Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | July 23, 2026
I finally got to see The Odyssey yesterday, and it was fantastic. Everything I was hoping for. It was packed with big, adventurous thrills, epic fights, and some truly haunting imagery. Anytime Nolan would get a little supernatural, my jaw was on the floor, or I was smiling from ear to ear (that Circe scene, woo!!). The film also looked incredible, with every location being used to its absolute fullest. But it may be the casting where the film was at its strongest.
Every person in this film was utilized perfectly. Travis Scott, who was all wrapped up in one of the biggest storylines in wrestling history until he just… left, brings us immediately into the more modern aspects of this retelling. Anne Hathaway plays her despair with relatable frustration. Tom Holland brings a palpable level of hope and sadness. John Leguizamo brings so much heart and devotion to his role. But Elliot Page’s scene is one of the ones that will stick with me for a long while.
There will be some spoilers ahead.
Matt Damon’s Odysseus later finds Elliot Page’s Sinon in Hades. It’s there that he must admit he tricked Sinon into thinking the Horse, which he was set to gift to the people of Troy, was empty. Sinon died alone, not knowing the horse contained the man he looked up to, and was none too thrilled to be used in such a way. Page brings such grounded heartbreak to a very heightened scene. Even through the scene’s effects and design, he still makes it feel real. It’s incredible.
Long before Page’s performance graced theater screens, a bunch of losers were mad that he was included at all, because he is a trans man. The hate and vitriol directed at Page has been absurd, constant, and an awful extension of what trans people have to deal with in this country every single day, blown up on a larger scale. On the plus side, plenty of people have rallied around Page, and you can now add Whoopi Goldberg to the list of folks who think transphobes are dumb, according to Deadline.
Goldberg touched on something particularly frustrating about the neckbeards upset about Page’s casting during a recent episode of The View: why are you so upset about a movie you don’t want to see anyway? “But I don’t understand. Why go see the movie? If you don’t want to see it, then don’t go see it. Why do you care who’s cast in it?,” Goldberg asked. “I don’t understand this idea that if we hate it, everybody must hate it because we hate it for this reason. You don’t like Elliot Page? Don’t go see the damn movie. Don’t do it. We will be okay if you don’t go see it.”
She gets at the heart of what can be so troubling and obnoxious about these types of people. It’s not just that they are upset about something trivial; they need everybody else to be upset about it as well. They want the world to rally around their hatred and ignorance toward something they don’t even want to experience. Luckily, that isn’t what happened. The film had a bigger opening than Dark Knight Rises and will probably continue to make boatloads of cash long into the summer, as people want to see movies made by extraordinary talents who see the world as more than a bunch of straight white men.
So, we’ll be over here watching this truly incredible movie, while they go be mad in their basements. Seems like a fair tradeoff.
