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It’s almost as if people got so intentionally up in arms over a movie they didn’t even see.
Key Points
- Transphobes took issue with Elliot Page’s casting in The Odyssey, thinking he’s playing Achilles.
- Page is not playing Achilles. He’s playing Sinon.
- Stop believing rage-baiters online!
Consider this a public service announcement: A lot of you need to spend less time on social media. Maybe then we wouldn’t have the most embarrassing “controversy” of recent memory.
In May, Elon Musk, the trillionaire who loves to proverbially shout “fire” in a crowded movie theater just to watch the chaos unfold, took to the social media platform he bought and butchered to whine about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
He glommed onto two unconfirmed points of contention that had been slowly making the rounds online until the trillionaire threw jet fuel on the flames: Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page’s casting as Achilles.
The first point was partly true, at least. Nyong’o, a legitimate Oscar winner(!) and arguably one of the fiercest and most gorgeous people in Hollywood, does indeed play the woman with a face that launched a thousand ships. She also plays Helen of Troy’s twin, Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) — both of whom, by the way, were the daughters of Zeus (not a real person but a deity) and Leda, who produced an egg from which they were born.
But now that The Odyssey is out in the world, everyone should know that the information around the second target in this conversation is just not true. Page, who worked with Nolan previously on Inception and has been deemed worthy enough for another collab, is not playing Achilles. He’s playing Sinon.
Sinon is a character who isn’t featured in Homer’s The Iliad or The Odyssey, but he appear in Virgil’s The Aeneid, the ancient Roman equivalent of the story. While The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus, the Greek tactician and king of Ithaca trying to return home from the Trojan War, The Aeneid is about Aeneas, a Trojan who escapes the sacked city and goes on a journey through Italy.
In Virgil’s telling, Sinon is a warrior and a more active player on the side of the Greeks. He uses deception to convince the Trojans to bring Odysseus’ wooden horse inside their walls and allow the soldiers hidden within to attack the city.
In Nolan’s The Odyssey, Sinon is the first major character we see, sitting on the sands of Troy’s beach, waiting for the Trojans to arrive on horseback. Page’s character is far less deceitful. He grew up on Ithaca and, as a boy, was wrangled to join Odysseus (Matt Damon) in Troy.
Sinon was left out of the plot involving the Trojan Horse. He volunteers to stay behind to present this “gift” for Athena to the Trojans, who immediately spear him. When they later meet in Hell, the ghostly shade of Sinon blames Odysseus for his lies.
So after all that — all the bile oozing out from those tweets — the thing people were mad about wasn’t even true. Even now, though, there is plenty of commentary from those feigning rage over all this (if you go looking).
Why was any of this a supposed issue to begin with? There are plenty of those out there claiming the casting is “historically inaccurate,” even though The Odyssey is a work of poetic fiction and involves ancient Gods, monsters, enchantresses, et al. At the end of the day, it’s a lot of racism (in the case of Nyong’o) and transphobia (in the case of Page) heaped at a film people have largely not even seen yet.
And who cares if Page were playing Achilles? After directing 13 feature films and winning multiple Oscars, Nolan knows what he’s doing.
Social media is riddled with misinformation that’s practically engineered to rage-bait anyone, especially when they’re in a deep scroll. There are also people online who (to quote another Nolan movie) just want to watch the world burn, and you probably shouldn’t be getting your information from them.
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If there’s any silver lining, this racist and transphobic “controversy” doesn’t matter. If you put your phones down, it doesn’t exist in the real world. The Odyssey was always going to make millions of dollars anyway. Right now, the film is projected to break box-office records with an estimated $120 million haul (up from the original $90-100 million projection) from just opening weekend.
Nolan said it best, telling The Telegraph, “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.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
