We're still a few weeks out from the release of Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated action-fantasy epic The Odyssey. Based on Homer's Greek saga following Odysseus's journey home after the Trojan War, the film is a star-studded affair featuring Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Charlize Theron as Calypso and Zendaya as Athena.
Audiences are excited to see the film, as evidenced by some ticket-buying snafus earlier this month. Variety reported that the AMC ticketing app experienced some delays, with moviegoers waiting up to an hour to purchase tickets. Fandango's website also experienced a few lag times. The film, which boasts a $250 million budget, is expected to be one of the biggest blockbusters of the year.
Aside from the ticket drama, there's been quite a lot of online controversy around the film. Here's the latest on all the chatter, and we'll keep adding more as the release date approaches.
The Lupita Nyong'o Casting Drama
When it was announced that Lupita Nyong'o had been cast as Helen of Troy, all hell broke loose online among conservatives and right-wing commentators. Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh posted several tweets about the casting decision on X. "We're told that we shouldn't object to Helen of Troy being portrayed as a black woman," Walsh posted. "And yet if a major Hollywood studio made a film set in Africa and cast a white woman as 'the most beautiful woman in Africa,' those same people would literally riot in the street. If, say, Sydney Sweeney was cast in the role, they'd be driven to murderous violence. We all know this is the case."
Elon Musk, who has been critical of Nolan's film since early this year, agreed with Walsh's sentiments. As HuffPost senior reporter Brittany Wong wrote in May, Musk is a believer in the great replacement theory, "a white nationalist conspiracy theory that white populations are being replaced by immigrants from majority nonwhite nations, particularly from Africa." Nyong'o is Kenyan-Mexican; she was born in Mexico and grew up in Kenya.
Musk also believes that white people are a "rapidly diminishing minority," Wong reported.
Nyong'o responded to the racist backlash in an Elle interview: "This is a mythological story," she said. "Our cast is representative of the world. I'm not spending my time thinking of a defense. The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not."
Nolan also defended the casting choice. "The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen," the director said. "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."
So, Is Elliot Page Gonna Be Achilles?
The short answer is, we don't know right now. Rumors have been swirling that Elliot Page has been cast as Achilles in The Odyssey. While Page's exact role has not been confirmed, he is listed on the film's IMDb casting page.
In the trailer, Page's character asks Odysseus, "Who's looking after your wife and son?" Musk called Page's potential casting as Achilles "the dumbest and most twisted things I've heard." Other pundits also criticized the speculative casting.
"We've gone from Brad Pitt to a girl who dresses as a guy, who's 5'1'', 118 pounds," Newsmax host Rob Finnerty said in a transphobic rant on his show, referring to Pitt's role as Achilles in the film Troy. "That's the person who is going to be playing the greatest warrior in history because, to the left, that is normal."
Page came out as gay in 2014 and announced that he was transgender in 2020.
All of this mess could be for nothing as neither the studio nor the director have confirmed Page's role. There's also speculation that Page is portraying Elpenor, a member of Odysseus' crew. In Homer's story, Elpenor meets up with Odysseus in the underworld after he falls off the boat and drowns.
Page worked with Nolan previously on Inception. We'll update this once we know more about his role.
Rapper Travis Scott Is Cast As A … Rapping Bard?
In May, Nolan confirmed to Time magazine that Travis Scott had been cast as a bard, a poet who recites stories about heroes. "A war, a man, a trick — a trick to break the walls of Troy," Scott says, as images of the Trojan War appear in a TV spot for the film. "It's burning, screaming to the ground."
On social media, many users questioned why Scott had been cast in the film after he appeared in commercials promoting it.
"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," Nolan said.
Scott has had five No. 1 hits on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 charts. He wrote the theme song for one of Nolan's previous films, Tenet.
What's Up With All the American Accents and Modern Language in the Trailer?
When the trailer was released in May, critics called out the American accents and modern language used in the film. On Reddit, one user quipped, "The way characters talk feels very modern and very off-putting, in movies like this you expect seeing dialogue more elegant and poetic."
Perhaps viewers were expecting more thees, thous and haths in the conversation.
Some quotes from the trailer? Antinous confronts Telemachus and says, "You're pining for a daddy you didn't even know, like some sniveling bastard."
Here's what classicist Emily Wilson had to say about using plain English to reimagine The Odyssey, according to IGN. "It may be tempting to imagine that a translation of a very ancient poem would be somehow better if it used the language of an earlier era. Mild stylistic archaism is often accepted without question in translations of ancient texts and can be presented as if it were a mark of authenticity. But of course, the English of the 19th or early 20th century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today."
Wilson translated The Odyssey into plain language in 2018. She was the first woman to do so, the New York Times reported.
'Historical Inaccuracies' … On A Fictional Tale
People on social media also criticized the film's costume design, saying the armor of Benny Safdie's character, Agamemnon, looks like Batman's. "Had no idea Ancient Greeks used Batman helmets and sailed in Viking ships. Seriously, how hard is it to look at the picture of what the real thing looked like?" one person wrote in the comments section of the trailer of the film, IGN reported.
Another commenter said it's actually not about being true to the story, but something else: "I think the issue people have isn't really about historical accuracy and more about the costumes looking boring as s**t." Others on Reddit made the same point.
Nolan defended the look to Time magazine. "There are Mycenaean daggers that are blackened bronze," Nolan said. "The theory is they probably could have blackened bronze in those days. You take bronze, you add more gold and silver to it and then use sulfur. With Agamemnon, Ellen [Mirojnick], our costume designer, is trying to communicate how elevated he is relative to everyone else. You do that through materials that would be very expensive."
Beyond that, The Odyssey is based on fictional retellings of epic stories featuring Greek mythology. Shouldn't there be plenty of room for interpretation at this point?
'The Odyssey' Is Filmed on IMAX 70mm. Do We Have to See It in IMAX?
Last summer, some IMAX tickets for The Odyssey went on sale — a full year before its release in theaters — and quickly sold out. It's the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX's 70mm cameras. Nolan is a huge proponent of IMAX, having shot The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer partially in the large format.
The reality is that there just aren't enough IMAX theaters for everyone to see the film this way. Currently, only 24 theaters in the United States are showing the film in Nolan's preferred 70 mm format, according to IMAX's website.
The Odyssey is in theaters on July 17.
