About a week before Christopher Nolan’s latest film hit theaters, I wrote this post at Forbes listing off ten movies free to watch at Pluto TV that were similar enough to hopefully be interesting to fans of historical mythic epics like The Odyssey.
Among these films was Mel Gibson’s masterpiece, Braveheart, still one of my Top 5 movies of all time. In fact, I’m such a huge fan of some of Gibson’s films (as an actor, but mostly as a director) that in that piece (published on July 11) I mused:
“The battle scenes are among the best and bloodiest ever filmed. Say what you will about Mel Gibson, but the man knows how to make a great historical epic. In fact, I’d be curious to see how his version of The Odyssey would play.”
Not long after this, Musk — who had been tweeting about The Odyssey and its “woke” casting and whipping his lackeys up into a fever pitch — tweeted:
“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
Now, as readers of mine should know by now I am neither in the “we must stop AI before it’s too late” camp or the “AI will save the universe” camp. I am, I think, a realist. A pragmatist. Neither Luddite nor techbro. I think AI is a rapidly evolving technology that has myriad good and bad applications and will probably help us develop technology and medicine and all sorts of things much more rapidly than we would without it. I also think any Grok-made version of The Odyssey that comes out this year will be a steaming pile of (Trojan) horseshit.
Maybe someday AI will evolve enough to make really amazing movies, but I still view it as a technology that can help in more pragmatic — and less replacement-heavy ways. AI can improve workflow, productivity, etc. but it can’t replace real human animation, real human emotion, and it can’t write for shit. But it can be very useful in countless ways and I use it all the time for game design, organization, research and so forth. I also use it to make goofy AI songs for my YouTube videos since these are A) usually just a bit of fun and B) won’t be copyright struck, with all the consequences that entails.
(Bizarre to me that using 30 seconds of a copyrighted track could completely destroy your channel instead of, I dunno, just letting whoever owned the license earn 30 seconds worth of the proceeds. The music industry has been one of the most nefarious, greedy, soul-sucking, parasitic corporate behemoths since it was called the “record industry” and I have about as much sympathy for them as I did back in the Napster days. Obviously it gets more complicated when it comes to creatives and artists, and as someone whose entire livelihood could easily be destroyed by AI, I’m incredibly sympathetic. I’m just saying that the music industry hasn’t really been a bastion of goodness all these decades, and I can’t really root for them over the new assholes in the tech industry. A pox on both their houses. But I digress).
In any case, the conversation didn’t end with AI. Another Twitter denizen critical of Nolan’s Odyssey tweeted1: “I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.”
“I’m down” Musk replied.
Now, this is funny on several levels. Gibson has made some great movies, as mentioned above, but neither Braveheart nor Apocalypto are “historically accurate” let alone “painstakingly historically accurate.” I mean, they wore kilts in Braveheart. William Wallace was born around the year 1270, roughly three hundred years before the first recorded Scottish highlander wore a kilt. Even the name of the film, Braveheart, attributed to Wallace in the movie, was actually a nickname for Robert the Bruce.
Wallace and his affair with Princess Isabella, while certainly steamy, was made up wholesale. They never met. The battle at Stirling leaves out the Stirling Bridge entirely. There are many inaccuracies in the film, but it feels authentic and that’s why it works. I don’t care at all that kilts weren’t around in 1300. Seeing men in kilts makes me think “Scottish highlander” and so the movie feels real and authentic despite not being historically accurate.
The same is true of Apocalypto, which is a terrific, suspenseful, genuinely remarkable film with some tremendous cinematography, fight choreography and stunning performances from the many local actors. The film followed in the footsteps of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and its Aramaic/Latin dialogue, using a modern approximation of ancient Yucatec Mayan.
Gibson, while doing everything he could to portray or imitate what that time and place might have been like, was not trying to accurately represent the Mayan civilization. He called it “merely a backdrop” for a more universal story about “civilizations and what undermines them.” Gibson and co-writer, Farhad Safinia, were using the fall of a past empire as a cautionary tale about the ways modern empires succumb to corruption and moral degradation.
What feels real and authentic and what is historically accurate are almost always at odds. The show Vikings portrays the Nordic raiders as we envision them (and I often style my hair to match) but this is certainly not what the actual Danes terrorizing the Anglo-Saxons looked like. If every there was an Achilles, he did not look like Brad Pitt and most of the hair-styles you see in just about any period piece from olden days are modernized so that they don’t turn audiences off too badly. The excellent film Master and Commander changed the enemy ship from an American vessel to one of the French fleet because producers worried making Americans the bad guys would turn off American audiences, but it was still a great film that felt historically authentic.
My point, if I even have one, is that I think Mel Gibson would make a great version of The Odyssey but I doubt he’d worry much at all about “historical accuracy” or sticking to the letter of Homer’s poem, as if going word-for-word on a 2700 year-old poem would be even remotely practical for a filmmaker, though he might opt for some version of Homeric Greek to add that deeper layer of immersion, which could be very cool.
Gibson would likely not go for historically accurate armor, but whatever looked cool to him and evoked “ancient Greece” to him and I think Braveheart’s kilts prove this point. Maybe it would look more authentic than Nolan’s, but I very much doubt it would be more “accurate” or that audiences would care. Audiences want cool-looking armor.
Would Gibson stick closer to the script? Perhaps. I think about Stirling Bridge, however, and how he just decided that battle would be more fun on a big open field rather than a bridge, and I think probably Gibson would have the same attitude toward his version of The Odyssey.
What about the casting? Well, Gibson is conservative (and increasingly radical at times, and always controversial) so you might think he wouldn’t “go woke” and his track record for accurate casting is pretty good: his casting for Apocalypto was almost entirely indigenous. A whole bunch of Scottish actors joined him (an Australian by birth) in Braveheart. But I don’t think he’d care as much about the casting in The Odyssey simply because you do have a lot of leniency in skin tones when it comes to the Mediterranean Sea. I doubt his Helen of Troy would have been black, so if that was at the top of your “I’m not giving Nolan my money!” list, the Gibson version already wins out.
Perhaps the biggest point in favor of a Gibson Odyssey is that he’d almost certainly pick a lot of lesser-known actors rather than all big celebrities. Again, this helps immerse us in the story. We don’t just see Anne Hathaway and Charlize Theron; we see two beautiful strange women we probably haven’t ever seen before, and they become Penelope and Calypso.
What would really work in a Gibson version is simply that he’s very good at giving us characters to root for, who we like and want to see survive. Both Braveheart and Apocalypto do a fantastic job at creating likeable, often funny characters who we bond with right away. This really gives us investment in their survival, the tragedies or betrayals that befall them, and their struggle to survive or get revenge or whatever. Gibson is a great filmmaker because he makes us emotionally invested in his characters and their stories. That includes villains. Almost certainly, not only would the suitors be more wicked, but the gods would take on an almost demonic presence (for surely the gods of ancient Greece are little more than demons, since there is only one true god in Gibson’s own theology).
And like Apocalypto, Gibson would almost certainly emphasize how Odysseus’s household is the last uncorrupted household in a slowly crumbling Bronze Age, showing us once again how great civilizations rot before they collapse.
Nolan is a great filmmaker for very, very different reasons and his version of The Odyssey does play rather cold and distant and grey, and even though I liked it a lot, I love thinking about how different directors could approach the same project.2
I think Gibson’s would have more heart, more fire, more color. It would likely be more heroic, though Gibson very easily might come to the same conclusions as Nolan in his interpretation of the text: That Odysseus was cursed for his betrayal of tradition and custom, targeted by angry or resentful gods in spite of his great victory and cunning. As I noted in my Odyssey review, there is a “small c” conservative message in Nolan’s framing of The Odyssey, and most certainly a Judeo-Christian framing at play with his idea of “Zeus’s law” and its breaking, with the Trojan Horse as a stand-in for “original sin” and the fall of Odysseus’s civilization from grace.
Gibson is a radical catholic, however, and would certainly want to explore Christian themes within his retelling of The Odyssey as well, though these themes would more likely Christianizing Homer by making Odysseus’s suffering redemptive. It would be darker and bloodier almost certainly. And in some ways, Gibson’s vision would be more coherent, avoiding the dissonance in Nolan’s climactic “slay the suitors” scene that never really lines up with Odysseus’s own guilt and need for atonement for his Trojan Horse and the betrayal of Zeus’s law. Gibson’s notion of god is of a wrathful deity, and the suitors would simply face divine justice for their sins. You could dive a lot deeper into how this might all play out, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts!
I’d absolutely watch a Mel Gibson version of The Odyssey, but there’s no way in a million years that Gibson is going to get into some bizarre feud with Elon Musk and Christopher Nolan. He may have fallen from grace, but he’s still a professional and isn’t going to want to make “that other Odyssey movie” right after this one just did a billion dollars.
I talk about The Odyssey in my rather rambling video review below:
What did you think of The Odyssey? Would you be interested in a Grok version? A Gibson version? A Grok Gibson version directed by an AI director modeled off of Mel Gibson starring an AI version of Val Kilmer? What a bizarro timeline we’re in. Oy vey.
My conservatism is most on display with things like Twitter becoming X. I refuse to budge on this one. I won’t call it X unless I have to and I won’t stop calling them “tweets” or saying “he tweeted” or “she was tweeting” etc. It’s madness.
You know, the Wes Anderson version of ‘The Odyssey” or, more seriously, Robert Eggers who would have Will Dafoe as the old servant, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Odysseus, Ralph Ineson as Agamemnon and some Skarsgard brother or other. And probably Lily-Rose Depp and Anya Taylor-Joy. Sam Mendes could be an interesting choice; Ridley Scott thirty years ago, maybe.
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