Odysseus: "Its time for us to embark on our Odyssey."

Crew: "Our what now?"

Odysseus: "A long an arduous trip named after its only survivor."

Crew: "Oh, ok... wait a minute..."

The Achilles thing made me chuckle. And then it made me weep a bit because general education seems to be dead. I learnt about the Trojan war and attached mythology at school, doesn't that happen anymore or is it an attention issue?

I genuinely believe that some people are just completely unaware of anything made before their birth.

Like they actively choose not to be aware, to the point of calling out a re-telling of a literally ancient tale for tropes it literally invented.

Doctor: "You have an oedypian complex."

Oedypus: "I have a what?"

Doctor: "You heard me, motherfucker."

When I was a kid, we went to see a play with my class.

Someone complained that is was a cheap copy of Lord of the Rings.

It was The Hobbit.

betting we're gonna get this kinda feedback on the Neuromancer tv adaption

I'm just excited for all the "historically accurate" cyclops, witches, demi gods, and magic objects that the conservatives are going to have in their AI remakes!

/s (just in case)

And the Trojan horse was literally shaped like a horse, a bit too on the nose, no?

I do this intentionally sometimes, for shits and giggles, but Poe's law guarantees that someone will inevitably miss the joke.

Wait till they hear about the genius trick with the Trojan horse

"Why would they take it in! It's literally named after their city being sneak attacked!"

When you show your buddy The Matrix for the first time and they complain that it overuses bullet time effects.

This reminds me of a road trip I took years ago with my best friend. Dude is an awesome guitarist but a little musically uncultured. He likes what he likes and other stuff might as well not exist. Well I have a much wider palate for music than he does and most of the time when we are hanging out, he discovers new music.

We were driving down route 66 and crossing into Texas on our road trip and the song "Free Fallin'" comes on. Immediately he pipes up and says "ah, man this is the worst cover of this song I've ever heard. The quality makes it sound like it was recorded in the 70's or 80's and you really just can't replace John's voice." I pulled over the car and began interrogating for clarity.

"John who?"

"Mayor? The original is so much better than this."

"You think John Mayor wrote Free Fallin'?"

"What do you mean?"

"I really really need you to think about why this song sounds 'older' than John Mayor's Free Fallin'."

"Oh..."

I haven't let him live it down. Every road trip we have been on since, I make sure the original is on the playlist somewhere. It was out of character for him to be so confidently incorrect.

To be fair, Nolan has named a protagonist Protagonist in the past; if you don't know the origin of the word Mentor, it would not be unreasonable to assume as OP did

I had a friend do this. Not in the theatre, but a week later when we were talking about the movie. I wasn't sure how to tell him without embarrassing him, but he joked about it himself later.

I'm trying to remember if we studied greek and roman mythology in school, or if I just read about it on my own. Did I read the Odyssey for fun??? Maybe it was on those "read something from this list" summer reading assignments.

I think I learned about the Achilles heel thing earlier because an art teacher had walking issues and talked about it. I'm not sure that counts as learning it in school except in the technical sense.

this phenomenon has a tvtropes page

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny

There are certain works that you can safely assume most people have enjoyed. These shows were considered fantastic when they were released. Now, however, these have a Hype Backlash curse on them. Whenever we watch them, we'll cry, "That is so old" or "That is so overdone".

The sad irony? It wasn't old or overdone when they did it. In fact, it wasn't done at all: this work was the first one to do that. But the result was so brilliant and popular, it became woven into the fabric of the genre. Its innovations were endlessly repeated, until the audience began to expect that every work of that type would include them. And so a work which was once genuinely novel has become the new status quo. It's basically the inverse of a Grandfather Clause taken to a trope level: some works can get away with a dated element because of age and tradition, but these works are dismissed as dated because they've drowned in the sea of their own imitators. The work has retroactively become a Cliché Storm.