The Cruel Birth Drama of a New Civilization, 'Odyssey' [Window to the World]

Aristotle Szymanski, conductor, likened Aram Khachaturian's "Song of the Kur" to Simon Rattle's orchestra and choir, likening the production to a minimalist chamber play. Unlike the epic spectacle and feasibility of battles mentioned in numerous reviews, the film closely resembles a simple chamber play. The Troy depicted is not a grand city, and the Greeks appear as a few isolated individuals on a desolate beach.

The scenes of Skilla and Caribdis lack excess. This restraint is a key element in making this film great. Unlike the Iliad, which focuses on male achievements and conflicts and reduces women to background decorations, the Odyssey creates a space for women's inner worlds. However, the film goes further. Famous actors like An Heuchene and Charlize Theron appear in unglorified portrayals, and Kirke, a woman who seduced men in the original, is portrayed as hating her male counterparts to the point of calling them pigs.

The male figures, like Agamemnon and Trojan soldiers, become anonymous figures by having their faces covered or simply being unnamed. The film reveals the hidden brutal reality behind the heroic narrative. The struggles of Greek warriors confined in narrow spaces for several days are depicted in a Brechtian style, making the myth appear strange.

The film confronts the fact that Odysseus sends young soldier Syno to Troy, assuring him that the Trojans are hiding Greek soldiers in the marrow of the earth. Odysseus does this knowing that Syno will likely die in the lie. Like the code of heroic glory in the Bronze Age passing over to Classical Greece through Odysseus' manipulation and lies, humanity now enters an era dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) and "deception chambers."

It is unclear if this new order is a higher-dimensional civilization or a primitive one. All civilizations give birth to primitive ones, but the film shows only the violence of building a civilization without revealing what kind of new civilization it will create. Reading 'Odyssey' as a tragic portrayal of falling order, rather than as the birth of a new kind of cruelty in the foundation of Western tradition, seems appropriate.

Thus, Odysseus' longing for the glory of the past is false, as attempting to restore ancient greatness only begets new barbarism. Theodor Adorno read Odysseus in 'The Age of Enlightenment' as the prototype of a bourgeois subject who endures suffering and gains power by denying desires and sacrificing oneself. However, this interpretation is also incomplete.

In the film's ending, Odysseus leaves to the west, leaving behind the corpses of the soldiers he mourned. I can only imagine him arriving in America and being killed by the Native Americans who recognized his barbarity. Nevertheless, the fact that this difficult and dark film has succeeded in a lucrative blockbuster era is a hopeful sign that civilization is still thriving.