For the last few weeks, Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” movie has been a more divisive topic for conservatives than the war with Iran. Is it woke or secretly based? Is it unfaithful to the original (and if so, is that good or bad)? Is anyone who sees it “an enemy of Western Civilization”?
As always, trillionaire entrepreneur and anti-woke crusader Elon Musk is an eager participant in these debates. This time, though, Musk isn’t just complaining. He’s proposed two ways to make a more conservative-friendly “Odyssey” and offered to put real effort behind making them happen.
The first is a nonstarter. “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,” Elon posted to X last week.
I’m sure that’ll be technically possible, but it’s certainly not desirable. Replacing a creative process that involves real actors in real places where real light strikes real lenses with a guy at a keyboard entering prompts would not be a victory for conservative art. It would be the abolition of art itself. If anyone can, with a few keystrokes, make the exact movie he wants to see, then cinema ceases to play its role as a cultural artifact. It no longer emerges from and shapes the zeitgeist.
The proliferation of AI-generated “Odyssey” adaptations Elon proposes might be aesthetically impressive, but these movies would not bring people together the way Nolan’s has — not even to hate them. They would be pieces of worthless slop that took no effort to create and leave audiences more isolated and demoralized than ever. AI can supplement filmmakers’ efforts, as Ben Affleck’s half-billion-dollar start-up InterPositive promises to do. It cannot replace them.
Elon’s other idea, which he got from pseudonymous Substack blogger John Carter, is more interesting: “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.”
Gibson is a political conservative and an able director who has proven his ability to handle epic material (“Braveheart”), make blockbusters that appeal to the religious right (“The Passion of the Christ”), and successfully immerse audiences in a wholly alien culture (“Apocalypto”). But if Elon wants to fund a mega-budget project for him, the Odyssey is the wrong choice.
Making Gibson’s “Odyssey” as a direct response to Nolan’s would seem reactive, derivative, and petty. Audiences would perceive a rushed-out remake funded by Elon’s money and motivated by his resentments as a political stunt and would understandably avoid it. Too many conservative artists seem content to make “conservative art” that appeals solely to committed conservatives. Instead of winning back the culture, they preach to the choir. Gibson is living proof that it doesn’t have to be this way, and saddling him with a project doomed to languish in the conservative ghetto would be a tremendous waste of his talents.
Fortunately, there’s a far better candidate for an Elon-funded, Mel-directed, swords-and-sandals epic poem adaptation: Virgil’s “Aeneid.” This masterpiece, written soon after Rome transitioned from republic to empire, follows a band of Trojans who escape the fall of their city, wander the Mediterranean for years, fight to win a new homeland in Italy, and fulfill their destiny by becoming the forefathers of Rome.
Virgil borrows settings, plot elements, and even his protagonist — the Trojan prince Aeneas — from the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” but his poem has a different “vibe” than either of Homer’s epics.
In Homer, time is a flat circle. Odysseus failing to make it home would be bad news for Telemachus and Penelope, but it would have no world-historic consequences. Neither would Troy’s defenders driving the Argives into the sea. No matter what happens, things will go on as they always have. Men strive to win glory in battle, the gods engage in their petty squabbles, and Fate hands down its mysterious, arbitrary decrees.
Everything in the “Aeneid” bears the weight of history, and history itself has an end toward which it is progressing. For Virgil, this telos is Roman dominion. Rome’s divine calling is to “rule with all [its] power / the peoples of the earth.” Aeneas’ journeys and wars are sowing the seeds of universal empire, and Virgil constantly reminds us of the growth they’ll one day produce.
Aeneas himself struggles under the burden of this lofty destiny. In some ways, his sense of duty makes him more human. C.S. Lewis describes him as a “grown-up” compared to whom Achilles seems like a “passionate boy.” In other ways, it has the opposite effect. Edith Hamilton argues that, by the end of the poem, Aeneas “is not a man,” but “something strange and portentous.”
In the hands of most Hollywood directors, an “Aeneid” adaptation would probably lean toward the latter. Aeneas would have much in common with Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” trilogy: an initially relatable hero swept up in prophecy until he becomes indifferent to the suffering he inflicts while trying to fulfill it.
But with Mel Gibson behind the camera, we could expect a very different “Aeneid.” For 2,000 years, Westerners have viewed the “Aeneid” as, in some sense, their own origin story. If Aeneas hadn’t succeeded, then our civilization — so profoundly shaped by Rome — wouldn’t exist.
The stakes are even higher for Christians. If God willed for his son to be born under Caesar Augustus, for the gospel to spread initially within the Roman Empire, and (in Catholic teaching) for the Church to be governed from the Eternal City, then Rome’s founding and rise must have been providentially ordained.
Gibson is the perfect director to emphasize this angle, not only because he’s a conservative and a Catholic, but also because he’s done it before. For most of its runtime, “Apocalypto” is a thrilling chase film set in a society so alien that, as far as the typical viewer is concerned, it might as well take place on another planet. That all changes in the film’s final minutes, in which the chase is interrupted by the arrival of Spanish ships with cross-emblazoned sails. Their arrival signals the end of human sacrifice and the eventual conversion of the Americas.
This ending, in which world-historic forces impinge upon human drama in a way that foreshadows the providential triumph of the viewer’s own civilization, is positively Virgilian.
Gibson could do something similar with the “Aeneid.” Begin with the unfamiliar: foreign language dialogue, Bronze Age brutality, strange gods, and mysterious portents. Maybe even show the Carthaginians engaging in human sacrifice — a practice not mentioned in the poem but well attested historically. Then, amid all that unfamiliarity, drop hints that Aeneas’ predicament is our predicament, that his virtues are those to which we should aspire, that the hearth-fire he carried out of Troy still burns for us — until finally, an “Apocalypto”-style climax reveals him as a founding father of Western Civilization and Christendom. All that he suffered, he suffered on our behalf.
An “Aeneid” like this would be unmistakably conservative without sacrificing mainstream appeal. It would be original rather than derivative. And for Elon Musk, it would be $100 million well spent.
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Grayson Quay is the author of “The Transhumanist Temptation” and a former editor at the Daily Caller.
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