Bourne-Hur.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oppenheimer afforded Academy Award Winner Sir Christopher Nolan a “king of the world” moment that his hardcore fans had been anticipating for years. Few other directors, if any, could’ve reaped a nine-digit box office take and filled a movie-trophy case with a big-budget historical saga about a haunted man who’s hailed as a hero by his peers for having a singular idea that took a team to execute and ended a lengthy war at the cost of countless innocent lives in the process, only to end the film with a monologue about his hubris, sins, and regrets, all as an admonishment to a humankind too quick to celebrate his body count and one day repeat his mistakes.
Handed a virtual blank check to make all his creative impulses come true henceforth in perpetuity, yet again Nolan defied today’s moneymaking traditions in favor of a pet project: a lavish adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Sixty years ago it might’ve been reimagined as a bloated three-hour musical with far less blood and lots of female backup dancers, but 20th-century filmmakers generally limited themselves mostly to shorter, less sprawling Greco-Roman fantasies augmented by Ray Harryhausen wizardry, almost as if the Directors Guild unanimously decided to leave it alone until that magical day when a Chosen One might rise up and make it happen.
The usual Nolan superfan excitement was muddled by detractors decrying its Hamilton-style casting process that tampered with the strict historical record, not to mention the fact that this is possibly the first Greek epic ever performed entirely in plain American accents — nary an imperious British lilt from the entire cast, not even among its UK-born costars. So far they’ve been pretty mum about the unrealistic portrayals of the Cyclops, the ten-foot-tall super-soldiers, and the conversations with ghosts. I look forward to their three-hour YouTube rants about the Indian-descended Sir Ben Kingsley and the half-Iraqi Andy Serkis each playing real-life, milky-white Englishmen in Young Washington.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 