SerpApi.Org
The problem with the criticism surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is that most people who’ve spent the past six months building a passionate case against the movie have seemingly no intention of ever sitting through it.
That person can talk about the anachronistic breastplates on the Laestrygonians. They can say how thoroughly the American accent or the use of words like “dad” break the immersion. They can react to false posts alleging Elliot Page is Achilles, or why Hollywood is utterly finished due to the woke casting. What they don’t have, it turns out, is a ticket stub.
By the way, the film they refuse to see just took $124.5 million domestically and $264 million worldwide in three days, turning it into the biggest worldwide opening Nolan has ever had. Reviewers gave it a 95 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes — the best of his 12 features — and our own review called it “devastating, bloody, captivating, funny.”
None of that settles anything. Money is not an argument, and we all know critics can sometimes get it wrong. But the thing to understand about the current backlash is that it was never a response to the film itself, but the publicity around it.
The timing gives it away
When the final trailer went up on Universal’s channel, trackers had it at more than 600,000 thumbs-down against 68,000 thumbs-up. More than 300,000 of those landed inside a 72-hour window. The Critical Drinker, whose critical method largely consists of auditing films for wokeness, was posting videos about the film two months before its release. Elon Musk wrote in May that “Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award.”
Nolan recently told The Telegraph the noise “comes with the territory,” adding that arguments held before anyone has watched something are “irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.” He was ultimately proven right if the movie’s initial reception is anything to go by.
Both The Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic appeared on Piers Morgan in July and discussed the movie, calling it jarring, and that was 48-hours before it opened in theaters. That doesn’t mean these men couldn’t have caught the film at a press screening (though The Critical Drinker did give himself away by saying he’s not sure “how much Elliott is actually in the film”) but the problem is bigger than that.
Some users already know where they’re standing, because Nerdrotic told them so.
And the verdict is predictable. Matt Walsh wrote on X that he’s seen the film, and that “The movie is just as woke as you fear, if not more so.” Since then, he’s gone on a posting spree, rattling off argument after argument, all of which regurgitate the same tired objection that ancient Greece has the demographic makeup of modern Los Angeles, a sentiment echoed on YouTube by Nerdrotic, who titled his review “an epic disappointment.”
We have to talk about the scholarship costume
The loudest complaints were dressed as expertise, but they turned out to be wrong. Helen, they said, was fair-skinned and pale in the source, so casting Lupita Nyong’o amounted to vandalism. A trans actor in a Greek war history was an anachronism — an objection that ran for months on the assumption Elliot Page was playing Achilles, which turned out to be wrong.
Even the Helen argument falls apart when you dig a little deeper. Nowhere in either poem does Homer crown her the most beautiful woman alive. The classicist Daniel Mendelsohn noted the corollary nobody wants to think about: Matt Damon looks no more Greek than Nyong’o does, and that never generated a campaign.
Homer scholar Joel Christensen, troubled by how much oxygen had gone to the film’s politics, offered a surprisingly unique verdict around all the noise. “I actually think it’s a very conservative film. The roles for women are constrained,” he told Variety.
Fidelity to Homer was never something anyone could claim, not even the experts. The name most probably covers a relay of singers, each refitting an already-ancient story in the idiom of their own century. Musk, who claims Nolan “desecrated Homer” can’t even stand a historian arguing with him. When Tom Holland — the historian, not the actor playing Telemachus in the film — observed that the praise was coming from people who’d waited to watch it, Musk’s entire rebuttal was to call him “a cuck.” (via THR)
Some criticism is valid, but the reaction economy never needs a ticket
Greek and Greek Cypriot outlets have sent letters objecting that a story rooted in their culture was cast with, by The Telegraph’s count, one Greek actor in a background part. Even Nolan has conceded that the modern English dialogue might have been a mistake. (per Variety)
But here’s the thing that should end this entire conversation. Mendelsohn, who has actually seen the film, points out that Helen is on screen for roughly 45 seconds. Six months of outrage, hundreds of thousands of dislikes and innumerable tweets by folks like Musk, over a character who’s only in the film for less than a minute and a character whose role was invented out of thin air.
That’s really the whole point. Say what you will about Matt Walsh, but he bought a ticket. He sat through all 172 minutes and then filed his verdict — and even that can be challenged. Maybe it’s time we stopped letting other people watch our movies for us. And that’s especially true of The Odyssey, not only because Nolan has managed to make a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic spectacle that’s ambitious and rich and thrilling, but also because the majority of the people who have seen it are currently gushing about it nonstop.
(featured image: Universal Pictures)
