ok like-- I haven't seen Nolan's Odyssey and I ppppprobably won't because I'm not that interested in Greek Myth and 3 hours is a long time to sit in a theater and watch something I don't have interest in. to be clear I'm sure it's good. it's Nolan with a blank check and Hollywood sucking his dick and with an entire cast of A-list actors. If it wasn't good something went seriously wrong.
but.... so this movie has a lot of controversies surrounding it, right? there are the bigoted assholes who are mad about the diverse casting, people understandably pushing back against that, people wishing it were more historically accurate regarding the costuming, and then people pushing back against that saying it doesn't have to be historically accurate
and I know that a group of Greek people wrote a (very polite!) letter to Nolan about how they wish that Greek actors were cast At All in the film, and then were more or less roundly mocked by the internet at large because 'the odyssey transcends time and place! they have the right to artistic license' as though that isn't the most callous thing to say lmfao
artistic license is perfectly fine, but it seems like the white western world at large has fully co-opted Greek Myth to the almost complete exclusion of Greek people-- you know, the people who live in Greece, the eastern mediterranean country from which GREEK myth comes from?
white people seem to legitimately think that Greek Myth reflects their roots somehow? sure Ancient Greece was an influential civilization, but ultimately it's the cultural history of GREECE and its people, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to feel annoyed that not a single major actor in the film is of Greek ancestry.
and it's not specifically about Nolan or this movie, it's more about the longstanding perception of Greek Myth by the western world and how it's been so deeply appropriated, and how thoroughly the presence of actual Greek people have been removed from most adaptations. But Nolan's Odyssey is already being lauded as an instant classic, so it's too bad that modern Greek people don't get to be reflected as a part of that :/
