Perhaps, low expectations will leave me pleasantly surprised while high expectations will have the inverse effect for others, or perhaps we all simply have far too much time on our hands to bicker about a movie as though it were deeply important to our lives.
Rarely, does a film generate controversy three months before its release, but the combination of acclaimed director Christopher Nolan and a foundational piece of the entire Western Canon as the source material has prompted an eruption of scrutiny, or perhaps we should say a whirlpool of despair like Charybdis itself, from the trailer for The Odyssey alone. Despite containing barely two minutes of footage culled from across what is likely to be a three hour movie, every frame has been scrutinized and then scrutinized again, considered from a filmmaking, storytelling, casting, and cultural perspective at the same time, and not surprisingly, many have found certain aspects of it lacking. The lighting is too dark, the costumes too modern, the accents incorrect, and more. As Men’s Journal described it, “A new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s recent film, The Odyssey, dropped to mixed reactions. While the trailer generated excitement, fans also voiced concerns, particularly about the dialogue and the actors’ accents. Some even criticized the costumes for apparent historical inaccuracies.” For example, Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, who is vying to marry into the throne of Ithaca in Odysseus’ absence, taunts his son, “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know,” prompting many to mock that they didn’t use the affectionate term for a father in Ancient Greece, despite that they didn’t speak English in the first place and likely had some informal variation used in familial settings. Ironically, the use of American accents, presumably instead of British accents, has also elicited some criticism even though no one has any idea what an Ancient Greek accent might’ve sounded like in the first place and therefore some modern accent had to be chosen in any event. While we have more knowledge of Ancient Greek clothing, armor, and weaponry, Mr. Nolan appears to have taken some artistic liberties, choosing a helmet for Agamemnon that many feel is not period-specific, with one social media user complaining it was “Batman with a hint of Warhammer,” and gleaming metal armor for what appears to be a group of supernatural giants known as the Laestrygonians, who are generally depicted as savages, attacking Odysseus’ men. To many, “It struck fans as strange that Nolan, who famously avoids CGI to preserve realism, would miss such details” to use Men’s Journal’s phrasing.
Perhaps needless to say, the casting choices have elicited the most criticism by far, complete with claims that Mr. Nolan had gone “woke” to please the studio rather than adhere to the purity of his artistic vision. The choices receiving criticism include Zendaya as Athena, presumably because of her mixed race heritage, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships and is the proximate cause of the entire story, also presumably because she’s black, the rapper Travis Scott in a short part as a bard, presumably because of his blackness and being a rapper, and Elliot Page, a transgender male as the greatest warrior who ever lived, Achilles, presumably for the most obvious reasons imaginable. The confluence of these choices has resulted in a wide range of negative comments from seemingly everyone allied with the right. Even Elon Musk felt the need to weigh in, writing on his social media site, X, that Elliot Page’s casting in particular was “one of the dumbest and most twisted things I’ve ever heard.” Hercules actor and unabashed conservative, Kevin Sorbo claimed, “You could have paid me to tank this movie and I wouldn’t have thought of this.” Political commentator Steven Barrett similarly insisted, “At a certain point. We just have to say no. So yeah. No.” People’s Channel’s Andrew Doyle noted, “It doesn’t matter how well executed a film might be, once it starts with the DEI preaching it invariably fails.” “Nolan does not know what he’s doing anymore or he really really really wants an Oscar for this ‘film,’” an average person tweeted, suggesting that Hollywood will reward the filmmaker for casting minorities, which might not be far from the truth these days. Nerdrotic, an individual with over 275,000 followers questioned, “Christopher Nolan, WTF are you doing? This isn’t for awards. He has them already. It’s about the top dog of a dying industry reinforcing their bad ideas.” Ian Miller writing for Outkick summed up some these thoughts nicely, viewing them in relation to Mr. Nolan’s reputation for attention to detail which in the case of this film, included creating an actual Ancient Greek ship that could sail and not using an orchestra for the score, because they hadn’t been invented yet. “So his dedication to accuracy was so extreme that he had his crew build an actual seaworthy ship for Odysseus, refused to use an orchestra to score the film, and his lead actor praised how ‘faithful’ he was to Homer’s text,” Mr, Miller opined, “And yet he cast a Kenyan-Mexican actress to play a Greek woman, and used a modern rapper to nod to oral poetry from 2,700 years ago?”
For his part, Mr. Nolan took the rare step of defending the casting of Mr. Scott in particular along with his general approach to telling the story, attempting to connect it to his earlier work. “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap,” the director explained in what seems a somewhat reasonable argument given that there are no Ancient Greek oral poets available, at least that I’m aware of with my limited knowledge of the modern music scene. The two had also worked together on perhaps Mr. Nolan’s least heralded project, Tenet. Otherwise, he insisted he was trying to make the film as “accurate” as possible, comparing it to how he approached the widely acclaimed Interstellar. “For ‘Interstellar,’ you’re looking at: What is the best speculation of the future? When you’re looking at the ancient past, it’s actually the same thing,” he said. “What is the best speculation, and how can I use that to create a world?” As an example of his unique take, he discussed the depiction of the infamous Trojan Horse, which is frequently shown as some sort of wooden statue on wheels, but is now given a more realistic treatment that he came up with 20 years earlier when he was being considered to direct the Brad Pitt vehicle, Troy. In the new version, the horse is abandoned, half sinking in the sand, like something left behind rather than a gift. “If the horse were sinking into the sand and about to be swept away by the tide, the Trojans would never believe there could be anybody in there,” Mr. Nolan explained. “They would be rescuing this thing from the waves and dragging it into the city as a prize. It wouldn’t be on wheels, like a roller skate.” Lead actor Matt Damon echoed these thoughts. “The script was very specific in what he was doing,” he claimed. “He’s very faithful to Homer because that’s not somebody you rewrite. But thematically, what he looked at was really interesting.”
Personally, my own reaction is a little more complex. While I am not surprised that Mr. Nolan’s casting choices have become fodder for the culture wars, I’m equally not surprised about at least some of the choices either. For better or far more likely, worse, we live in a world where a starlet can’t appear in a jeans advertisement without making enemies. One of the world’s premiere filmmakers tackling one of literature’s most famous stories in the most highly anticipated movie of the year was undoubtedly going to generate controversy of some kind, whether warranted or not. To at least some extent, a portion of the backlash appears to be driven by the belief that Mr. Nolan was at least marginally conservative on a cultural level and would not succumb to what many believe amounts to stunt casting to please progressive racial bean counters. They point to his previous work, particularly The Dark Knight Rises, as containing at least some conservative themes. As Reason’s Robby Soave put it, “I do want to remind everyone that Christopher Nolan is responsible for the most rightwing major studio film of all the time, The Dark Knight Rises. So perhaps we should wait to see The Odyssey before all making up our minds about it.” While there’s undoubtedly some truth to that – Rises does feature socialist anarchists attempting to upend the capitalist order – there’s also the reality that Mr. Nolan is a big budget filmmaker operating in a progressive industry with executives to please. In that regard, Mr. Damon isn’t exactly the ideal choice for Odysseus either. He’s of Nordic descent and looks about as Greek as I do, but it was unlikely anyone would spend this kind of money without a bankable star in the lead role.
More fundamentally, I have concerns that go well beyond casting. Previously, I criticized Oppenheimer for spending more than 90 minutes telling the part of the story everyone knows, what was already featured in Fat Man and Little Boy, while largely neglecting the far more interesting and never before seen events that happened afterwards. This time around, he’s telling another recycled story and The Odyssey has always struck me as an odd choice for a film in the first place. Setting aside that a movie version was first produced in 1954 starring Kirk Douglas, a European TV version was released in 1968 and an American version in 1997, and the general fact that almost everyone is familiar with certain aspects of the story, the nature of the work doesn’t seem to lend itself to movie making, either temporally or narratively. Movies, in general, do a notoriously poor job of handling the passage of time, that is making you feel the weight of the years that have passed prior to a certain moment. Stanley Kubrick, for example, played with this notion in the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey jump cut that covers millions of years in a single frame, transitioning from humans to half apes in the literal blink of an eye. Consciously, we know the time has passed and we can connect the past with the present, but emotionally we rarely feel it in a movie the way we do in a novel or poem. In this case, The Odyssey largely rests on the extreme dislocation of Odysseus spending ten years fighting a war in Troy that he wanted no part of to begin with, then another 10 years coming home. If the audience doesn’t feel that reality – doesn’t experience what it would be like to journey for so long, much less in an era when you were lucky to live to 40 – the movie simply can’t capture the emotional heft of the story and I, at least, am hard pressed to figure out how compressing twenty years of events into a likely three hour run time can possibly work.
Narratively speaking, The Odyssey is essentially a road movie, that is a collection of completely disconnected scenes as the characters move from point to point. From this perspective, the plot can be written as a single line – a man cannot find his way home, however hard he tries – while the story itself consists of a sequence of vignettes of varying degrees of interest, almost none of which have anything to do with what happened before or after. Odysseus with the cyclops, Odysseus with Circe, Odysseus and the sirens, Odysseus crosses between Scylla and Charybdis, and more are essentially episodes of a procedural TV show. As an epic poem, all of this works because the episodes are woven into the rich mythology of Ancient Greece in an early bit of worldbuilding that beggars most modern fantasy. Between the knowledge a reader would bring of these events beforehand and the details Homer included, we experience it as a coherent whole, but assuming there isn’t an inordinate amount of expository dialogue, the result on screen is likely to be a bunch of creatures and other challenges with seemingly random characters, flowing by so fast given the time constraints, no one without a lot of existing knowledge is going to be able to make sense of it.
To a large extent, the same can be said of the characters themselves. While Odysseus’ motivation is rather straightforward – a universal desire to be at home with his loved ones after a long journey – the reasons he can’t make it home easily are complex, dependent on the convoluted machinations of the gods. Following the fall of Troy, the gods were displeased at the Greeks for their lack of piety and offerings, but Odysseus in particular earns the enmity of the lord of the sea, Poseidon after he blinds his son, Polyphemus, the cyclops. Poseidon had favored Troy to begin with, and this insult was simply too much to bear, so he uses Odysseus as a stand in for a more generalized rage. Further, Odysseus is keenly aware of this, but to reach home in that era, he has no choice except to travel the sea, across Poseidon’s domain and at his whims. Throughout, he is keenly aware that he’s risking the lives of him and his men each and every mile they travel, but chooses to do so because of his (and their) desire to return home. To make things a little more fair, Poseidon’s hatred is balanced against Athena’s affection, who as the goddess of wisdom and war sees something of herself in Odysseus and elevates him above all other mortals, helping to protect him, changing his appearance, and doing her best to ensure his safety. At the same time, Athena can be seen to use Odysseus as a stand in as well, another part of her long running rivalry with Poseidon, during which the chaotic, untamed forces of the sea were pitted against the more orderly, structured forces of a civilization in an eternal clash of wills. If anything, the situation is even more complicated because both of them answer to the king of the gods, Zeus. In principle, Zeus favors Athena as his favorite daughter, but Odyssey’s blinding of the cyclops is too much of an affront of the gods to bear, making him powerless to act, so long as Odysseus isn’t killed because another force, one no god can control, the fates have decreed he will make it home at some point.
If this sounds rather complicated, I am hard pressed to see how much of this can be successfully captured on film, even a rather long one, but if it’s stripped away, we’re left with a largely meaningless, incredibly simple story and potentially a lot of senseless visual spectacle. As evidence of this consider The Return, a recent two hour telling of Odyssey’s arrival home that dispenses with the entire journey and the rivalries between the gods, choosing to focus entirely on a broken man arriving in a broken land and slowly realizing that he must secure his birthright to protect his family and his people. The film works because of its focus, the story it chooses to tell rather than everything else that it might tell, but based on the trailer, Mr. Nolan appears to be making the same mistake he did with Oppenheimer and including everything except the proverbial kitchen sink. Time will certainly tell and I will admit to no small amount of interest, but I’m not optimistic either and that goes well beyond some suspect casting. Perhaps, low expectations will leave me pleasantly surprised while high expectations will have the inverse effect for others, or perhaps we all simply have far too much time on our hands to bicker about a movie as though it were deeply important to our lives.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 