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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is finally in cinemas today, anticipated as one of the biggest movies of the year thanks to its visionary director, starry cast and the sheer ambition required to tackle a foundational mythological epic for the big screen.
And it’s already the film that launched a thousand online disputes.
The Odyssey has landed near-universal rave reviews from critics – including from me, someone who was particularly excited, although a little anxious, to see it after studying classics at university.
But there is also a wave of incensed backlash on social media.
Ironically, that rage is almost exclusively coming from people who haven’t seen Nolan’s film yet (if they ever will).
Instead, they are simply creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of fury by overreacting to out of context interview clips, and making wild assumptions based on the mere handful of minutes from a nearly three hour movie that was revealed in the trailers.
This was brought into sharp focus when I shared a quick positive opinion about The Odyssey on X, following the world premiere.
Cue hundreds of comments calling me everything from a ‘crazy liberal b***h’ to ‘a hideous feminazi-looking grifter’.
I was told by Elon Musk’s fans on Elon Musk’s website that the movie was ‘woke garbage’, anti-white, and that I myself was a paid shill for Universal Studios and, bizarrely, a Joe Biden voter despite being British.
Musk himself helped whip up this anti-Odyssey frenzy on his platform after dropping in on conversations to agree that this adaptation had no merit.
The ex-trillionaire slagged off the casting of Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, claiming Nolan had ‘lost his integrity’ and was ‘pissing on Homer’s grave’ by casting a Black actress as the most beautiful woman in the world, before querying the masculinity of trans star Elliot Page.
Musk also called historian and podcast host Tom Holland, who has praised the film, a ‘cuck’, although it is difficult to say if he knew he wasn’t actually interacting with the Tom Holland in the film, who’s married to co-star Zendaya.
I almost don’t know where to start with all of this – but one key place is to remind everyone that The Odyssey is drawn from Greek mythology, not history.
It’s fictional. Helen never existed and, in the legend, she famously hatched from an egg after Zeus raped her mortal mother while disguised as a swan.
How people can then become enraged at this not-real character not being blonde-haired and blue-eyed is simply unhinged and racist.
Page plays Ithacan soldier Sinon, ported over from Virgil’s Aeneid, whose key role in the Trojan Horse plot is beefed up with an invented backstory including Robert Pattinson’s antagonist Antinous – not, as Musk and others speculated, Achilles.
There’s a lot of ignorance here, not least because Musk and co have also chosen to underline his argument by holding up Wolfgang Peterson’s 2004 movie Troy as a superior example of a Homeric cinematic adaptation, calling it ‘an epic movie’.
In their eyes, better means ‘more faithful’ to the text – but Troy took massive liberties with the source material, such as killing off key figures onscreen whose deaths would completely collapse subsequent Greek myths, such as Agamemnon and Menelaus.
Of course, I’ll not hear a word against Peter O’Toole and Eric Bana’s performances as Priam and Hector, James Horner’s score bangs and the production design captures more of the true spirit of its inspirations – for the Trojans in particular – than it often gets credit for.
But to suggest it better reflects the Iliad is just absurd.
However, I’d also urge people not to let Musk’s love of Troy put them off it, because it’s still a favourite of mine, despite its sins.
That’s right, I’m able to hold two opposing thoughts in my head at once about a film without combusting, something else that the keyboard warriors in my comments will find intensely triggering.
Nolan himself brushed off the negative opinions coming from both Musk and the MAGA pundits, as well as archaeologists and ancient historians griping about inaccurate costume and boat design pre-release, as ‘irrelevant because no one having them knows what the film is yet’.
That final point is the crux of the argument pushing back against criticism – adaptations are a matter of personal interpretation, not, as the crazed commentators in my X mentions suggest, some kind of nefarious globalist agenda.
As someone with more experience than most in the source literature, of course Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey didn’t exactly match the one in my head. Of course there are things, subjectively, ‘wrong’ with his vision.
But those arguments over how it looks and even sounds in places don’t particularly sway me as someone who interacts with The Odyssey mostly as literature that’s survived and been re-shaped for audiences across thousands of years.
That’s the exciting part about this story, how it’s withstood the test of time.
And it’s valid to have discussions about its merits as a movie and adaptation of a piece of classic work I have three translations of at home.
It’s not valid, however, to use discussions as an excuse to echo racist, transphobic, and frankly preposterous talking points.
I can understand, for example, some of the disappointment from Greeks over a lack of representation among The Odyssey’s cast, given its cultural heritage.
But I can’t understand the person people (yes, more than one) on X who told me Zeus was going to strike me down with lightning bolt for praising a movie that cast Black actors.
I’m hopeful that discussions focus far more on the former school of thought and not the latter, no matter what Elon Musk wants.
And I’m confident – this is just the beginning of the film industry re-embracing these sword and sandal epics.
And with renewed interest will come greater opportunities for all who genuinely care about Odysseus and company.
The Odyssey is in cinemas from today.
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