The End of the Bronze Age

Last night I took my youngest to see The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX before it leaves today. Seeing it a second time, for me, is where the film really shines.

The first time, I was blown away and in shock at the scale, the story, and the technical prowess it took to pull the film off. The second time, I could appreciate it for the art that it is.

Watching the story unfold as Odysseus comes to terms with the understanding that he and his men are the marauding “people from the sea,” and that they alone have sent the world into chaos because of the blind ambition of Agamemnon, is a prescient statement on the timeline we currently inhabit.

A time when kindness and the act of welcoming strangers have given way to the age of the “other” and distrust of those who don’t look or sound like us. Zeus’s law has been broken by the audacity of man.

There was a moment at the end of the film where Penelope and Odysseus sail west to honor his men, chasing the fading sun, and Penelope turns to Odysseus and asks:

“Why will the stories only be sung?”

Odysseus responds:

“Because song will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.”

A line I didn’t clock the first time stunned me on a second watch.

We live in an era nearly devoid of all adventure—a world made of Nerf. Where machines arrive to think and write for us as we chase something we call efficiency.

The whole experience left me wondering if modern man’s age of Bronze is also collapsing because we, too, lived in a “world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.”

That said, much like the ending of the film, I also feel “a new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”

That is a day I certainly look forward to.