Reasons to boycott Nolan's The Odyssey (that I know of so far):
They shot in the illegally occupied Western Sahara as reported by Middle East Eye (thanks to @fuckyeahdavidandyonatan for bringing that up)
They dumped their props into a protected area of the Italian sea after shooting (thanks to @godslop for finding the article in English)
Zendaya wearing looted 3000 years old Iranian earrings for the premiere of the movie + having her stylist fly on a private jet just to get her a dress for the premiere in London
No Greek actors in a movie about Greek heritage
While people mentioned that Anne Hathaway was flown in to the set every day, apparently it was not on a private jet but on a helicopter that was being used anyway to fly in equipment.
None of these things are new in Hollywood or exclusive to the Odyssey, its director or its actors, but I do think we as audience should start holding Hollywood accountable when it disrespects our culture, heritage, environment, especially when it's movies that are this big and have a huge budged that would allow for more conscious choices.
Please do add anything else I missed.
Some very good and reasonable points, but for as much as I recognize the Iliad and Odyssey as extremely important works of literature for Greece I think it not having an all Greek cast is forgivable. No Greek actors, not even one? Yeah, that shows they probably didnât care about including any in the first place. Is that a serious problem? Probably in the same League as giving the characters pants and filming in Iceland.
Still, if they were filming Beowulf and the cast was a bunch of Australians? I think the nords could survive such a wound.
So unless Greece is really starved for a win right now, which it very could be since my only reference for Modern Greece is 20th century civil wars and an apparently plummeting GDP, I think a swing and a miss for the Greeks on Nolanâs behalf is just going to have to be a bummer.
I donât want to be a dick and tell Greek people their awesome folklore isnât theirs to tell, but up against one of the biggest names in filming ignoring modern colonialism on multiple fronts and committing large scale pollution I think we can forgive a Shakespeare adaptation that isnât an all English cast.
This isn't really about the specific take I'm reblogging (offensive as it is), but I'm morbidly fascinated by how virtually every conversation about how there are zero Greek people in the castâeven counting the five million-odd members of the Greek diaspora that a number of very bankable US actors belong to as "Greek people", which the very careful, mildly-worded Guardian article linked doesâseems to get conflated with the cast not being entirely Greek as if these are the same argument.
Yes, there are racists making a big deal about how the characters and text are Greek, but a) they don't want an all-Greek cast either, they want an all-white cast, they're fine with all-Anglo representations of Greek people, and b) the complaint isn't about what the entire cast should be anyway. Nolan et al. didn't have to choose between Lupita Nyong'o and Any Greek People At All. That's a pure derailing tactic to trivialize the actual criticism and conflate it with something much easier to dismiss.
It's about the defense that it's representing the entire modern world while managing to exclude Greek people from their image of the modern world in a specifically Greek contextâ something that goes way, way back, because the ongoing existence of actual living Greek people rather than a long-lost fallen civilization whose works and artifacts are a common property of the world has frequently been deeply inconvenient to broad Western narratives and politics around it.
It's not unrelated to the other incredibly egregious instances of careless US-centric imperialism the OP was correctly highlighting, it's another form of it.
