1. Last week’s movie night was The Running Man, starring Ahnold. It was more or less your typical action-sci-fi film of the 1980s: over-the-top violence, bitingly funny satire, mounds of creative energy, and a charismatic cast (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonzo, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto, Jesse Ventura, Jim Brown, etc). It’s not brilliant, but solidly entertaining and with a journeyman-competent script.

2. Something that stood out was how rough Arnold’s character is. He’s a cop who was arrested for refusing to fire on a crowd of protestors, and after spending a year and a half doing hard labor (in the world’s most escapable prison), he’s become bitter and indifferent. Only after fighting for his life alongside a few companions does he regain his idealism and desire to help others.

But in the middle of this, Arnold tries to make a break for the border. To affect this, he kidnaps a woman (Alonzo) and takes her hostage, even threatening to break her neck if she defies him. It’s ambiguous how legitimate the threat it (she’s able to escape without much effort), but I like the fact that the film is willing to have the hero acting a little villainously, to establish him as a potentially dangerous man willing to cross lines to survive, even if it leaves the question of how far he’d actually go up in the air. It makes him feel like someone who gets things done and shows how far he’s fallen (it also serves to illustrate his actual character once Alonzo thinks through the implications of what he didn’t do).

The quality of being dangerous is one that I really want to see more heroes adopt.

3. A happy thought occurred to me just recently: it would be almost impossible for Disney to do a Live Action remake of A Goofy Movie.

4. Having re-read The Odyssey, my opinion of Epic: The Musical has gone down considerably, as an adaptation. It’s impressive for what it is, but it’s nevertheless a good example of amateurish mistakes in storytelling.

For instance, the musical tries to give Odysseus a new flaw to overcome, which is that he’s too naively merciful and kind and must become more ruthless in order to survive in this harsh, cruel world (by the way, showy cynicism and “the world is cruel!” are marks of amateurs trying to sound insightful). There are two big problems with this: first, this is an absurd flaw to give the man who came up with the Trojan Horse. That’d be like telling a story of Julius Caesar where he realized (after defeating Pompey) that he was too naive and unambitious.

5. The other big problem is that this manifests exactly once in the entire story: when he doesn’t kill Polyphemus. Which is an interpretation of the event introduced by the musical, existing alongside Odysseus’s original mistake of hubristically taunting the cyclops afterwards. But this is enough to get Athena to turn her back on him and for Odysseus to conclude that this is the problem preventing him from getting home.

To make matters worse, the show even adds another element to undermine its own thesis by having Odysseus be the one to kill the infant Astyanax (Hector’s son) in the opening number. You can’t open a story with your hero using a piece of ruthless and wily trickery to break a siege before deciding he has to kill an infant out of prudence and then try to claim his problem is he’s too merciful and unwilling to do what needs to be done to win.

(The scenes an example of another problem: the gods – minus Athena – are too sadistic. It’s one thing for Zeus to punish men for something they had little control over, it’s another for him to force Odysseus into child murder or gleefully make him choose between his own life and his crew’s. Another example of amateurish writing: the authors see that the Greek gods are capricious and unmerciful and think that translates to ‘mustache-twirlingly evil’).

6. The really frustrating thing here is that all this was unnecessary: Odysseus already has a major character flaw – his hubris and desire for glory – which makes perfect sense for who he is and which results in a logical cause and effect for delaying his return. There was no need to invent a half-realized secondary flaw for him, particularly not one that the show undermines by another invention. This is a completely unforced error.

7. The efforts to make the monsters more ‘sympathetic’ was also part of a trend that I really hope to see less of. It doesn’t add nuance; it undermines the thematic power. The cyclops is not there to be understood or morally equivocated; they exist as an image of men without a society. They’re giant shepherds who live in caves and care nothing for one another, know nothing of trade or arts or the gods, and follow no law but that of strength. Because of this, they have only one eye reflecting their limited vision of life. Since the whole story is about the journey home and restoring peace and order after the war, this is perfectly in line with the themes.

Trying to make the cyclops sympathetic and “oh, he’s just like Odysseus” loses all of this and leads it to a dead-end repetition of “isn’t the world cruel?”

The same thing with Circe, who here is interpreted as acting to protect her nymphs after an unspecified earlier incident where (I guess) wicked men abused them. Not only is this yet-another example of the “women never do anything wrong unless driven to it by a man” trope (that also needs to die), but it makes no sense in context. Circe is a goddess: how did visiting men manage to abuse her or her servants?

This is all an example of faux depth: writers who blindly add elements that their English professors told them were necessary for nuance (moral ambiguity, sympathetic villains, evil authority figures, etc.) without understanding the actual dynamics of the story they’re working with.

All that being said, I have a nasty feeling that by this time next year I’ll be writing about how Epic is a better adaptation than Nolan’s Odyssey.