Christopher Nolan Is Too Kind in Response To Nerd Backlash Over ‘The Odyssey'

When it comes to major motion pictures, the nerds won. We did! For better and for worse. Just look at what is being offered at movie theaters. It’s wall-to-wall genre pictures, with the occasional romantic comedy trying to break out. Comic book movies are on the downswing of their popularity, but there will still be several this year, in addition to a bunch of hyper-accurate video game films. There is lots to choose from, and yet nerds are still finding a way to tie themselves into angry knots over perceived inaccuracies in a movie with a cyclops.

The most recent trailer has sparked backlash due to people wearing armor that folks say wouldn’t have been accessible at the time, a more modern vernacular being used, and rapper Travis Scott being a bard in the film. It’s all very silly. I don’t want to lump it in with the c.h.u.d.s. who are insisting that Lupita Nyong’o can’t be Helen of Troy because she’s black, but it’s hard not to read such complaints as having a similar tone. It’s all angry backlash against creative decisions by a director.

And that’s what all of this is. We have seen trailers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The trailers don’t start by saying, “prepare for the most historically accurate film of all time,” because it’s an artist’s interpretation of made-up events that happened to occur in the past. I won’t act like I’m immune to bemoaning the creative choices of a director, but there has to be at least some effort to meet the creators where they are. Also, he’s making a Hollywood blockbuster out of what most people would consider a homework assignment, having people like Scott and not using heightened or accurate language, is him trying to meet us halfway as well.

It’s all very exhausting, and Nolan was much kinder in his response to it than he had to be. In a recent interview with Time magazine (according to Variety), Nolan addressed criticism that Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon wears black-plated armor. “There are Mycenaean daggers that are blackened bronze,” he explained. “The theory is they probably could have blackened bronze in those days. You take bronze, you add more gold and silver to it and then use sulfur… With Agamemnon, Ellen [Mirojnick], our costume designer, is trying to communicate how elevated he is relative to everyone else. You do that through materials that would be very expensive.”

Again, I don’t think he needs to get into the weeds like that, but the fact that he did shows that he is at least thinking about all of this stuff. In that case, creativity outweighs accuracy. He also had a great answer for why he cast Travis Scott, noting, “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.” It won’t surprise you to learn that people have ragged on that reasoning, and I would like to invite those folks to eat s***, because he’s absolutely right. Storytelling has taken many forms over the millennia. We just saw that represented beautifully in Sinners, and Nolan’s answer comes from a similar place of understanding.

The movie could still come out and be boring or just not hit in the way I may hope (subjective as that notion may be), but docking points from a fantasy movie for accuracy just bugs the hell out of me. Go read the book and imagine whatever you want. It’s a lot cheaper and won’t raise your blood pressure.