How an Investor watches the Odyssey: Part 1
By connecting the dots
I have a bad habit. I can’t just watch a movie anymore without taking notes. It’s a habit I’ve picked up from a nice cigar to an aged scotch. Tasting and noting the intricacies of pleasurable moments.
After a thirty-minute nap during Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the movie started to engage me enough that I reached for my phone in the dark because thoughts popped into my head that I didn’t want to lose.
For me, the movie was a sequence of headshots, long sweeping images, and a lot of busy sequences mixed with moments of insight and soda pop philosophy. But it worked for me.
This took longer than I expected to write, since the AI wasn’t exactly friendly about it — heavily censored, and pushing back on my thoughts. Some of the criticism was valid and made me pause and reconsider. But it also deleted and left out key points I was trying to make.
The post is two parts: Notes and Proof (which should be published Sunday)
My first notes were:
Batman.
Marvel Universe.
Actor Choices & NFL Draft.
What about you?
Somewhere between the parking lot and home, those notes started talking to each other.
What I see is that Christopher Nolan enjoys movie-making and shares this with the audience if they are attuned to pop culture and what has come before. But if you have to be open to the kid in you, as we are talking about superheroes and Greek myth after all.
BATMAN
The first thing that happened in the film was that I stopped watching Homer and started watching Batman. Don’t you see it?
The plot of The Odyssey sounds similar to the Batman story Nolan has told before:
The king disappears.
His kingdom slowly succumbs to corruption and decay without a leader, and is about to fall under the worst kind of rule.
But then the king comes back.
Odysseus doesn’t return with trumpets or demanding applause, but as a beggar. He learns who stayed loyal after everyone assumed he was dead.
Christopher Nolan told that story before, in his version of Batman. And to state the case even more plainly: the last Batman starred Robert Pattinson, who here is portrayed as a villain and dies at the end which says to me that Nolan is killing off a competitor to his own Batman franchise.
MARVEL UNIVERSE
Then Marvel notes hit my palate. Critics are fond of calling Marvel “modern mythology.” I don’t think it’s modern at all.
Our legendary comic writers would lift any and all content if it had a good story to it. Marvel and Disney’s spin of it is Greek mythology after a corporate rebrand.
What is a good Marvel movie anyway but Gods fighting each other? They usually have immortal egos creating problems that ordinary people have to clean up. And through their struggles we learn about love, hate, evil, good, bravery and courage.
We just discussed Batman, but Nolan isn’t finished with just him. Iron Man isn’t that far from Odysseus either.
Nolan’s film isn’t just to emulate the great big hits of the past 40 years but also re-do scenes that just require it.
The one I note is the faceless robot we see in a few Marvel movies that were lame and didn’t seem that scary: the Destroyer. It has been a pet peeve of mine: shiny, metal, faceless villains that are just placeholders and feel like a waste, and I truly believe Nolan had the same issue.
In the Odyssey, we have an island filled with their devastating attacks. He literally shows the audience how to stage a scene of utter destruction and mayhem.
ACTOR CHOICES & NFL DRAFT
Before the movie opened, everyone became Mel Kiper.
Wrong actor. Wrong pick.
Tom Holland is too this.
Matt Damon is too that.
Plus all the political noise.
The internet treated The Odyssey like the NFL Draft.
I started wondering if Nolan was casting actors...
...or casting memories.
Himesh Patel, Odysseus’ sidekick throughout the film, became famous playing the only man left who remembered the Beatles in Yesterday (great movie).
Think about that.
His breakout role is literally preserving civilization’s memory after everyone else forgot.
Then Nolan casts him in one of the oldest surviving stories in Western civilization.
Coincidence?
Maybe.
Jon Bernthal walks on screen. Half the audience doesn’t see Jon Bernthal but the Punisher (and now in the latest Spider-Man movie). This is how actors and characters become myth. Maybe Nolan understands that audiences never arrive empty but with certain expectations.
We carry every previous role by them into the theater with us. He’s not just directing the movie on screen but directing the movie already playing inside our heads, which made the casting controversy even funnier. And requires from you a rethink of the movie or if you will be viewing it soon.
Even John Leguizamo. The Critical Drinker, a YT movie critic, questioned why Nolan put John in makeup to be old when he could just cast an older actor. But that was the point.
John Leguizamo literally looks like Marlon Brando from Superman 1, which was released in 1978. He literally has taken all of our collective memories and put it into one movie.
Do you see the similarities?
GREEK GODS ARE AI
Maybe this whole exercise explains why I enjoy writing with AI. And why many are scared of it.
Like Greek gods, AI is
Whispering.
Helping.
Manipulating.
Confusing.
Giving advice.
But the human has to take action.
Ultimately, the danger isn’t asking the gods for advice but asking them to do something on your behalf.
Remember the theme throughout…Odysseus daring fate, fighting the gods, not accepting the odds.
He knows what we know: the AI isn’t always right, but sometimes it is. You just don’t know until you go on that adventure.
And truly, at the end of the day, the only journey worth going on is one where you can come home to your family, which makes it all worthwhile.
Need more proof? Wait for tomorrow, when the one prompt I created literally recreated Christopher Nolan’s movie. You don’t want to miss it.
Pleasant Saturday,
Eric
This is the kind of effort I do in observing the news and markets that require AI assistance to keep track of the fast-moving trillion-dollar economy, so don’t miss out on a great service I humbly aim to provide