Elon Musk is taking his criticism of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey to new heights, claiming his AI platform ‘Grok Imagine’ will create a full-length adaptation of Homer’s epic by the end of 2026.
  • herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19 hours

    The Odyssey is a work of fiction. It’s a heroic epic, not a history. How do you make a historically accurate version of fictional oral poetry?

    • Baggie@lemmy.zipEnglish
      9 hours

      Well you see he’s stupid and can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
      13 hours

      Hire a historian to give a no-nonsense talk about the history of ideas Homer used. Believers in Greek gods and countries mentioned were definitely real. We don’t know nearly as much about them as Homer did but we know Odysseus wouldn’t encounter supernatural beings and can conjecture what these themes were inspired by.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        12 hours

        We don’t know nearly as much about them as Homer did

        True, the man truly had vision.

        There’s nobody better than a blind man to write historically about the hue of a person’s skin.

        • buddascrayon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12 hours

          It is also speculated by historians that Homer wasn’t just one person but in fact entire industry of people whose job it was to tell stories.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
      20 hours

      I get what you’re saying, but maybe that’s a bad example. I actually do want them to release a historically accurate version of Star Wars… ie. the version that was released in 1977 in which Han Solo shot first and there wasn’t a bunch of CGI shit all over the place.

      • buddascrayon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12 hours

        Star wars silver screen edition. Look it up, it’s out there. It’s like a 25 GB download but you can find it.

        Bunch of fans got a hold of original film print of the movie and digitized it. No remastering, just the movie as it was presented in 1977.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13 hours

        Han Solo shot first only.

        Han straight up ended greedo. Bug-eyed bastard never even got a shot off.

      • bonesawmcl@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20 hours

        Well that exists! Sure not quite officially, but look up project 4K77, you can download that version of Star wars right now (and it’s awesome. I’ve watched all three of them in their most original version)

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
          19 hours

          Yeah I got the despecialized edition and it’s fine. It’s weird that you have to pirate one the most popular movies to be shown in the theater to get what was shown in the theater.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 day

    How is this a “threat”? What would be the dire consequences if he did?

    “Offers” is the right word here.

  • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1 day

    Why are we okay with every robin hood movie being an interpretation, but all the sudden the oddesy needs to be historically perfect?

    • chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      It’s a dog whistle for casting only white people and no queer actors. If something has a racist angle, assume that’s the one Musk means

        • chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 days

          (Looks at the history of Musk in the public eye)

          I’m gonna say it’s the idiot one. All the moron had to do was keep his mouth shut and keep paying to buy the founder title of other market disruptors and he’d’ve been the next Henry Ford (literal nazi that Americans remember fondly cause he was “pro-labor” (threw labor a bone to disrupt union efforts))

          Instead, we now all know he’s an evil idiot with an ego problem.

  • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
    2 days

    The Odyssey is fictional story.
    Does he think magic and giants and gods are historically accurate?

    What about a historically accurate version of Harry Potter Dresden?

    • Murse@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2 days

      JK Rowling is a bigoted cunt, and her content doesn’t deserve even a sliver of acknowledgement.

    • binux@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2 days

      I do think it’s still fair to consider the very likely possibility that there’s a fair amount of truth contained within the story though (obviously not all the supernatural stuff, but still). That’s definitely the case with the Iliad; Troy was literally discovered in modern-day Türkiye in the 1800s.

      All the crazy stuff in it is probably at least in part a result of its origin as an oral tradition instead of written text. The story being passed down across generations of memorizers without any hard reference to go off of tends to make for a really long game of telephone.

      None of this is to humour Musk by the way. I just think this topic is interesting in general.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2 days

        The theories are that its a mythic retelling of a legend that’s an embellished version of something that basically ‘kind of’ happened, around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, between the 13th and 12th centuries BCE.

        The original date of it being first written down is somewhere in the 8th century BCE, so, yeah roughly 500 years of oral tradition untill then.

        https://www.britannica.com/topic/Is-the-Odyssey-a-True-Story

        Schliemann’s findings and the continuing work of later archeologists seriously fueled theories of the historicity of the Trojan War, dated by later Greek authors to the 12th or 13th century bce. While the mere existence of Troy is not proof that the war was real, the discovery of arrowheads, signs of fire, and unburied bodies found in a layer corresponding to the 13th century bce indicates the possibility of battles having occurred.

        Supporting evidence includes Hittite records mentioning warfare with Wilusa, their name for Troy. Some historians believe that a kingdom the Hittites called Ahhiyawa was really Achaea, or ancient Greece. Records suggest that sometime in the 13th century, Ahhiyawan forces were involved in a war against Wilusa, whose ruler, Aleksandu (very similar to Alexandros, a name for the Trojan prince Paris), requested military aid from the Hittites. Experts believe that a real conflict or a series of conflicts of some scale—either a struggle for political or commercial supremacy—inspired embellished accounts of the Trojan War.

        So… taken in whole… the Odyssey is maybe roughly as actually historically accurate as… the Old Testament.

        If your lense is ‘is this legitimate history?’…

        There are kernels of events that basically actually happened, and some important people who did something vaguely similar to what’s described in the stories… around which is erected a grand mythic narrative featuring a great amount of totally fantastic and impossible nonsense, and many wholly fabricated characters and ‘plot points’.

        • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caEnglish
          1 day

          Schliemann dug straight through the actual Troy that he was looking for, destroying a huge chunk of it to get to an even earlier settlement in the strata beneath that he decided to call Troy. His “method” was essentially do dig a trench all the way to the bottom, assuming that the oldest level would be Troy. (Yes…he was that stupid).

          It was only afterwards that other, actual archaeologists placed the proper stratum that the homeric Troy would have existed in. And by then, much of it was already obliterated.

          I majored in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology with a focus on the Bronze age (Hittites, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Babylonians, etc…), and lesson one may as as well have been titled “Why Heinrich Schliemenn was an asshole.”

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1 day

            This is extremely true and worth saying as you have.

            Yeah, I’m not an subject matter specialist? expert? as you are, but yeah… errybody hates Schliemenn, because his idiotic site practices very likely destroyed a whole lot of … pretty important history.

            • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caEnglish
              1 day

              I’m far from a specialist. Not only is my knowledge about 25 years or so out of date, I ended up leaving with half a year left on my degree because not only did a divorce make me unable to afford to continue, but some guys from the middle east crashed into the World Trade Center and ignited a war that shut down any actual archaeological work in the most of that part of the world for a decade or so.

              So rather than specialist, I’m a guy that has 3.5 years of a 4 year Bachelor’s degree, and then went off to take a bunch of computer certificates instead. lol.

              Still regret never going back to finish it once the middle east settled down again.

        • binux@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2 days

          This is an incredibly disingenuous reply so I’m not even going to do it the dignity of a fully-fleshed response.

          All I need to say is that if you seriously read my comment as saying that the Odyssey is completely reliable history with little to no flaws or embellishments in its writing, then it sounds like you should take a course on media literacy.

      • homes@piefed.worldEnglish
        2 days

        New York City is a real place that exists, but that doesn’t make the Avengers films any less fictional.

        • binux@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1 day

          I’m going off of what real historians have hypothesized, not just baseless rhetoric. Nor am I claiming that the legends themselves are wholly factual (though as I’ve said it’s definitely possible to be partly the case). Feel free to read the Wikipedia article on it and draw your own conclusions.

          Personally, I think it would be absurd if it were the case that in Late Bronze Age Greece — in or around the Bronze Age Collapse — they chose Troy (evidently not even a Greek setting) specifically to be the setting of an oral war story without there being a material reason for it, however minor. But that’s just me obviously.

          Addendum (This is somewhat unrelated but still important to bring up): I think it’s honestly quite offensive to compare an entire cultural heritage’s creation to relatively simple blockbuster films made not even a couple decades ago. You’re comparing a cultural creation brought about in the midst of an entire mythos, through countless generations, to a few simple narratives; the origins of which can be found not even a century ago. Not only is it a false equivalence, it’s downright ignorant if not explicitly ill-intended. One was made through the contributions of several minds over hundreds of years through the sole intent of participating in a rich communion of ideas; the others were made, fundamentally, with the intention of turning a profit. It’s belittling and ethnocentric to pretend that they’re equivalent in any form.

          • First_Thunder@lemmy.zipEnglish
            2 days

            I mean, “the Greeks have always been at war with the Persians” was always a good rallying cry. And arguing that the Persians are descendants of Troy would probably work as propaganda

            • Uruanna@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 days

              We do know for a fact that the Achaeans and the Hittites had several conflicts over all of Western Anatolia and specifically control of Wilusa (Ilios / Troy) between the 15~14 and 12th c. BCE, and that the city got destroyed in battle during the collapse around 1180 BCE. We have a bunch of complaints from the Hittites about it.

    • Carighan Maconar@piefed.worldEnglish
      2 days

      Does he think magic and giants and gods are historically accurate?

      Would you put it past him? The guy is so high most of the day he probably thinks the sparkle fairy brings him a coffee every morning.

  • betanumerus@lemmy.caEnglish
    2 days

    You don’t need to make en entire fantasy film to show us that historically accurate cyclops, Elon!

  • WatDabney@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2 days

    With historically accurate cyclops, scylla, charybdis, sirens and ghost of Agamemnon…