Conservatives Who Tried to Make ‘The Odyssey’ Fail Are Spiraling After Its Success

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey made its way into theaters this weekend… and the tide around it is changing faster than the waters that Odysseus and his men had to go through.

Right-wing spaces have tried to create controversies around the film for months, in the name of supposed “historical accuracy.” These have ranged from complaining about the movie using certain modern words like “let’s go” and “dad” (which Nolan himself has since justified beautifully), to the diversity of the film’s massive ensemble cast. The casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, and of trans actor Elliot Page as Sinon, have both been pretty loud and annoying talking points… and they’ve been cited as reasons why the movie was destined to fail. Now, we know that is not the case at all.

Gary Buechler, also known by his handle of @Nerdrotic, has dedicated plenty of videos and social media posts to The Odyssey‘s casting “controversies” and to speculation that the movie would flop. Once he posted his official review — accompanied by an AI-generated thumbnail and the banner of “an epic disappointment” — a number of replies on Twitter began to criticize him. It wasn’t just that he stoked the flames of the discourse (as he has for virtually every superhero project with a diverse lead released in the past few years), it was that he continued to double down even after the reality of opening weekend.

Right-wing YouTuber and Comicsgater Jon Del Arroz has also been found at the scene of the proverbial crime, having posted for months about how he believed The Odyssey was going to flop. (He claims to have read the original story “in multiple translations”, just like he’s previously called himself the biggest “expert” of female superhero characters.) Over the weekend, his video review of the film was titled “Nolan’s Odyssey RUINED Everything Homer Built And I’m FURIOUS!” And in the days since, his Twitter is filled with newer posts calling the movie “high anti-white propaganda”, a reflection of “how illiterate our society is”, and asking “why are so many people shilling for this when everyone knows it’s bad?” These tweets have also been met with a similar response to Buechler’s posts.

“Diva There’s a Cyclops in the Movie”

Even beyond these usual suspects, a handful of other posts attempting to reframe The Odyssey as a mess have gone viral… because people are more confidently dunking on them. Conservative pundit Michael Knowles tried to get engagement by tweeting: “Nobody liked The Odyssey.” …before admitting in one of the replies that he did. And while there are valid conversations to be had about the movie’s lack of Greek actors, some accounts have continued to decry any non-white person’s presence in the movie, especially now that footage of Asian actor Will Yun Lee’s performance as Anchialos has been made public. As @falseroxy very eloquently put it, the complaints about supposed historical accuracy ring a little hollow when “diva there’s a cyclops in the movie.”

The supposed controversies have taken on a new context now that The Odyssey is out into the world. The uproar around Page and Nyong’o’s casting has felt especially ironic now that (spoiler alert) they each have, at best, a few minutes of screen time… which ultimately amounts to a fraction of the film’s nearly-three-hour-long runtime. And the overall consensus surrounding The Odyssey is anything but “an epic disappointment”: the film holds a 95% positive critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, and has had the biggest live-action opening for any film released so far this year with a whopping $264 million worldwide and counting. It is, by far, the biggest opening weekend of Nolan’s career outside of his work on The Dark Knight trilogy.

And even beyond those numbers, the fact of the matter is: The Odyssey has gotten people talking. It has driven plenty of people towards Homer’s original epic poem, dissecting specific passages or storylines, or the differences between the various translations that have been popularized over the years. It has led people to campaign for other epic works to get the modern big-screen treatment (and I am particularly fond of the suggestion that Nosferatu and Werewulf director Robert Eggers should tackle Moby Dick). Its select number of 70MM IMAX reels (and theaters capable of playing them) have provoked a conversation about film formats and the very human work that went into assembling the finished product. That’s not to say that the conversation has been universally, 100% positive… but the beauty of art is that it shouldn’t be. And either way, those conversations are much more constructive and nuanced than the right-wing culture war that these accounts attempted to start.

(featured image: Universal Pictures)

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