Jul 19, 2026 · 46 min · 19 segments
Bob and Brad drop a bonus episode to react to **Christopher Nolan's **The Odyssey**** — Bob's seen it twice and lays out a full theory of late-period Nolan as a career-long meditation on deception…
I thought that this was a big, messy, flawed movie that... was still in the vein of something like Oppenheimer.
It's certainly in conversation with Oppenheimer, but I thought this was definitely a step down from that.
Now, I went and saw it yesterday, unbeknownst to me that you were gonna go see it as well, and I have many more thoughts.
I'm much higher on this movie after a second viewing, but I guess my first question to you, Brad, is what actually made you excited about going to see this movie? When you didn't know anything other than I've read The Odyssey and I know Christopher Nolan, Is that enough of a draw to get you out of the house? Or, like, what is the pull when it comes to The Odyssey? I do
Like, for me, it felt like Nolan is, like, hitting his stride as an older director that isn't quite as... needing to pursue like, I don't know, tricksy type of things in his films.
I read the Iliad is like a ninth grader I read the Odyssey as like a 10th or 11th grader I was so excited for this that I started rereading the Odyssey I didn't quite finish it I got maybe like 40 to 50% of the way through and I will say it's fascinating to me that I read let's just call it half of the book every single thing in the movie is from the first half of the book Other than his, obviously, other than his return to Ithaca, every single thing that we saw comes probably in the first like 30% of the book.
Yeah.
Which blows my mind that like this ancient song from 3,000 years ago is so epic that a three-hour Nolan film could only capture like 30 to 40% of the original poem.
What's surprising to me is how much of the story I've picked up throughout the years.
I thought that this was a big, messy, flawed movie that... was still in the vein of something like Oppenheimer.
It's certainly in conversation with Oppenheimer, but I thought this was definitely a step down from that.
Now, I went and saw it yesterday, unbeknownst to me that you were gonna go see it as well, and I have many more thoughts.
I'm much higher on this movie after a second viewing, but I guess my first question to you, Brad, is what actually made you excited about going to see this movie? When you didn't know anything other than I've read The Odyssey and I know Christopher Nolan, Is that enough of a draw to get you out of the house? Or, like, what is the pull when it comes to The Odyssey? I do
Like, for me, it felt like Nolan is, like, hitting his stride as an older director that isn't quite as... needing to pursue like, I don't know, tricksy type of things in his films.
I read the Iliad is like a ninth grader I read the Odyssey as like a 10th or 11th grader I was so excited for this that I started rereading the Odyssey I didn't quite finish it I got maybe like 40 to 50% of the way through and I will say it's fascinating to me that I read let's just call it half of the book every single thing in the movie is from the first half of the book Other than his, obviously, other than his return to Ithaca, every single thing that we saw comes probably in the first like 30% of the book.
Yeah.
Which blows my mind that like this ancient song from 3,000 years ago is so epic that a three-hour Nolan film could only capture like 30 to 40% of the original poem.
What's surprising to me is how much of the story I've picked up throughout the years.
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