Nolan is Right About The Odyssey Backlash & I’m Furious He Even Has to Say it

Some things shouldn’t have to be said, and Christopher Nolan having to respond to ridiculous, bad-faith criticism of a movie barely anyone has seen is firmly in that bracket. After an extended period of engagement bait, dogwhistle criticism, and engagement fueled by very rich men with a weird amount of free time on their hands, Nolan spoke to the UK’s Telegraph to hit back at venomous criticism of The Odyssey that comes without merit. He drew the line at openly acknowledging the source of lots of the poison, as you’d expect from the director, but his point is a very relevant one. And it’s infuriating that he has to say it.

The director pragmatically said the backlash “comes with the territory,” but dismissed any point made without seeing the movie as “irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.” His lack of social media access (he famously doesn’t have a mobile phone, in what more people should acknowledge is a genius move) is telling here: the Internet has stripped nuance out of all things. Content is disposable, fast-fashion-style instant gratification designed to appeal either to your dopamine centers or your amygdala, and unfortunately, outrage is the prevailing currency. And real outrage and fake rage are largely indistinguishable in a technological world that prioritizes manipulation for results.

Nolan Has Been Here Before

While the specifics of the casting “crimes” Nolan has supposedly overseen in The Odyssey are of a completely different nature, the director faced a… challenging fanbase a long time ago when he stepped foot in Gotham. There, he didn’t have to face the anger of people who seem to believe that the existence of ethnic minorities or transgender people is somehow a threat to them (largely because of the manipulation machine they dip their faces into for 10 hours a day), but as he says himself, it did set a precedent. “Remember,” he said, “I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman. 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. 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.”

And interpretation is the thing. You can’t hand someone like Nolan the reins of major stories and ask him to make someone else movie. You can’t not let him cast rom-com teen idol Heath Ledger as the Joker. You can’t not let him strip all of the Gothic mythology and character of Gotham out, if he wants to. Because if you do, you don’t get Nolan’s Batman trilogy. You get a rough approximation at best, clipped of all of the best things Nolan does and his creative bravery. And when the same voices on YouTube complain about the homogeneous nature of the MCU or Disney live-action remakes, you have to question the contradiction. It comes down to race and gender identity, which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the movie. The idea that they would have any bearing on the box office performance or anyone’s decision to see something we should be so profoundly grateful for even existing is criminal. Be happy directors like Nolan are making stories like The Odyssey. Be happy they care enough to celebrate the craft of film-making when the world is flooding with the sludge and slop of generative AI.

The Odyssey Criticism is Idiotic

Nolan strikes a hopeful note in his Telegraph interview, hinting in his faith that the movie will find its audience just as The Dark Knight did even with the infant Internet’s outrage against it. “In the end, fans of the property – even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done – enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could… 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.” There will be people who say that dismissing legitimate criticism as harassment is disingenuous or – dare I repeat it – morally compromising, but there is a lot of ego bundled into that claim of “legitimacy” and it falls apart when you look into the details.

As Nolan says, Homer’s story was told 400 years after its setting, and the writer (if he even exists – and it’s debated by historians endlessly) filled in his own gaps of wonder with contemporary answers. Nolan has spoken about his desire to make The Odyssey make sense as a modern interpretation: he cast Travis Scott as a bard consciously because of the parallel between modern rappers and ancient musical performers. He might not say it himself, but he thumbs his nose at the idea that everything has to be exactly as someone expects. It’s not your vision, it’s his. Grow up and deal with that as quietly as you can.

But fundamentally, the idea that Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy or Elliot Page playing Sinon is a betrayal of the original text is comical. It simply doesn’t matter. I would wager that The Odyssey is not enshrined into the cultural heritage of the people being whipped up by their rage-obsessed bandleaders on social media and YouTube. I’d go as far as to say I bet many of them couldn’t recite any of the story’s details, how it came to be, what it means. It’s a romanticized, simplified, vague idea of the Trojan horse and the world’s most beautiful woman inspiring a war. But that woman – Helen – was born of the Gods, Zeus and Leda, and hatched out of an egg into a world where cyclops were real. Where giant 10-foot soldiers ate humans. With sea monsters and sirens and goddess witches. Where Matt Damon can play a Greek, and nobody raises an eyebrow. But a black woman? A trans person? Out of the question. It’s despicable. In fact, it’s hilariously pathetic. And it has nothing to do with The Odyssey.

The fact that Nolan has to acknowledge this stupidity, because 600,000 fake dislikes on a trailer are a story worth talking about for months, is exhausting. The fact that every positive review will now be met with clownish accusations of “wokery” or “leftism” or “mind viruses” (led by weird cultists who whip up armies of bot accounts to validate themselves) is an embarrassing stain on humanity. Nobody is being paid to give The Odyssey good reviews. Again, grow up. Still, it’s inevitable, because that will make people feel better about their own unsubstantiated opinion of something they refuse to even see, because of “ruinous casting choices.” And that hollow victory will be what the thinly veiled sexist, racist, and dehumanising YouTube thumbnails you can already find quite easily on that platform, targeting The Odyssey from channels I don’t even need to name to spark familiarity, will also feed on. And nothing will ever get better.

And it can all try to hide behind the veil of “historical accuracy,” but The Odyssey is neither historical nor accurate. It’s a fantasy dredged from myth, a 2800-year-old work of fiction that never presented itself as anything else, about a story some 400 years older than it. Homer wrote The Odyssey to preserve virtues, to hark back to something he thought was lost, to preach the perfect state of existence, defined by morality, bravery, loyalty, and – ironically given the backlash – hospitality. He didn’t write true history. The ancient writer could have told stories of bravery and adversity without a cyclops, which the 750–650 BCE version of the Internet would probably have called a betrayal of historical accuracy. Thankfully, of course, Homer would have probably just told them it was his story, and he could do as he liked.

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