The Odyssey Is Already a Critical Hit - But One Opinion (Not You, Elon) May Matter More
Ahead of the highly anticipated release of The Odyssey, the embargo on social media reactions has finally lifted.
This means that critics can share their (spoiler-free) thoughts on social platforms, although they won’t count towards that all-important Rotten Tomatoes score, which will accumulate once the full reviews drop.
Still, based on social media reception so far, it looks like The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, is already a critical darling.
A Variety reviewer described Nolan as a “visionary” and called the film a “work of art,” while a Fandango critic said it was an “absolute triumph and a crowning cinematic achievement from one of the great filmmakers of our time.” A Time Out reviewer claimed that it is “packed with career-best work from the stacked cast,” while a NextBestPicture critic called it a “colossal achievement of scale, even by Nolan's standards.”
With praise like that, expectation for the movie is now sky-high — but the thing is, we might be focusing on the wrong opinions.
What Is Elon Musk Saying About The Odyssey?
On the subject of wrong opinions, X CEO and all-around controversial public figure Elon Musk has been deriding the movie for months. The main issue for Musk and the troll army he's inflaming seems to centre around The Odyssey's perceived “wokeness." The outrage specifically focuses on how Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong’o are part of the film. According to the right, the presence of transgender and Black actors in The Odyssey destroys the integrity of the film: a film that, it should be noted, is based on a myth and also features literal monsters.
Musk even went as far as calling Nolan a “worm” on X, saying: “Chris Nolan desecrated Homer and grovelled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar. What a worm.”
How Does Tom Holland Fit Into This?
As the culture war surrounding the film continued, Tom Holland weighed in — but not the one you think. Tom Holland of Spider-Man fame is indeed playing a pivotal role in the film as Telemachus, Odysseus’ son. But there’s another Tom Holland whose opinion matters more than Musk, and even possibly more than critics too.
This Tom Holland is a historian and author. He hosts the popular podcast, The Rest is History, and previously praised The Odyssey as “the best cinematic adaptation of a Greek myth I have ever seen” in a post on X.
Later, as he posted a Guardian article rounding up critics’ reviews on X, Holland seemingly aimed Musk and his cronies as he wrote: More praise for “The Odyssey from people who - shockingly - have actually waited to see it before giving their opinion.”
As another X user shared this comment, Musk wrote in reply: “Tom Holland is such a cuck.” Given that he didn’t present any valid arguments against Holland’s point, one can only assume that Musk hasn’t got any. It also hugely weakens his case against the film. After all, if a literal historian doesn’t have concerns about historical accuracy, then there’s no reason for Musk to continue to pretend that he does.
Which Translation Of The Odyssey Inspired Nolan?
It should be noted that Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey story was partly inspired by a newer translated version by Emily Wilson. Her translation, which came out in 2017, was the first to be done by a woman.
Inevitably, when her translation was first published, she received a lot of furore. And in an interview with Vulture, she explored how these culture wars intersected with her work.
“The people who are getting angry haven’t spent years studying Homeric Greek,” she said. “There are people who have conspiratorial ideas about how professionals don’t know anything: ‘Here’s this Ivy League professor; she obviously doesn’t know as much as me, and I did my own research.’ That’s one element of the culture war. There’s a lot of anxiety about gender, race, and whiteness tied to the discourse about greatness. I don’t think any of that has anything to do with me, but somehow people have latched on to this. I think it’s because the coverage of my translation, when it came out in 2017, had the word woman in the headline. People get threatened by that.”
As for Nolan’s movie restarting this culture war, in which she is once again in the firing line, Wilson added: “It’s very weird. There’s a whole new resurgence of the culture war with the Christopher Nolan movie coming up. I thought it had all died down. I try to remind myself quite regularly that it has nothing to do with me because I genuinely believe it’s this strange cultural phenomenon.”
