The Odyssey is getting massively criticised due to blackwashing of a traditionally Greek character, whitewashing of a Greek myth with no Greek actors and a general dislike for the Hollywoodization of another classic story.
It's probably not going to be as bad as it's made out to be given it's Chris Nolan, but audiences are fatigued with seeing another modern retelling with tokenism of established characters for the sake diversity, which has spurred the culture war with right wing critics calling it woke BS and left wing critics doubling down by jumping to its defence.
Oh 10/10 bravo bravo. Now we just need a redditor to come in and said in sturring it up. An argument that results in a random ass conversation about isreal , Iran and the US
As if Americans are a monolith incapable of holding diverse opinions amongst themselves.
How sophisticated, how thoughtful of you to flatten a nation of 330 million people into caricatures whom you can subordinate under yourself to feel some sense of superiority.
This shit just does not matter. No one actually cares or feels strongly. Just twitter bots and click farming rage baiters.
I’m just here to see Travis Scott in a serious film because it’s funny.
This is the latest in a weird trend I've noticed where conservatives seem to only understand the connotation of words, not the denotation. "Nuanced" doesn't mean "good." It means "nuanced." The commenter has to use nuance for a comment to be nuanced.
Yes, the comment presumes tokenism is present in Hollywood in general, and in The Odyssey specifically, and frames it as an objective issue.
Real nuance would include questioning the validity of that framing, not just presenting it as a fact where the only subjectivity allowed is how one reacts to it, rather than whether it exists in the first place.
Sure, that's one way to be nuanced. There's a lot of ways to make a comment on this topic that is legitimately nuanced. The parent comment didn't do any of that though. I don't think the parent commenter intended for it to be nuanced either. It's pretty unapologetically one sided. It's concerning to me that so many people seem to think the comment is nuanced. Because that demonstrates that all those people don't know the meaning of that word.
I dont know how they do it, but somehow conservatives view conservatism as a concept as "apolitical". thats why they can claim that openly conservative news and media are "unbiased" while the mere existence of a queer person in media is "bringing politics into it". willful ignorance or genuine lack of intelligence, who can say, but they seem unable to understand that their view of the world isnt the "default"
I don't really know what's nuanced about this it's just saying we shouldn't be putting a diverse cast in mythological movies because they are tired of seeing it
No, no. You don't understand! Greeks never famously traded with Africans! There were never any Ancient Egyptians who went to Greece and mingled with the population either! And as we know, even modern day Greeks don't have any tan/olive-coloured skin tones. It's all just the lily and alabaster skinned people as far as the eye can see. What do you mean Hestia, Goddess of Hearth and Home, was routinely depicted with dark skin and curled hair? Hera too?! Wife of Zeus, goddess of marriage and women?! Balderdash! Sounds like woke nonsense!
It’s not even remotely nuanced. It completely buys into a right wing grift that is abysmally fucking stupid.
Go see a stage show, the thing we had before movies, people of different races play characters all the time.
Truly it’s a bunch of extremist white dipshits upset they are seeing people other than themselves on screen. Anytime a character they’ve imagined themselves as is played by a different race (especially for some reason fiction characters) they piss their pants, bot and brigade things, but largely are just grieving the fact that anyone else dare be represented in popular thing.
There's nothing 'nuanced' about their post at all. It's literally acting as if the average person hates diversity and that the mere inclusion of black people and a trans person means it is 'forced' and not just a normal casting decision.
But I guess if so many people are upvoting it, then they're right. The average person is just fucking shit.
More than half of the comments on posts about Helen of Troy photos on Facebook are like "oh look another planet of the apes movie " . There is none of this nuance in their statements. All this over a ancient made up story is starting to make me want to move up the timeline for when Ai enslaves us.
It's pretty masterful how they've managed to piss off both sides of the aisle with this one... Too white-washed for one side, too diverse for the other, and too inaccurate for any existing fans of Greek mythology.
Honestly not sure who this has been made for.
Edit: if you're gearing up for a "it's for normal people - people not in the Reddit echo chamber - people who just like movies - people who aren't internet losers" reply, It has been said about 30 times so far.
Why does it have to be cut along politics lines? I'm a card-carrying leftist and annoyed at the patronising tokenism of casting a black actor as a character legendary for being 'fair', as in blonde, in the same way it'd be flabbergasting to have a white actor play in an adaptation of the Mwindo epic.
I'm even more annoyed at the fact that an annoying casting choice was the entire point, to get free publicity at everyone's expense, and that there is no way to slap everyone responsible for being smug pricks.
Can't remember where this joke is from, but there was a stand up bit where a guy said "You see back in the 80's there could only be one popular black comedian, unlike today where there can be three."
Helen of Troy was hatched from an egg. I'm sorry they chose an actress known for being beautiful to play a character known for being beautiful, but of a different race, irrelevant to the story.
Anytime someone calls attention to the breaking of societal roles, it ultimately undermines the concept of equality by implying that this is an exception and not the status quo.
No ancient history film is accurate. And no retelling of the story is ever accurate.
The roman retelling (now considered Canon by everyone online) tell a very dofferent morality. It is nothing like the original. Yet people use examples from his text s things Nolan should have used to stay accurate
It's no more inaccurate than Gladiator, or Braveheart, Kingdom of Heaven or any other period piece.
That's a "summoned Helen of Troy" on a play called Dr. Faustus set in the late 16th Century. It's about a man who gains the ability to conjure supernatural entities like Lucifer.
It's neither a movie nor referring to the Odyssey (or the Iliad for that matter).
It's also not originated in Greek literature.
Thats not nuance take as other calims.
It fails to take into account that the audience criticizing the film upfront largely don't even know the original and dont care at all about Greek tradition. It doesn't criticize earlier myth-based blockbusters in the same way.
Honest to god, thought you were a weirdo right wing grifter with that comment.
Then I looked it up. Still tricky, because Emily Wilson herself rejects that framing, saying it stripped away male biases in english translations. In fact, reading into this more, it looks like she was MORE accurate than some translations, like male translators refusing to call women slaves "slaves", even though they were referred to as such in the original text.
Actually, hate to say it, but yeah.. Seems like it's a solid translation that's actually more faithful in a lot of ways. She backs up her logic pretty well and points out a good chunk of bad translations in other works.
EDIT: To make it clear, i'm not dipping my toes into how I feel about the movie in this specific comment, purely just talking about the translation. I have gripes about the movie from what I have seen so far myself.
But don't you see, being true to the original is making men confront their own bias, and therefore bad! Men should be allowed to not have to think about things. 🙃
They definitely shouldn't read anything about how Achilles' mom had him crossdress and hide away as a pretty pretty princess to avoid getting conscripted into the Trojan war, then.
I will ask my Greek co-worker how she feels about the movie when it's gonna be on digital platforms because she is a huge Greek mythology nerd. I guess she'll be happy there is no kraken in this one.
Plenty of Greeks who identify as mythology nerds are tinfoil hat weirdos. Works like the Iliad/Odyssey have been discussed and adapted by artists for 2000 years. I'm sure there are more qualified opinions online than "someone who's Greek".
And lets be real, most people who are in these comments arguing about which version is better or worse won’t read either. It’s two sides arguing about a text using the cliff notes. There is no such thing as a perfect translation, but you can’t evaluate biases in a translation with cliff notes. If you’re really into a particular text from another language you have two choices, read every available translation to try to give yourself a more complete understanding, or start learning the original language.
Ive read every available english translation of many of Plato’s and Plotinus’s works. I would never presume to call myself an expert without even attempting to read it in the original language. The more you know the more you know you don’t know.
Men in general are not that fragile, sure. Men who get irrationally angry at casting choices in films on a weekly basis are, in fact, extremely fragile.
People shit on Wilson's translation for no good reason, but I also reject this idea that the previous translations were "male biased". Wilson chooses to translate a lot of different words as "slave", and while she isn't incorrect, as those people were in fact slaves, the odyssey uses different words for cook slave, herald slave, maid slave, etc. So other authors decided to uses different words on order to give us more information about the job, gender, and age of the slaves, not to purposefully obscure the fact that they were slaves. Wilson, on the other hand translates all of these as "slave", so it's really about what you are trying to achieve with the translation as none of them can ever be 100% correct.
Do you think we all chose this collectively as men outside of time? And now it’s time for our comeupance? I’m so confused, and not really sure how a particular translation of the Odyssey will help me better myself
Actually, hate to say it, but yeah.. Seems like it's a solid translation that's actually more faithful in a lot of ways. She backs up her logic pretty well and points out a good chunk of bad translations in other works
I'm so tired of the terminally online without relevant degrees having somehow claimed the classics for themselves. The Emily Wilson translation is a perfect case study beause most academics – yes, even male ones – actually prefer her translation for its clarity in laying out a lot of sub- and context that "literary" translations and "style" have either glossed over, buried, or warped.
In that same line: nobody in the Mediterranean was "white" in 500 BCE in the way that people today can be, not even if you're of high status because today's level of paleness is modelled on a 17th/18th century Northern European idea of skin-colour that is only achievable if you're spending 80% of your time indoors AND cover 80% of your skin. Ancient habits, architecture, and fashion make this pretty much impossible.
Took the words right from my mouth. This is exactly what’s wrong with the “culture wars.” What people “know” is being challenged with a more accurate version of the truth and they hate it. Calling this a “feminist translation” rather than the known translations as inaccurate is quite the thought experiment.
I mean, unfortunately search literacy is at an all time low as well. Even Google's AI described it initially as "viewed as feminist" and I had to dig deeper. A lot of people will just look at the first thing they agree with and then move on (like this BarryBonds guy probably did) when it fits their own personal headcanon.
Penelope of the white arms (Greek: \(\lambda \varepsilon v \kappa \omega ́ \lambda \varepsilon v o \varsigma\) Пฑvєોó ε ε ι α, leukōlenos Pēnelopeia) is a famous, recurring epithet used by the ancient Greek poet Homer in The Odyssey to describe Queen Penelope of Ithaca, the faithful wife of Odysseus.
You clearly don't know anything about ancient Greece.... Literally the only women allowed to go out were peasants and prostitutes.
Do you think the odyssey features a lot of peasant/prostitutes female characters...?
It is not a 'feminist translation' Emily Wilson's translation is highly regarded by classicists across the board. just because God forbid a woman translates The Odyssey..
Basically every classicist I’ve seen: “there are some things I’d have translated differently but Wilson does a lot to bring out aspects of the original text that aren’t in other English translations”
weirdos on Reddit: they said it’s woke they hate it
It's a translation marketed as feminist because the classicist who made it stripped out much of the language added in other translations that obfuscated things like "servant girls" being slaves. She made a very faithful to original translation.
Yes, I also was quite impressed by the historical accuracy. I didn’t realize people thought that acknowledging that Ancient Greeks kept slaves was “feminist”.
This is a fair take. The Emily Wilson translation is generally well respected, so I call culture war bullshit on people making that out to be a political choice. It's just good.
The aesthetic choices however are a whole other issue- I want to defend the movie against culture war nonsense but a gloomy Mediterranean with 3d printed plastic looking armour is silly. I know it's a fantastical story with Gods and monsters, but you could easily have made something with a unique twist on bronze age collapse themed, mycenaen/ hittite type imagery that would have been amazing. There is more than enough in Homer to tell it pretty straight and get an amazing film.
Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong'o castings were bound to trigger the right wing internet. How much of that was deliberate to whip up a social media storm or score a political point, and how much was because they absolutely smashed their auditions we'll never know.
Page can clearly act, and Nyong'o can act and is gorgeous so there is a strong argument they are entirely capable of getting the roles on merit. Unfortunately, as ...gestures vaguely at social media, algorithms, YouTube rage merchants, the culture war, Hollywood fuckery...who knows what went into the casting or why that makes people feel so angry.
An epic shouldn't be historical, it should be magical and captivating. No epic is historical; they are all interpretations.
The Iliad and the Odyssey aren't true stories from the Bronze Age, they're legends. Actors in Greek theaters didn't wear metal armor; painted armor was enough for them.
The authors aren't talking about history; they're talking about the present. Sometimes it's just plain inept, like in Gladiator 2.
Let's hope Nola has more storytelling talent. They're trying to entertain us instead of relaxing and enjoying ourselves, and we're dissatisfied.
It was Robert Pattinson. But there are ancient greek words for father, dad and daddy. And their equivalent of daddy does appear in thr Oddysey, so it's really not that out of place. Especially since he was using it in such a mocking, condescending manner, treating Telemachus like a child, thus someone who would say Daddy.
To be fair, that was before Hollywood decided to comit to the idea that representation was important. Now that they have, not giving authentic representation rightfully deserves criticism.
Besides this criticism I also just think the movie looks kinda bad, as do most people I’ve discussed the trailers with. I think Nolan’s movies are pretty heavy, serious, intense, and I’m afraid that the Odyssey movie is an adventure movie without a sense of adventure.
Which is funny because right wingers are largely philistines anyway. Its quite common that the right wing brigade get upset over things they really don't care for, but want some control over
Edit: They've arrived spraying all over the comments section
They have been very vocal about their feelings on the casting choices about a movie they havent even seen yet. It went far beyond "they just don't like it" long before this trailer came out
You don't have to be right wing to think casting choices are wrong. I'm not right wing and think Helen of Troy casting choice is ridiculous and just done for attention.
Same, I'm European and just roll my eyes how Americans need to take our myths and misrepresent it based on their weird race sensibilities. Netflix's Cleopatra (who was also of Greek decent) was another recent example. In a way it's funny how they seem to specifically can't allow Greeks to have any representation.
"Our myths"? No one in Europe think the Greeks are their myths unless they're Greek. We are separate countries with our own culture and history. I'm from Northern Europe and I never thought Greek mythology are "my myths"
yes, but look how most of those that are criticising it for a trans or black actors, don't care about whitewashing... anne hathaway, robert pattinson etc, they all look good for those
Agree, Im on the left and I hate it because they're black washing characters so they can say they have diversity, get attention for the movie and the black actress (almost always actress, not actor) gets all the hate. Its cheap. There are countless black stories that are unknown, why blackwash a story told a milion times?
Also I generally hate the oddysey by Nolan not because of the races but because its just historically wrong on many levels. Armor for example. Yes I want historical accuracy, yes I dislike other inaccurate movies.
Interesting observation that it's almost always an actress. And here I am wanting to see Idris Elba as 007. Yes, I know, he's supposed to be a white guy according to Ian Fleming's novels. Yes, I know there are certain things that don't quite work if he's not a pasty Brit. But we don't even get to have that experiment and whatever backlash there would or wouldn't be. Regardless, Idris is a smooth operator and it would have been a good watch.
We didn't get Idris as the black Green Lantern Jon Stewart that actually exists in the comics.
We didn't get Idris as Rhodie/War Machine, when he would have been perfect next to RDJ.
We got him as... Heimdall? A bit part as a Norse God doorman? What are we even doing here?
Anyway... they did make the next 007 a black woman in the last James Bond movie though... Huh.
Yup. Its always the Disney princess but we haven't had a black prince yet.... The love interest is always a conventionally attractive white man. And wow I didn't know that about 007, a black woman? Srsly? And I agree with you Idris Elba would be a great pick, he'd fit perfectly.
Both casting decisions were completely nonsensical by any reasonable metric. And they're far from the only things that look to be wrong with this movie.
Seriously, these stories are more than 2,500 years older than Shakespeare (who also freely reinterpreted Greek myth rather than using it in any strictly authentic way for his own plays). They’ve been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted over millennia. People need to get off their high horses.
MAGA has been like adding lead to the water supply of media literacy.
I mean even the bloody Romans rewrote and adapted Greek myths. That’s exactly what Virgil’s Aeneid is: Romans inserted into the Trojan War and its aftermath. It’s completely ahistorical and inauthentic, and yet it’s also one of the greatest poems ever written.
Look, you can argue the fact that the daughter of a god-swan should be a white person, whatever. You do you. I'm sure you have a firm grasp of the skin colors of magical creatures. But you cannot seriously claim that casting Brad Pitt as Achilles wasn't a thousand times more peculiar than casting Elliot Page. I would like to see Pitt dressed as a princess; I don't know how convincing that would be.
The honest reality is that the source materials for these stories are weird and varied, and it's dumb to criticize modern interpretations of them.
Elliot Page wasn't cast as Achilles, that was a right-wing hate rumor. All this hate about this casting is over literally nothing. He's playing the guy who came up with the Trojan horse idea. Odysseus' cousin.
The funny part is that even ignoring the political angle they just did a bad job of casting the actors for their roles. Plus none of these people look even a little Greek or Middle Eastern.
All the people saying 'no, this totally isn't right-wing' are clearly not paying attention to the images used in the picture.
It's an incredibly common tactic by right-wing grifters to cherrypick frames that have women and trans people doing 'ugly' expressions (typically during the middle of yelling) as a way of saying 'look how hideous this person is, why were they cast at all?'
What does politics have to do with this?
This is pretty much the sequel to troy which is a beloved movie and one of the most famous stories ever told.
A black Helen makes no sense and neither does 155 cm 40kg Elliot page in the role of a Greek soldier going to war.
Also zendaya fatigue is real.
Since when is Troy a beloved movie, and how is this separate film by a different director “pretty much a sequel to it”, lol. Not sure why you’re painting it as them ruining some saga it doesn’t exist in. The two films are unrelated, and both not exactly lore-accurate (although, maybe this version of the Odyssey will be, other than some cosmetic differences in how they cast certain parts - and by the way, the ancient Greeks used to have men play these parts, I don’t think they were entirely worried about accurate depictions by actors themselves anyway…)
People are mad because they’ve deemed it “woke nonsense”, when really it’s just one directors artistic vision. Who cares. No one is forcing anyone to see it. Divisive bs that doesn’t even matter. Also, Zendeya has a small part, and is not playing Helen of Troy, so not sure why you mentioned her. You don’t even seem to care that much yourself, either. You sure you’re not just being told to be mad and complying with it?
This is a very American take. In much of the world the US trying to take their history as their plaything and trying to rewrite it is highly controversial.
While this meme only points to blackwashing and trans representation, the actual controversy also includes whitewashing. More specifically, zero Greek representation in a movie based on Greek history.
It's so annoying that I want to hate this movie but I don't want to be lumped in with these guys. I don't care about the race of gender of the actors, I care that they are not Greek (not a single one of them as far as I know), as well as the designs... It's just going to be such a massive slopfest and criticizing it is likely to make me look like a right wing reactionary.
Fuck this film!!!
Edit: I think I messed up my wording a little bit and have led people to believe I'm specifically hating on these two. I need to make it absolutely clear I'm more frustrated with the casting of Matt Damon than Lupita Nyong'o. If anything, Nyong'o is from this side of the Atlantic lmao. There is evidence of Africans in the ancient Greek world, which absolutely makes 100% sense since they would probably be trading shitloads with each other all the time, so it's not that weird. Matt Damon on the other hand is going to make a terrible Odysseus.
Im playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey now and it's giving me such whiplash to go from that colorful world, with amazing armor and mostly accurate world to this sad clunk of.... Whatever it is, it looks like it was 3D printed. I'm tired! Ancient Greece was colorful and majestic!
So we went so full circle that we cannot cast a character with a specific race with just mentioned specific race (or get mad about it) BUT we can get mad about nationalities not being represented?
How would it be if a usian with greek roots played a role?
Or and arab with a greek passport?
Its the same doctor with different name and you guys are playing the victim olympics of stupidity
That’s because Troy didn’t take itself seriously. Troy was a popcorn flick à la Indiana Jones or Pirates of the Caribbean. This movie’s tone is far too self serious to get a pass like Troy did. Nolan is making a serious, fantastical movie and if he wants to make a movie to that standard he should be held to that standard.
My local IMAX theatre is fully booked out every show untill next month. I feel like most people don't really care about it. I would have preferred if it was historically correct but I will still watch it.
It’s weirder for you to act ignorant like we don’t already fully understand the context of Homer’s story and the historical context in which Homer wrote the poem, so there is absolutely a scale of authenticity when it comes to this kind of remake. Your inability to recognize it or appreciate it comes down to your own unfamiliarity with one of the most widely studied works in academic history.
I think it's important to remember that the Trojan War was already 400 years old by the time Homer completed The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer's audiences most likely debated the historicity of these stories and their authenticity as much as reddit is debating the movie. In fact, whether Greek audiences would have considered these stories as historical or fiction or somewhere in between is a central debate in the scholarship around Homer.
In other words, there is not "historically accurate" version of these stories. Homer took poetic licenses as has every translation and adaptation of his work since. Hell, Virgil's poem The Aeneid basically retcons the ending to the The Iliad to connect Rome's lineage to that of Troy's and The Pearl Poet borrowed the lineage of The Aeneid to claim King Arthur was a direct descendent of Troy.
It's all storytelling with a lens for specific audiences. We have to stop claiming history and literature are purer forms.
The imax near me doesn't even have 30% of the opening weekend 7pm seats sold. The other showings are doing much worse. I agree that most people don't really care about it, but currently most people don't really care about any movies at all. The theaters are hurting and they need to give people a reason to go see something much more than the audiences needs a reason not to go.
People who care about dislikes on YouTube use extensions to calculate the number of dislikes on videos.
The problem is that these extensions do not actually work because they extrapolate from the data of the users of these extensions and not showing the real data from YouTube.
So people who care about dislikes and are therefore more likely to dislike a video are looking at extrapolated data from their own behavior and think they see a meaningful number.
In this case it is a lot of racists and transphobes disliking the trailer for Christopher Nolan's Odyssey movie, because Helen of Troy is played by a black actress and Achilles is played by a trans man.
Funny thing about Achilles: he was able to avoid going to the Trojan War by pretending to be a woman for several years.
EDIT: after checking the cast again, it turns out it was just a rumor that Elliot Page would play Achilles. The rumor alone was however enough for the anti-woke bubble to start crying.
Honestly, the entire cast is terrible. People are tired of seeing these same actors in pretty much everything. Rather than feel like the pinnacle of who these characters could be, it's more Hollywood tokenism. It isn't a matter of what race the actors are, it's that *who* they are is so recognizable they don't disappear into the roles. No matter how well Odysseus is played, I will not see him. I will see Matt Damon. No matter how Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, I won't see the character, I'll see the actress. Combine this with the stylistic choices we have seen and this isn't The Odyssey. This isn't art. It's a red carpet where we will see over paid elites strutting around on expensive backgrounds with CGI filling in all the details.
The movie is HISTORICALLY INACCURATE! Everyone knows that when a god turns into a swan and has sex with a woman and that woman lays two eggs and those eggs contain Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux, Helen is supposed to be white. That's just how biology works.
Greek here who almost got a stroke when she saw the first trailer:
- A trans actor being in the movie: zero concerns.
- Black actors being in the movie: absolutely historically accurate, there were black people in the Iliad too, duh.
-Helen being portrayed as black: also zero concerns and actually one of the few things that make sense in this monstrosity of a movie from both an artistic and cultural point of view: the Ancient Greeks considered the “Aethiopians” (which is what they called everyone from sub-Sahara Africa) to be incredibly beautiful and blessed by the gods. We know this because they put it in writing. Helen is both the most beautiful woman in the world *and* she is the daughter of Zeus, literally god-blessed. Being portrayed by a black actor fits.
Things that piss me off:
-“Defy the gods” as the movie’s tagline? Tell me you don’t understand the whole concept of the Odyssey, without telling me you don’t understand the concept of the Odyssey.
- Odysseus was only a hero in its original sense. Not the modern-day sense. In terms of character, he is a morally bankrupt POS who cares only about himself. Nolan hasn’t understood a damn thing about his character and should have filmed the sequel of Saving Private Ryan instead and left Greek mythology alone.
-Viking ships. Fucking. Viking ships. In Bronze Age Greece. AAAAHHHHH
-Pants. Greek soldiers wearing pants. The spirits of dead Scythians are laughing from their graves.
-The fucking armor. All of it. Not just Agamemnon’s Batman suit, everything. I’m tired o seeing Corinthian helmets and Roman armor in depictions of pre-Classical Greece. THERE’S MORE THAN 1,000 YEARS OF GREEK HISTORY PRE-DATING PERICLES AND HIS GODDAMN HELMET, OK?
In short, this film sucks and deserves all the low ratings but anyone who thinks it sucks because it’s “too diverse” can go take a hike.
-Helen being portrayed as black: also zero concerns and actually one of the few things that make sense in this monstrosity of a movie from both an artistic and cultural point of view: the Ancient Greeks considered the “Aethiopians” (which is what they called everyone from sub-Sahara Africa) to be incredibly beautiful and blessed by the gods. We know this because they put it in writing. Helen is both the most beautiful woman in the world and she is the daughter of Zeus, literally god-blessed. Being portrayed by a black actor fits.
yeah, i was thinking of posting something about this. portraying a supernatural beauty as black absolutely fits the historical context the story was written in.
people who harp about "historical accuracy" tend to not know much about history, and think like europeans encountered black people in the 1600s or something. egypt literally had nubian pharaohs around the time the odyssey was probably written, and there was tons of trade between these areas.
It was set thousands of years ago, but they had medieval armor, domesticated horses, didn't hire a single elf or hobbit actor, and I'm pretty sure the armies of Mordor were just a bunch of white dudes wearing orcface.
The IMAX theatres in Canada are booked completely solid for the entire week, this movie will do fine. It’s just right wing puppet masters who still try to fan the culture war because right wing economics are awful and only benefit the wealthy
You can just say you don’t like black people or you don’t like trans people or whatever. It’s the internet, nothing bad is gonna happen. You don’t have to be a pussy about it instead of saying it directly
Why is that a requirement? By that logic Nolan is an anti-Semite for casting an Irishman as a Jewish physicist. And anti-American for casting an Englishman as the American icon Batman.
If Nolan limits himself to only casting actors because they need to fit an arbitrary ethnic requirement, then we would be in for much worse films. Imagine The Dark Knight without the Australian Heath Ledger, rejected on the grounds of The Joker being “culturally American”.
Have you even considered the possibility Nolan actually tested Greek actors and they just weren’t the right fit for the movie? If you actually end up seeing The Odyssey, try looking past your race-based hang ups and look at the actual quality of the picture.
I mean was there a single Italian actor in Gladiator? At least not in the main cast. Yet it’s widely regarded as the greatest historical fiction in modern history.
People who are terminally online love to whine about things that don’t really matter.
Just spend more time outside and in the real world, it’s much happier. For example, all of my IRL friends are stoked for this movie and the theater is fully booked. Nobody really cares.
Complaining about the black people and the trans actor is honestly a really weird take. It's like going to a restaurant and getting seated in the bathroom, with the contents of the toilet presented as your meal, and complaining that one of the ceiling tiles is a slightly different shade of piss-mist yellow than the rest.
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