Director Christopher Nolan has responded to the MAGA “meltdown” over his upcoming film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, slapping down criticisms from conservative corners complaining that the trailers have been too “woke,” calling their argument “irrelevant.”
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Nolan dismissed such critics during a new interview with the Telegraph. As the Daily Beast explained, “His comments come after MAGA commentators — including X owner Elon Musk — trashed the film for months over Nolan’s choice to cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and trans actor Elliot Page as the Greek warrior Sinon.”
“Musk, Newsmax host Robert Finnerty, and more have slammed the film, which isn’t out until July 17, as a ‘rewriting of history’ and Nolan as ‘racist’ for casting a Black actress in a fictional Greek character’s role,” added the Daily Beast. As the outlet implied, The Odyssey is not based on a historical text, but a work of mythology.
But Nolan had another basis for his rejection of critics like Musk, dismissing them entirely.
“Comes with the territory,” Nolan said. “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.”
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He compared the situation to his experience working on the Batman franchise, noting, “Remember, I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman. When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learned over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”
According to the Daily Beast, “Despite Nolan’s cavalier attitude about MAGA’s crusade against The Odyssey — which sold out its first round of tickets a year in advance and crashed ticket-sale apps when sales opened this year — the movie studio has taken note. Universal restricted comments on the film’s official X account following a barrage of hateful posts. Musk has used the platform to engage with posts calling Nolan ‘racist against Greek people’ and trolling the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which he claims influenced the director to cast a ‘diverse’ actress in order to meet Oscars eligibility requirements.”
But as the Daily Beast notes, “Nolan won Best Picture for Oppenheimer, a film with a mostly white male cast that met diversity standards through its production team.”
According to Forbes, legitimate film critics who have actually seen the film have been almost unanimously positive, “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.”
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