The predictable and absurd culture-war campaign against “The Odyssey” has been brewing for months, generating outrage from people who have not seen the film and are upset because they are… well, very racist. Writer/director Christopher Nolan, however, has no interest in engaging with or legitimizing them.
Asked by The Telegraph whether the backlash had taken him by surprise, Nolan waved it away with his trademark mix of diplomacy and casual dismissiveness. “These conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet,” he said succinctly before giving it any more time or oxygen.
The outrage accelerated in May when it emerged that Lupita Nyong’o would play Helen of Troy, the mythological daughter of Zeus who, according to the legend, hatched from an egg. Much of the ensuing campaign was amplified by Elon Musk, who accused Nolan of surrendering to Hollywood’s “woke agenda” and helped boost attacks on transgender actor Elliot Page as Sinon, an Ithacan warrior incorporated from Virgil’s “Aeneid.” Musk has shown no comparable concern about Matt Damon, a white American actor, playing the Greek king Odysseus. Convenient. Complaints about the film’s costumes and ship designs followed, helping the final trailer accumulate 600,000 dislikes on YouTube despite praise from historian Tom Holland (and no, not the same Tom Holland as the co-star in the film, despite everyone on Twitter seemingly making this mistake)
Let’s face it, the “historical accuracy” defense is particularly hollow, empty, and constructed in obvious bad faith. “The Odyssey” is a mythological epic featuring gods, giants, a journey into Hades, a Cyclops, and a witch who transforms men into pigs. Helen herself is said to have emerged from an egg after Zeus took the form of a swan. Yet this crowd has decided that Black and trans actors are where credibility suddenly collapses, effectively telling on themselves and saying the quiet part out loud: their supposed fidelity to Homer is transparently selective, and the real objection is to whom they believe should be allowed to appear in the story.
Nolan knew that adapting one of the foundational works of Western literature would invite strongly held opinions, including plenty made in bad faith. He faced something similar during the decade he spent directing his Batman trilogy.
“But remember, I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman,” Nolan said. “When I came on to ‘Batman Begins,’ writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learned over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”
That period included widespread skepticism over Heath Ledger playing the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” then considered an unlikely choice because of the actor’s reputation as a romantic leading man. Nolan ultimately learned that audiences could accept a dramatically different interpretation when the conviction behind it was clear.
“In the end, fans of the property —even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done—enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could,” he said.
Nolan is applying the same principle to Homer, rather than allowing Musk, YouTubers, and people rage-clicking a trailer to dictate the limits of an adaptation.
“All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way,” Nolan said. “It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is.”
Meanwhile, early critical reaction has been through the roof. And commercially, “The Odyssey” is already shaping up to be enormous. Current long-range tracking has the film opening between $100 million and $120 million domestically, while its coveted 70mm IMAX screenings sold out in major cities a full year before release. The culture-war outrage may be loud online, but there is little evidence that actual audiences are listening.
“The Odyssey” also boasts an enormous, star-studded cast that includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Samantha Morton, Elliot Page, and Bill Irwin. The film opens in theaters through Universal Pictures on July 17.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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