What happens when the most offline man in Hollywood is asked to react to an online hate campaign against his movie? Well, we found out in a recent interview with Christopher Nolan ahead of the release of The Odyssey.
Nolan says that he doesn’t even own a smartphone, his network instead getting him the relevant information he needs without ever having to log on himself. He is aware of the online movement protesting the film, but had this to say about it to The Telegraph:
“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.”
The only opinions out about The Odyssey are from critics who have seen the film, issuing universally positive social media reactions this past week, some calling it Nolan’s best and others even saying it might be a frontrunner for Best Picture.
You could find a couple of negative reviews, but on investigation, on more than one occasion, random users were taking world premiere photos from actual critics and passing them off as their own, accompanied by a negative opinion based on…not seeing the film. Just another angle of the hate being directed at the movie.
What is all this about? You only need to check the comments on the Telegraph interview to find the highlights. The film is deemed “woke garbage” with the common complaint that it cast a black actress, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, and trans actor Elliot Page as a young Greek warrior (many, incorrectly, are saying he is playing Achilles). There are comments claiming the film is offensive to the Greek people by not using Greek actors. There are more grounded complaints, however, about the costume design and modern dialogue in the film, something Nolan also recently addressed in an interview with Channel 4:
“When you look at this world, when you look at the ancient world, people tend to view it in weird ways. There’s a lot of cultural prejudice. There’s a lot of elevating it because it’s old,” Nolan said. “When you go to the poem, what you find is something that is really earthy and grounded and accessible. So for me, in building the world of the film, when I talked to all the actors about it, I said, I just want to centre it on that and make it feel very fresh for modern audiences, and do away with some of those assumptions that aren’t based on anything logical.”
Though in a separate interview with the LA Times, he shrugged and said, “I was maybe being naïve, it might bite me on the ass, but I wanted an earthy narrative. To me it was a no-brainer.”
He’s also defended some of the costume choices, going into detail about the concept of “blackened bronze” and its potential use in an era with “fragmentary archeological records.”
Many behind the backlash movement believe this will translate into financial failure for Nolan’s Odyssey, though early box-office tracking and positive reviews from those who have actually seen the film do not indicate that at all. Nolan has only made one movie that has earned less than $500 million since 2006. So, we’ll see how things go a week from today.
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