Christopher Nolan responds to rightwing bigots' backlash to his film "The Odyssey"

[Magical Realist]

"Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has weighed in on the backlash his new film The Odyssey faced before anyone had even seen it.

Released later this week, The Odyssey boasts an all-star cast that includes the likes of Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya.

However, certain small-minded critics have taken issue with some of the movie’s casting choices.

Most notably, the decision to have Lupita Nyong’o play Helen Of Troy in Nolan’s take on Homer’s Ancient Greek epic was met with racist backlash, while some also slammed the choice for Elliot Page to appear in the cast, reuniting the director and actor for the first time since the latter’s transition.

During a new interview with The Telegraph, the Oscar-winning director made it clear that this kind of discourse doesn’t really get to him, as it “comes with the territory”.

“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 claimed.

Nolan also pointed out that, earlier on in his career, he “spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman”, meaning he’s well-versed in these kinds of debates.

“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,” he said.

“And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”

He concluded: “All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is.”

Praising Lupita Nyong’o’s work in his latest film, the Oppenheimer director told Elle earlier this year: “The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen. And Lupita makes it look effortless.

“I’m sure there’s a tremendous amount of discipline and training that goes into projecting that kind of poise and feeling the emotion bubbling beneath the character, the layers of the character right there underneath. She’s just an incredible person to work with, and I was absolutely desperate for her to do the part.”

More recently, he has also responded to the polarised takes on The Odyssey’s approach to historical accuracy – including the inclusion of modern dialogue in the film.

The Odyssey hits cinemas on Friday 17 July."

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/c...upqokZZQEg

[C C]

And the entertainment industry does depict non-Western cultures inaccurately, too (their history, customs, mythos, etc). Despite professing that they go to great effort to make sure they get it right and sometimes making adjustments due to ensuing criticism. For instance, the excerpt at the bottom that pertains to the TV series Dark Winds.

The only difference is that they don't have to show any respect to, say, the history and ancient story narratives of the privileged and oppressive West. Social justice doesn't apply to the latter, so they can portray or change _X_ however they want and just economically flash a finger to the whining objectors. (For the '50s and '60s, the shows Annie Oakley and Daniel Boone were ridiculously unfaithful outrages that were disapproved by historical societies.)

Though, admittedly, this may be a period where some films could be suffering at the box office due to that lack of cultural sensitivity, and eventually money does start to matter. But it's just a temporary bump that will fade as many other trends have in the past.
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Critical response: The Navajo Times criticized the series for its stereotypical presentations of Navajo people and incomprehensible delivery of the language by non-native speakers of Diné bizaad. Series director Chris Eyre responded to the criticism, and commented, "It's critically important to all of us that we represent the culture correctly. If there's course-correction to be made, we're happy to do that." For the second season, the series hired Navajo cultural advisor George R. Joe to help create more accurate portrayals of the Navajo culture.

[C C]

Mixed reaction for Chris Gore, who's going to watch it a second time. Disaster rating from Alan Ng. Both agreed that the "controversial castings" didn't even matter. The identity-swapping stuff or whatever that was actually about.

With regard to the use of modern speaking, there have always been B-movies of historical periods since the 1950s that were too cheap to even bother with sounding faux-antique (Hercules speaking with a NYC accent, etc). And it's hilarious that we feel substituting posh or affected British accents and elitist Mid-Atlantic speech for ancient Greco-Roman languages in movies is authentic. Especially when the contemporary UK speech pattern didn't even begin emerging until the late 1700s. The accents used in Shakespearean acting are blatantly anachronistic, as is that application in Robin Hood themes and any historical drama set in the pre-1800s.
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FILM THREAT
https://youtu.be/aGisZUaV7JQ

NG: I was bored out of my mind. I was checked out of this movie pretty much from the beginning. The sound was awful. I couldn't understand dialogue. And then I started to understand dialogue and realized how bad the dialogue is. This is the most pretentious movie I've seen all year.

GORE: The thing that didn't work for me mostly was the accents. The way they spoke, I felt diminished the film. It just felt too modern.

There are parts that drag, especially the first half, but then there are also moments, in particular with the Cyclops, that I thought were great. The fall of Troy. I thought Samantha Ward was very good as the witch and the way the soldiers transform. I'm not going to go into detail there. I thought that was very clever.

But for the most part, I'm still marinating on it. It's not a disaster. But I'll say the controversial castings were not a big deal. It's not that big a deal because of screen time, right? They might as well be cameos. They're really not in the movie all that much.

[...] It's one of those things where you see a Nolan film the first time, and you're like, why did he do this and that, and then the second time you see it, maybe it bothers you less.

NG: That's not going to happen for me.

GORE: We'll see. I'm seeing it a second time.

NG: Here's my big problem. That was Matt Damon on screen. That was Anne Hathaway on screen. That was Tom Holland on screen. There was no characterization, no effort to say, "I'm playing this character." Instead, I'm seeing Matt Damon and hatboy and everyone. And it just doesn't feel part of the period.

GORE: I don't like that the colors were muted. It felt very muted. It should have been grand and colorful, and it wasn't that. And I thought the music was not the best for a Nolan film. Usually the score carries the movie a lot. This one didn't.

NG: A lot of drumming.

GORE: The Travis Scott song over credits.

NG (sarcasm): Oh yeah. I can't wait to see it at the Academy Awards this year.

GORE: You won't.

I will say this movie will probably win a lot of technical Oscars, and it is guaranteed to win an Oscar for casting, and there's a reason for that.

[...] This is initial reaction, and my reaction is that it's not a disaster but mixed. For Alan it is a disaster, not mixed.

Just out of the theater reactions ... https://youtu.be/aGisZUaV7JQ

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/aGisZUaV7JQ

[Magical Realist]

"A group of movie critics saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last week. They posted social media impressions about the film, all of which were uniformly positive. Now, we are on round 2, just a few days ahead of the The Odyssey’s official premiere this weekend, as a new invite-only preview has spawned yet another host of online takes, many of which are from the press.

Well, guess what? Like the first batch, they are unanimously glowing. Not just glowing, some are so over the top it’s almost hard to believe. Here is a sampling:

Austin Burke: “#TheOdyssey is an experience… Maybe THE experience of 2026. Nolan has crafted something monumental. While it’s an impressive spectacle, the performances are fantastic… A few of them are nomination locks.”

Stephen Ford: “the odyssey is the kinda movie where you find yourself completely forgetting you're even watching a movie. it felt like i was dreaming. a mythical nightmare that blends elements from all of nolan's films. so lucky to see this in theaters. i'm in awe that this movie even exists.”

Gene Park (Washington Post): “im absolutely speechless. what an experience.”

They go on like this indefinitely. The worst one I’ve seen is a “mixed” review:

Edward Douglas: “Gonna struggle to give The Odyssey more than a mixed review cause it suffers from many issues, including lighting, pacing, and a muddy sound mix that made it tough to understand anything or anyone. Best parts were the ones involving things like Circe and the Cyclops."

There is, of course, still the frequent skepticism on social media that anyone invited to an early screening will be biased toward liking the film. This ignores the countless times this happens with every single movie that is screened for press, where those films range in scores from 0% to 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes scale. It doesn’t make sense that this is some sort of cabal put in place by Universal to artificially boost the film’s hype. I would brace for low, review-bombed user scores for The Odyssey, however, as with the online discourse it has spawned about its casting of minority actors and alleged “faithfulness to the source material,” things are obviously heading in that direction. That may not be the case on Rotten Tomatoes, where anti-bombing measures now make moviegoers verify they actually saw the film (thanks, Captain Marvel). If you want a preview of the situation brewing here, you can read the comments under practically any Odyssey social media post on the internet, including many of these reviews.

The next question is box office. It seems like a reach that Nolan can top his Batman movies, but a more immediate comparison is Oppenheimer, which grossed $975 million. Then, of course, awards. Critics are already saying The Odyssey is a serious contender for a slew of them, and Oppenheimer won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, among others. We’ll see how The Odyssey stacks up."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2...unanimous/

[Magical Realist]

"Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" Is Going To Drive The Right Wing Completely Insane"

The Oscar winner’s latest is a Trojan horse of a film: a rip-roaring blockbuster secretly carrying a sober meditation on civility and intolerance. And Elon Musk is going to despise it.

By Hillary Busis

"Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of The Odyssey isn’t out in theaters til Friday, but it’s already the film that launched a thousand tweets. For months, conservatives like Elon Musk have been having racist tantrums about Nolan’s decision to cast Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. They’re also in a transphobic tizzy about Nolan casting Inception star Elliot Page as a Greek soldier. But angry as they were about a rumor that Page would play Achilles, the mythic hero with a bum heel, they’re going to be furious about his actual role in the film—assuming they see it at all. They’re not going to like the greater message of Nolan’s Odyssey, either.

That’s because the first person we see in The Odyssey isn’t Matt Damon’s Odysseus, the epic poem’s titular sojourner—a brilliant strategist and king whose 10-year trip home from the Trojan War forms the spine of the story. It’s not Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, his long-suffering queen, or Tom Holland’s Telemachus, his long-fatherless son. It’s not misandrist enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton), sexy enchantress Calypso (Charlize Theron), or gray-eyed Athena (Zendaya), goddess of wisdom and Odysseus’s celestial champion.

The film opens, instead, on Page’s character: an infantryman named Sinon, a figure based in mythology who doesn’t actually appear in Homer’s Odyssey. (Musk and co. are going to love that.) Sinon is the poor bastard responsible for telling the Trojans about the giant wooden horse that the Greeks have left behind: a horse the Greeks would simply love Troy to have as a gift, Sinon says. The Trojans kill the messenger, then haul the horse past their walled city’s impenetrable gates. You can guess what will happen next.

Yet Nolan, a filmmaker who never met a complicated timeline he didn’t love, doesn’t actually show us the resulting carnage right away. After this prologue, he moves the action instead to Ithaca: Odysseus’s seaside homeland, which has devolved into a hive of scum and villainy in the 20 years since its king first set sail for Troy.

The polytheistic Greeks abide by a strict code of hospitality, which The Odyssey calls Zeus’s Law. As the film rather didactically explains, they’re obligated to treat strangers well because for all they know, those strangers could be gods in disguise. Ithaca’s extraordinary circumstances have turned this religious duty into an albatross: Because she can’t break Zeus’s Law, Odysseus’s wife Penelope must indefinitely host the ill-mannered suitors who have flooded her home, each of whom hopes to marry her now that Odysseus seems to be gone for good. (The standout of the group is Antinous, a smarmy SOB played to villainous perfection by Robert Pattinson.)

Penelope can’t rule the kingdom alone, due to the ancient laws of misogyny. Telemachus can’t officially take over as long as Odysseus may still be alive out there somewhere. And Ithaca isn’t the only chiefdom that’s gone to seed following the war.

Telemachus learns from another king, Trojan War–vet Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), that there’s unrest among his subjects as well. In the wake of the conflict, Sparta’s citizens have become consumed with fear about unspecified “people from the sea” invading their country and destroying their way of life. The people of Ithaca, too, have heard that the “people from the sea” are coming.

We don’t hear Spartans or Ithacans openly stressing about immigrants stealing their jobs and eating their dogs—but it’s not hard to draw a direct line between their xenophobia and the well-documented, real-world conspiratorial anxieties of people like Musk.

It’s ridiculous for the anti-woke contingent to complain about the Odyssey not being “historically accurate;” this is a story about gods and monsters and gorgeous women who hatched out of eggs. The “people from the sea” throughline does, however, seem like a direct reference to hateful rhetoric from the real world—spoken by people who consider themselves to be the guardians of Western civilization, the true inheritors of Homer and his ilk. The rest of the film makes very clear what Nolan thinks of such incivility, primarily through its depiction of Odysseus himself.

The Odysseus of legend is known for his cunning and his eloquence. He’s clever to a fault and a bit of a scoundrel; the Trojan Horse was his idea. But in Nolan’s hands, and Damon’s, the character is no glib trickster. This Odysseus is world-weary and weather-beaten, a man who seems to feel the weight of every minute of the two decades he’s spent away from home: 10 at war, 10 trying to return.

What’s more, he has a conscience. One of the film’s most effective moments comes when Odysseus journeys to the literal ends of the earth, where it’s possible to commune with the dead. He’s hoping to connect with the departed soul of Tiresias, a powerful prophet who might finally be able to tell him the way home. (It’s not mentioned in the movie, but the Tiresias of myth was also gender fluid, living as both a man and a woman at different points. Just a detail certain parties might appreciate!)

When Odysseus summons the dead, though, he’s also confronted by someone else: Sinon, the soldier he left to be slaughtered by the Trojans after convincing them to bring the horse into their city. The ghost of poor, loyal Sinon excoriates his commander. Odysseus couldn’t give him a proper burial, he says—a big no-no for these guys—and didn’t even tell him the truth about the horse: that it was filled with Greece’s best soldiers. On a moonless night, that Alpha team crept silently from the statue’s belly and wrenched open the gates of Troy, decisively ending the war in their favor.

Nolan obviously has a keen eye for action. When we finally do see the fall of Troy, it’s appropriately spectacular and visceral: flashing weapons, spurting blood, swirling sweat and sand and swords and sandals. But the slaughter is not painted as an unmitigated triumph for the Greeks.

Throughout the movie, Odysseus is tortured by flashbacks to that attack’s barbarism and chaos. In his memory, he keeps flicking his eyes back to his horrific horse: a false peace offering, a gift that concealed a nightmare. Odysseus’s guilt is palpable, practically a character in its own right. When his ship sails past the famously alluring Sirens, their song isn’t merely seductive: it tortures Odysseus by forcing him to confront his true nature, to consider his deepest faults and failures.

With time, Odysseus and the audience both realize that he is the one who irrevocably broke Zeus’s law. By building and deploying the horse, he’s responsible for the schism that has rippled across the ancient world, destroying old notions of propriety and decency. To put it in terms a Nolan fan might appreciate: Odysseus is Oppenheimer. The Trojan Horse is the atomic bomb.

It might sound heavy-handed—preachy, even—when you boil the movie down to this thesis. But the craziest thing about The Odyssey is that Nolan’s interpretation absolutely sticks the landing, adding an unexpected dimension to one of our culture’s most told and retold sagas. This is a film stuffed with bravura set pieces and awesome effects; it’s also mature and thoughtful, a character study disguised as a blockbuster.

A mythic hero traumatized by his own actions? A lush, entertaining film that both adapts and deconstructs one of Western civilization’s foundational texts? A trans actor cast as the story’s most noble character, someone whose killing winds up being the film’s original sin? All woven together by a master storyteller the right would love and have tried to claim for themselves?

The Bronze Age Perverts of the world are going to hate this. But if they really engaged with Nolan’s Odyssey, they just might learn something from it."

https://www.vanityfair.com/story/the-ody...ntent=null