‘Kaos’ Turns Out To Be An Unusually Insightful ‘Rage Against the Gods’ Comedy
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
(REVIEW) “Kaos” is a thoroughly entertaining dark comedy about how bad a world of polytheism would be and the gods truly worth being angry at. But it can’t quite live up to its own concept.
Most religious mythologies reflect how various peoples experience the world. Mesopotamia had really bad weather and tribal warfare, so its people tended to portray the gods as deeply chaotic and unreliable. Meanwhile, their Egyptian neighbors had stable weather and an equally stable government. As a result, their gods were largely stable and benevolent as well.
Our modern world is one of growing cynicism toward our founding institutions, whether that’s our religion, government or our economic system based on capitalism. Therefore, many of our movies reflect that. Marvel’s done that with its fictional gods, and the recent “The Crow” remake projected uncaring bureaucracies onto the afterlife as well.
READ: Why Hollywood Is Making So Many Exorcism Movies
That brings us to Netflix’s new series: “Kaos.”
A darkly comedic, contemporary reimagining of Greek mythology, “Kaos” follows several of the Greek gods, including Zeus (played by Jeff Goldblum), Hera (Janet McTeer), Dionysis (Nabhaan Rizwan), Poseidon (Cliff Curtis), Hades (David Thewlis) and Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), along with the humans who get caught in a plot by the Fates and Prometheus to overthrow Zeus, based on a prophecy he received as a child.
What’s great about “Kaos” is how it makes its Greek gods story the dark comedy that it was meant to be. I don’t know anyone in my life who’s read the tales of the gods and hasn’t seen them as essentially cosmic-level petty, rich deities who cause devastation to one another and to mere mortals over trivial grievances. This Netflix show, rather than try to rewrite them to be more palatably noble like in Disney’s “Hercules,” leans into the laughably terrible nature of how the gods actually behave.
The gods in this series, just like in the ancient myths, are motivated by trite ambitions and jealousies that have devastating consequences on the lives of ordinary people. Zeus kills thousands because a wrinkle in his forehead makes him think the prophecy of his end is coming true, while Poseidon terrorizes King Minos into breaking his promise to his daughter in order to get Zeus off his back.
Prometheus manipulates gods and unwitting mortals to bring about the prophecy and bring down Zeus. Through it all, ordinary humans like Orpheus (Killian Scott) and Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau) — caught in their own romantic drama — are played like puppets for these deities. Dionysus helps Orphesus get to the underworld to rescue her on a whim in order to show his father he can show initiative.
The drama comes from the existential rage of humans who no longer want to be caught in that trap. When Eurydice and Canaeus (Misia Butler) discover the horrible things the gods are doing, they vow to do their part to stop them. But, as noble as that feels, they’re all still just pawns in a larger plan of the gods. This brings a nihilistic irony even to the moments of heroism in the story.
This mix of irony and pagan deities makes it a much better vessel for “rage against the machine” or “eat the rich” stories than most modern attempts. Marvel movies or reboots like “The Crow” attempt to still make their stories unironically heroic, which makes little sense if you’re dealing with a world where petty deities run everything.
Likewise, using pagan deities makes far more sense than attempting to shoehorn this deconstructive nihilism into Christianity. Because Christianity is the most recently relevant of our faith institutions, most content that tries to deconstruct our society this way projects that civilizational hatred onto Christianity, such as “Good Omens,” “Lucifer” or “Hazbin Hotel.” Unfortunately, this ends up having to twist Christian theology around to be unrecognizable. Heaven isn’t a petty or corrupt civilizational order unless you completely rewrite the book. But Greek mythology can be portrayed in a cynical portrait of the powerful just by taking it seriously.
This subtle contrast — intentional or not — between Christianity and ancient Greek paganism is one of the most fascinating subtexts throughout the show. The series takes seriously what a society in which the Greek gods were real — or at least a society that still believed in them — would really be like. A world where the all powerful beings who ruled you and demanded worship were also omnipotent man-children would make all moral values largely useless.
King Minos (Stanley Townsend) wishes to show his love to his daughter Ariadne (Leia Farzad) by setting the oppressed Trojan prisoners free. But Poseidon tells him not to and threatens to kill him if he does. So King Minos has to go back on his word. Truth is, Poseidon doesn’t even care. He is doing it to please Hera (who wants to appease Zeus, who in turn is worried about a prophecy because he got a wrinkle on his forehead.
This is very close to the argument Plato made against the divine command theory.
Divine command theory says that we get our moral values from God. In Plato's dialogue “Euthyphro,” he argues that we can’t get our moral guidance from the gods because they contradict each other. This has been falsely used to try to discredit divine command theory for monotheistic religions, but it holds up really well against polytheistic ones. While Plato tells us why this makes no sense, “Kaos” shows us. Philosophers like Plato made the case that this reality meant you had to move beyond the gods to a larger rationale order in order to determine your values.
“Kaos” doesn’t get this philosophical, but it does show the humans who feel betrayed by the gods rejecting them and working to find another basis for meaning in life. But what unifies the characters is a hatred for the gods. “F--- the gods” is their “Eat the rich” rallying cry. And it sums up the emotional heart of the story. They may not know what to live for (we’ll get to that later), but they know the gods are not it.
It wasn’t until Christianity came into the world that compassion like we understand it was introduced. As Tom Holland discusses in his book “Dominion,” Christianity came into a pagan world where women were oppressed and children were killed if they were considered weak. Christianity elevated women and made infanticide unthinkable.
We see glimpses of this in “Kaos.” The world it presents is one where gladiatorial combat is normalized (as it was before Christians abolished it) and where people willingly sacrifice themselves and others because the gods ordered them to do so. It’s one where few people use the virtue of compassion as an ideal to describe how people should behave, or an argument against cruelty — even if they hint at it, they are operating against the norm.
Humans in the show will appeal to compassion or love as an emotion or desire but not as a higher principle. Zeus himself calls love weakness. It’s Hades’ wife — on the outs from the gods — who tells Dionysus that it’s not.
The series keeps the balance of satire and sincerity well, with multiple cutaways and fourth wall-breaking narration by Prometheus. The performances are a highlight, with the actors playing the gods looking like they’re having the time of their life with their over-the-top campy renditions. Goldbloom particularly has never had a role that fit him so well. And even he gets a lot more opportunities here to show layers beyond childish self-absorbed arrogance, from paranoia to demented rage. Meanwhile, the humans are played with complete grounded sincerity, once again highlighting the show’s themes of earnestness nestled in absurdity.
The show, however, isn’t perfect. It works better as a continuation of the story of the gods than it does a retelling, because the retelling is so loose and unfaithful to those original stories (Eurydice and Orpheus being a very obvious example). Yet, the show pushes you to treat it more as a retelling than a continuation because it uses all the names from those myths.
But the bigger problem is that the show suffers from a weak payoff to its ideas and characters. The final episode is mostly a setup for the next season. Everything Zeus did to dramatically change the status quo is immediately undone to set up a cliffhanger that we don’t understand the implications of. Most of the characters walk off into the sunset determined to do something (to defy Zeus), but don’t actually do any of those things. Orpheus and Eurydice’s inevitable breakup was treated almost like a shrug after their reunion was literally to hell and back. The main character who does have a good conclusion to her arc — while still setting up her future — is Ariadne.
The thematic payoff to show questions, which it articulates in its final episode, is also a letdown. After Caeneus and Eurydice discover the evil the gods are doing, Eurydice asks what she should tell the people of earth. Canaeus says she should tell people not to live for the gods but for themselves.
This Disney channel level cliche moment is treated like some sort of moving revelation, but it rings deeply false in the modern world. I don’t think anyone can honestly survey the modern landscape and think, “You know what this world really needs? More selfishness.” Yet, it’s one of the few moments of the show where a human’s meaningful words are not undermined with irony, even though this is incredibly naive. As Tara Burton’s “Human Rites” has shown, the rejection of Christianity has not made people less religious; it’s just brought about the return of paganism.
You can argue that this is also faithful to the values of the ancient world that the show is creating. After all, Epicureanism — the philosophy “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” — came out of the ancient world as one of many alternatives to pure fidelity to the gods, along with Stoicism and Platonism. But unlike its deconstruction of the Greek myths, there’s very little critical engagement with that view here or acknowledgement of alternatives. It reads more like a mission statement by the author. If it is, it’s simply a weak one. Hopefully, this is not indicative of the show’s direction going forward, which would make it far less interesting.
What the show highlights through all of this — whether or not it means to — is that the cynicism modern people feel toward life is not the legacy of Christianity but rather paganism. As journalist Louise Perry wrote for “First Things” (and as I referenced in my recent review of “The Front Room”), paganism is a religion of the imminent. It worships the things that we can see and touch in our everyday experience. Those who have power abuse it and demand worship. In turn, they are worshipped because — what else can you worship besides the powerful?
The trouble is, as Perry explains, “paganism never really went away.” Christianity tamed the forest. It introduced the ideas of compassion and respect for women and the weak. But paganism was always a forest that could come back, and repeatedly did, even sometimes in the trappings of Christianity and the church. But it’s important to recognize where the source of the problem is, so we don’t jettison the wrong things and simply make the problem worse.
Obviously, this is harder than it seems. Who chooses which is divine oppression and which is “clearing” an oppressive forest? One main plot point of “Kaos” is the story of Canaeus. It is adapted to be a sentimental transgender metaphor, where Canaeus comes from an unaccepting society. Christianity traditionally treats the transgender ideology as harmful. So for the writers of this show, Christianity would be the oppression it’s rebelling against rather than paganism. This is why movies like “The Front Room” look to paganism as an alternative to Christianity — even though it requires historical ignorance of how bad paganism historically was.
The show may not have enough depth to do total justice to its ideas or themes, but it has just enough meat and entertainment value to be a worthy binge. Hopefully it starts a trend toward blaming the right gods for the problems we face.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.