Critics Love “The Odyssey” Almost As Much As The Bigots Hate It
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened last week to some of the best reviews of his career, sitting at 96 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from 198 reviews, while a loud corner of the internet spent the lead-up attacking Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy and hurling transphobic abuse at Elliot Page. Nolan has a word for all of it: “irrelevant”.
What The Critics Are Actually Saying
The reviews read like a group chat that just got out of the cinema. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars, praising its “thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair”. Rolling Stone‘s David Fear called it “arguably Christopher Nolan’s best work after 2017’s Dunkirk” and said the film leaves you with “an overall sensation of awe”. Empire‘s John Nugent, another five stars, put it more bluntly: “The scale and scope here is, frankly, jaw-detaching.”
Not everyone swooned in unison. Variety‘s Guy Lodge admired “a genuinely grand, gutsy vision” while finding the emotion a little remote, and The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney thought the film “uneven”. Even the sceptics, though, agree Matt Damon’s Odysseus, Anne Hathaway’s Penelope and Tom Holland’s Telemachus anchor something worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find.
Long before anyone saw a frame, conservative commentator Matt Walsh complained that Nyong’o, an Oscar winner, was not believable as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, and Elon Musk amplified the pile-on, claiming the casting was an awards-diversity play. Nyong’o, who plays both Helen and Clytemnestra, barely blinked. “This is a mythological story,” she told Elle, adding that the cast was “representative of the world” and that she would not waste time defending the role.
The Transphobic Campaign Against Elliot Page
Page plays Sinon, and the abuse aimed at him was ugly enough that the film’s final trailer racked up around 600,000 dislikes on YouTube and, according to Newsweek, the studio restricted comments on promotional posts. Nolan was having none of it. “It was really thrilling to work with Elliot again,” he told Rolling Stone. “He did an incredible job.” He told The Telegraph the pre-release outrage was “always irrelevant, because no one… knows what the film actually is yet.”
Have you noticed the pattern? The people angriest about the film are the ones who have not seen it. Page does not play Achilles, as most claimed. He plays a soldier named Sinon, the messenger who delivers the news of the Trojan Horse. The trolls got their ratio. Nolan got his rave reviews, and the rest of us got three hours of Matt Damon fighting his way home.
