nolan's the odyssey has such a fundamentally culturally christian understanding of religion and divinity that it is genuinely jarring to see characters in a supposedly ancient greek historical context describe divinity and its expression in those terms. characters wonder aloud why gods hide themselves (they didn't), question the existence of what nolan interprets the supernatural to be (they wouldn't) and talk of zeus's law (not real, and still somehow bastardized) in the same way we would talk about the ten commandments. it's so out of place. and it taps into that "defy the gods" thing.
like. we can defy the christian god, in a way, because we can choose to not do what he says we ought to. sure. but we cannot defy greek gods in the same way, because the god is not just an entity that commands you but the very thing you are doing. apollo does not just send plagues, he is plague. you know apollo is real because there is plague. plague is not apollo acting in the world, it is an instance of apollo, in the same way that insight is athena, love is aphrodite, harvest is demeter, storms are zeus. gods are not commanding nature and sending signs and acting upon the world, because signs and nature and human nature are themselves the gods. the gods cannot be absent, because we still get ideas, and harvest, and go to war, and feel desire, and hunt. the gods cannot be defied because you cannot defy "getting ideas" or "harvesting" or "having sex" or "dying." to attempt to is entirely futile. like you cannot defy poseidon because you cannot defy the sea. you cannot defy aphrodite because you cannot defy love and reproduction. nature and human nature are unbeatable, and so the gods are unbeatable, because they are nature and human nature.
and it's such a beautiful way of looking at the world, and he just doesn't get that.
I think this is something that happens often with americans retelling of greek mythology, where there is always this idea of "defying the gods"; I think it's a way for them to criticize Christianity without openly criticizing it ( even though it comes off more as a critique of God as a concept, than of the christian religion per se).
It's also presentism: they don't want to see the actual accurate history, they want to see themeselves and their values and views; so they show you ancient greeks "defying the gods", ancient Rome as a place of excess and extravagance, where "pietas" is completely absent (but they don't know what "pietas" is anyway); the Middle Ages as devoid of color, with stupid and dirty people and an almost secularized society.
It's stupid, but it's also dangerous: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
