I had nine hundred words written before the lights went down. Eleven people had warned me this movie was woke. They were wrong. I sat through all three hours to find out, which is more than any of them did.
The poster is a broken marble head with three words under it. Defy the Gods. I bought a ticket to the Tuesday matinee out on Route 7, the theater that brings wine to the seat, intending to come back here and take Christopher Nolan apart. Three hours later I closed the notebook without using it.
Because he made our movie. He made the one I have been asking for in this column since 2019, and I would like the record to show that I said so first among people who were not paid to say it.
What Defy the Gods Turns Out to Cover
Agamemnon sails home in triumph and is dead before the day is out, killed in his own house by his own wife, over what he did to their daughter before the war. The Trojan Horse gets no glory. Nolan films it as a squalid piece of business, a man taking the oldest rule there is about how a household treats a guest and using it as a door. The raiders everyone on screen fears turn out to be Greek veterans, robbing their way home from the war they won.
Then Odysseus reaches Ithaca and does not sit down on the throne. He confesses. He leaves.
Every one of those is a bill arriving. A man does the thing, the thing comes back for him with interest, and winning does not buy him out. Hollywood forgot how to make that picture around the time it stopped believing anybody owed anybody anything.
David French Watched It and Then Stopped Reading His Own Column
I do not usually finish David French. He has been wrong about this president for ten years with a consistency I find almost restful. But he went to the same movie and called it one of the most small-c conservative films he has ever seen. On that we shake hands.
Where he loses me is the marketing. French argues that Defy the Gods reads like an invitation and that the film spends three hours refusing it. Fine. It is still what they printed. Universal put three words in front of every moviegoer in America and I am not going to pretend they meant the opposite.
There is also a paragraph in the middle of his column about the president’s personal finances that has nothing to do with a Bronze Age epic, and readers should go around it. Nobody comes out of a picture about guest law thinking about hotel licensing. I have decided an editor put it there. Our business desk has documented what these studios do when they think the paperwork is finished.
Somebody Is Going to Pay for What They Wrecked
That is the sentence French ends on, and I copied it onto the inside cover of my notebook in the parking lot. He writes it as a warning to the whole country, the way that crowd always does when it wants credit for fairness. I read it as a delivery date.
The suitors are the best thing in the film. Twenty years those men sit in a house that is not theirs, eating food they did not pay for, and they have talked themselves so far into the arrangement that they are still laughing when the door swings open. Half my theater laughed along with them. Not me. I sat there with my wine and thought about how good it is going to feel when the owner finally walks in, and I have never been more sure which side of that door I am standing on.
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