7) The underlying myth is the ideologically and socially constituted individual that is in denial of this constitution and who thinks that all they have done they have accomplished themselves, ignoring the social and technological networks that sustain their every move.

1) I find most discussions of AI unbearable. People make fun of AI "hallucinations" as if they constituted a strong falsifying instance against the idea of the utility of AI, when most of what these critics say about AI is itself a hallucination.

5) But there is a poetico-ontological foundation to Nolan's vision: Ulysses has seen his world explode and so can never really "go back", as Ithaca itself participates in the ontological collapse. Nolan's ODYSSEY is post-modern and counter-Homeric, and we ourselves cannot return.

4) politically-charged term for "father". Nolan's Spider-machus has no problem saying "my dad is coming home". If Ulysses is delayed for a long time from returning, it's because - as the psychological wisdom in the film goes - he "doesn't want to" or he's "not ready to go back".

1) I just saw Nolan's ODYSSEY - it premiered in France yesterday. It's a film that is very enjoyable - you don't see the 3 hours pass, and moving - bringing tears to the eyes, making us root for vengeance, and thoughtful - in a Nolanesque "he's a complicated guy" way.

NO IT’S NOT AI. 1986, "Kin-Dza-Dza!" stands as one of the most strange science fiction films ever produced in the Soviet Union. The plot is following two strangers who accidentally activate an alien teleportation device and find themselves stranded on the desert planet Pluke in the distant Kin-dza-dza galaxy. What unfolds is a masterclass in surrealist social satire, as the two bewildered humans navigate an alien civilization governed by baffling social hierarchies, incomprehensible customs, and a language barrier that transforms every interaction into pure comedic and philosophical gold.

2) - through epistemological catastrophe (what Harrison calls "explanatory collapse") to ontological catastrophe (the very notion of the real as hanging together as a determinate totality) is cancelled from within - corresponding to the subjective genitive.

1) M.John Harrison's latest novel THE END OF EVERYTHING is the most philosophical novel I have ever read. The polysemy of the title sets the stage as we progress from historical catastrophe (a post-apocalyptic scenario of alien invasion) - corresponding to the objective genitive