Movies: "The Odyssey" and "Disclosure Day"

Also: The End of Night: The “Eärendil” Space Mirror

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Michael Hoffman

Today’s Quote

“No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.”

— Frank Capra

My Dad is Coming Home

MOVIE REVIEW

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Hollywood director Frank Capra was right about the power of cinema. “Going to the movies” has shaped the American consciousness for good and ill since Thomas Edison and D.W. Griffith pioneered the technology more than a century ago.

Beginning in the 1960s the medium has been used by more than a few filmmakers to process their audience; more specifically to coarsen and bestialize us. Even for a jaded seen-everything viewership, writer-director Christopher Nolan’s nearly three hour take on Homer’s “immortal tale” is a PTSD-inducing odyssey in itself, an extended voyage into human suffering and misery unrelieved by a moment of laughter. Anyone who takes a young child to this pageant of pain and agony is a degenerate.

Overly long by at least an hour this monument to the director’s self-indulgence represents 180 minutes of suffering punctuated by pedestrian dialogue stripped of any vestige of the tenor of Homer’s poetry. Nolan chose to write his dialogue in our contemporary idiom, so that when Telemachus on two separate occasions refers to Odysseus as “Dad” rather than father, the dramatic spell is broken and the time travel aspect is jarringly shattered.

What many movie goers long for is to be transported for 90 or 120 minutes to another time and place. Not with this flick, which succumbed to the demands of post-modernity and its coils of accessibility, i.e. presentism—viewing the past by the standards of the present.

Mr. Nolan rejected the successful formula of two esteemed films which were audience favorites: Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander” (2003), and Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2011 remake of “True Grit.” In both movies the cadence and rhythm of the language of the past were respected, though not pedantically replicated. Weir and the Coens ensured that verisimilitude was preserved without bogging down in anachronism. They respected their audiences enough to anticipate they would appreciate the antiquarian incentive afforded — visiting a faraway time as engaged observers.

This “Odyssey” is a 21st-century agony fest, dressed in the props and habiliments of the Bronze Age.

Forget any encounter with shimmering goddesses. Athena resembles a forlorn peasant. Circe is a haggard housekeeper. Helen of Troy, she of the “face that launched a thousand ships” is portrayed by the African actress, Lupita Nyong’o, even though Homer described Helen as having white limbs, while Euripides termed her “reddish blonde.” The archaeological evidence testifies that the Greeks of 2,500 years ago were of Nordic appearance. In Nolan’s “Odyssey” there isn’t a blonde in sight. The cast is so racially blended it would pass muster on any register of DEI dictate.

If a movie depicting noble African queens such as Hatshepsut or Nefertiti were acted by Icelandic women there would be outrage and legitimate protests about the erasure of black history. Contempt for white history however, is so virulent that the protests contra Mr. Nolan’s casting choices are treated as rebarbative, inexcusable violations of decency.

Sci-Fi Religion for Mom-and-Pop in Goyimville

MOVIE REVIEW

Disclosure Day

(Spoiler-alert: some of the film’s surprises are divulged herein).

A movie with a title like this evokes our Revelation of the Method. Steven Spielberg’s portentous fictional drama which debuted June 12 in the U.S. is supposed to be a serious examination of claims that aliens have been in government captivity since the alleged crash of a spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

“Disclosure Day” is part of the Star Wars genre in the sense that it is isolated from the legend and lore of the West. It is sterile, secular schlock — largely disconnected from archetypal memory and the lessons our heritage imparts. The plot unfolds in a vacuum. A bankrupt world is on the verge of nuclear war. Christian religion has no answer.

He respectfully depicts Catholic nuns and uses them as a prop in order to illustrate the “higher” religion. For his theological peritus he chose a mother superior character who is queried by a former nun whose conscience is burdened by the idea of the existence of aliens. She relates to the head nun that since God decreed that humans were superior to all other life forms, how then can beings with superior intellects and wisdom exist? The mother superior replies that what God proclaimed is true on earth. She says that it does not violate our faith however, to encounter a vast universe where other forms of sentient life may excel us.

What contradicts this theology lite is the imago Dei. God declared that we were made in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26). Our dignity and rights emanate from the fact that we are his image-bearing creatures.

The current iteration of the image of an outer space creature is one that does not look much like us. In Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) they are diminutive, with elongated heads, large eyes and skeletal fingers. Since the days of “The Outer Limits” television program of the 1960s, aliens have been depicted as scrawny, large-headed beings with no visible genitalia who walk about naked. Spielberg repeats the image in “Disclosure Day.”

When a god-like alien is introduced in the last reel, he is an anemic, vampiric wraith with a pumpkin-sized head atop a withered body, looking every inch the deity of the dead rather than an inter-galactic avatar of vibrant life. This is the savior whose presence will rescue planet earth from World War III?

“Disclosure Day” is not exactly thought-provoking cinema. It is mythos for Mom-and-Pop-in-Goyimville and their 12-year-old kid, littered with the bric-à-brac of pop psychology’s empathy nostrums.

It is drained of even the remotest connection to Yggdrasil, the Aeneid, Beowulf (with its alien Grendel), the Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Le Morte d’Arthur or any other of the West’s storied wisdom allegories.

Spielberg’s dissembling is so transparent it’s comical. When the heroine, “NBC meteorologist Margaret Fairchild” becomes telepathic through alien intervention, she is met by a would-be worshipper who kneels before her and makes the Sign of the Cross. Fairchild dismisses her prospective acolyte by uttering disapprobation for “religion.” We are sold on a UFO religion while being misdirected as to the nature of the sales pitch.

Omitted is any allusion to Elijah’s ascendance to heaven in a “chariot of fire” (2 Kings 2:11). Perhaps an Old Testament reference strikes too close to Spielberg’s reverence for his personal faith. He is known to maintain a reasonably observant religious household. His connection to his heritage is said to have been strengthened through his second wife, Kate Capshaw, who converted to Judaism before their 1991 marriage, after studying with an Orthodox rabbi.

He said, “When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.” He and Mrs. Spielberg ensured their children had bar and bat mitzvahs. The family observes major Talmudic holidays and lights Shabbat candles on Friday nights. The director had a separate kosher kitchen built in the basement of his Los Angeles home. For good or ill, he is passing on the immemorial creed of his patrimony.

In “Disclosure Day” however, he is hawking a new creed, or at the very least another installment in vapid, deracinated, George Lucas-style hokum, wrapped in a skein of mythic Saran wrap.

In interviews Mr. Spielberg has adopted the posture of a serious inquirer into the nature of the universe and reality itself. “Disclosure Day” sabotages his intellectual and spiritual pursuit with Saturday matinee, Indiana Jones-type chases and cliff-hangers. Worse yet is a cloying scene that would have embarrassed Bambi. A romper room flashback set in the protagonist’s childhood bedroom, it depicts aliens taking the form of compassionate and sentient wild forest animals acting as escorts for the precocious child.

The movie concludes with the unveiling of a live alien who conveys no message; nothing but a single humdrum word that we’ve all heard a hundred times from our parents and elementary school teachers. Apparently, the journey to the final scene is the message. The grandly presented illuminoid might as well have been mute. Rip-off is the telepathic message that reverberated in my cranium.

“Disclosure Day” is a CGI roller-coaster with scant pay-off. Coming from the director of classics such as “War Horse” and “Lincoln” it poses a mystery of its own, every bit as enigmatic as the space seance in Roswell—why the heck did he bother making it?

The End of Night

The “Eärendil” Space Mirror

Courtesy of Spaceweather.com I’ve learned that for years astronomers have watched Starlink satellites multiply until deep-sky photos without streaks became almost impossible. Last week, the FCC authorized Reflect Orbital Inc. to launch a huge space mirror named “Eärendil-1” before the end of the year.

From an orbit about 388 miles high, it will cast a moving, 3-mile-wide patch of light onto the earth as bright as a full moon. In the future the corporation may combine beams from multiple satellites to create even more intensely illuminating spotlights. Reflect Orbital’s objective is to launch 50,000 additional mirrors by 2035, merchandising “sunlight-on-demand” and marketing it to solar “farms,” construction sites and the military.

If their plan is realized, it would be calamitous not only for astronomy but also for the natural world. Humans, nocturnal animals and night-blooming plants tuned to the rhythm of day and night would find their darkness interrupted by moving pools of redirected sunlight. The blowback from this tampering is unknown.

The word Eärendil is derived from an old Advent antiphon, Crist I, said to celebrate the coming of Jesus. It is preserved in the Exeter Book, a 10th-century manuscript where we find lines which captivated the famed philologist J.R.R. Tolkien: “Éala Éarendel, engla beorhtast, ofer middangeard monnum sended...” “Hail, Earendel, brightest of angels, sent over Middle-earth to mankind...” (Tolkien encountered the Exeter Book circa 1913 while studying the Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford University).

Éarendel is traced to the Old Norse word “Aurvandill,” which is said to denote a radiant celestial being personified by the morning star.

Tolkien coined the word Eärendil, terming it “Elvish language.” In his writing it represents a sea-farer set in the heavens to sail the sky. Eärendil appears prominently in The Silmarillion and is also mentioned in The Lord of the Rings. When the character Frodo invokes “Eärendil” and uses the Phial of Galadriel, he is calling upon the light of the Silmaril.

In a 1967 letter, Tolkien recalled being struck by the name’s pulchritude and celestial associations. His 1914 poem “The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star” morphed into the full legend of Eärendil as mariner and herald. The name unites Christian allegory (Earendel as Christ the light-bringer in the Advent context) and ancient Nordic astronomy.

In Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology Eärendil embodies hope and divine light, everything which Reflect Orbital Inc.’s “Eärendil-1” does not. There is nothing particularly divine about tampering with nature to “perfect” it. Long-time readers of this writer’s work will recognize in space mirror Eärendil-1 the megalomaniacal Kabbalistic impulse to “improve” Creation—for “benevolent purposes,” of course. Appropriating Eärendil from the work of Tolkien, who opposed technological over-reach, is a malicious mockery.

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Mr. Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former paid consultant to the news department of the New York Times. Three of his books have been published in translation in Japan and France.

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