After debuting in theaters last night, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ended months of noxious discourse with one simple trick: it’s simply a very good film. After critics offered near universal praise, audiences finally got a chance to see this Homeric epic on the big screen last night, and they were not disappointed. 97% of user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were positive, as were 96% of critics’ reviews.
In many ways, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Nolan has made a career out of heady blockbusters with broad appeal, such as The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, and more. Hell, even Dunkirk, a nearly wordless, Tarkovsky-esque picture about the horrors of war, made over half a billion dollars at the box office. While there have certainly been dips in his filmography (Tenet *cough, cough*), every movie he has directed has earned a fresh Rotten Tomatoes score from both audiences and critics.
Of course, this fairly untouchable track record didn’t stop right-wing provocateurs from dog piling on The Odyssey before even seeing it. Most of this “controversy” came down to casting decisions and early footage. On the less depressing end of the spectrum, some were understandably taken aback that Matt Damon was playing Odysseus rather than someone who comes across as more Greek and less Bostonian. Others took issue with costuming choices, such as Agamemnon’s helmet not being period-accurate, or withhow characters spoke in modern American English.
While there were a few reasonable concerns, a significant amount of the “backlash” could be chalked up to typical conservative culture-war nonsense. In response to Mexican-Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen of Troy, Elon Musk posted that “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.” Elliot Page was singled out by transphobic trolls for his role in the film. On X and other dingy corners of the internet, commentators lashed out at the film’s “DEI” casting. Many agitators seemed particularly upset given The Odyssey’s prominent place in the Western literary canon. Some called for boycotts, while others claimed the movie would flop.
To his credit, Nolan seemed completely unperturbed by the nonsense. “Comes with the territory,” he said in an interview with The Telegraph. “Look, 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.”
“Wondering if those who have spent months lambasting a film they haven’t seen will now, confronted by 5 star reviews for The Odyssey, reconsider their boycott, or whether they will dismiss the positive reviews as evidence of a woke conspiracy to overthrow Western civilisation?” wrote historian Tom Holland on X, who previously roasted Musk over his bad takes.
While we’ll have to wait a bit to see how the film does at the box office, it made $17.6 million on Thursday night, which is the highest any movie has made from previews so far this year. Another successful right-wing “boycott” accomplished.
