NOLAN DEFILES TEMPLE OF ODYSSEY
HOLLYWOOD director Christopher Nolan’s journey into the Greek classics has descended into a woke battle over the skin colour of the ancient world’s most beautiful woman and mental stability of Trojan warhorse hero Odysseus as ‘complicated’. Who? Damon?
Its much anticipated release next month, The Odyssey is copping a social media clubbing over Nolan’s desecration of Homer’s epic adventure story using what critics say is political and ideological fantasy to fit a diversity quota set by Hollywood.
US talk show host Matt Walsh says, “This is the approach that now defines Hollywood, they are riding rough shod like a mongol horde over every classic they can get their hands on”.
Snow White, ‘fairest of them all’? Little Mermaid. Wicked.
How about Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships in Homer’s ancient tale? The blind bard never describes what Helen looks like, only that she is regarded as divine whose beauty drove men mad, hair and pale skin, ‘like the shell she hatched from’ (Zeus was disguised as a swan when he seduced Leda, a queen consort of Sparta).
In Homer’s odyssey, Helen left with Trojan prince Paris and triggered the 10-year war in which she would be caught and returned to Sparta 10 years after Odysseus rolled out the gift horse carrying Greeks before spending the next 10 years getting home to his family in Ithaca. After all that.
Walsh says Nolan has betrayed the Homeric epic and ‘spirit of the time’ seen through those who lived it then, not now. The film is Batman dark, brooding and dressed in cheap 3D-printed armour. The ‘script’ is plagued with lazy dialogue. It doesn’t sound like people in ancient Greece. Not even Odysseus’ son Tom Holland (Telemachus): ’My dad is coming home’?
Walsh notes in one epic moment Odysseus leads his men into battle and shouts, “Let’s go!” Maybe if you’re running onto a footy field or setting off on a bike ride. Brad Pitt (as Achilles) never sounded so benign and matter-of-factly in Troy 2004 (which Nolan apparently was supposed to have filmed).
As for the ancient world’s greatest warrior Achilles, Nolan also has attracted social media criticism over having chosen Eliot Page, who came out as a transgender man in 2020, to play a Greek male described throughout history as a superhuman warrior on the battlefield. Achilles heel? He probably shared a bed with his brothers, possibly Patroclus with whom he shared his tent. But transgender?
“When that movie came out we didn’t realise that within the span of a decade Hollywood would completely forget how to make or refuse to make good historical films,” Walsh says. “Nolan set out to subvert a classic, to bludgeon a monumental story with flat writing and incoherent creative decisions along with the modern mandates of feminism, transgenderism and anti-whiteism.”
Interestingly, American singer Eartha Kitt played Helen of Troy in 1950. Orson Welles staged an experimental production based on the Faust legend called ‘Time Runs in Paris’ in which Kitt is the eternal feminist. Critics said Kitt didn’t just perform Helen, she redefined what the role could mean.
Welles, “was never interested in mythology as a museum piece. He was interested in what happened when you broke the frame and let a living human being collide with an archetype”.
And here we are.
Trojan footnote:
ON June 10, a 12-tonne Trojan Horse replica from the 2004 film set of ‘Troy’ was gifted to the city of Canakkale on the Dardanelles Strait in western Turkey. Founded in 3000BC, Troy is a UNESCO-listed World Heritage site occupied by nine different settlements, now “dotted with poppies and scampering squirrels”. The site was abandoned in the sixth century AD.
The Trojan war took place here around 1200BC and lasted 10 years until the siege and the city’s defeat at the hands of tricky Odysseus.
The ruins of ancient Troy also are in the same area where Allied troops suffered heavy losses in 1915 when they tried to seize the Dardanelles Strait from the Ottoman Empire in WW1.
