Archiving the “strange death of Europe,” as Douglas Murray put it, and the West more broadly, at the hands of the neoliberal technocracy.
The Odyssey, coming to an empty theater near you, has it all: Helen of Troy played by a BIPOC individual called Lupita Nyong’o, a five-foot-one tranny (Ellen Page) playing a male Greek warrior in a part invented out of whole cloth and totally missing from the original story, as well as several Indians, East Asians, and Hispanic cast members.
The only thing missing is a Greek actor.
That’s right — not one part in the whole production went to a Greek actor.
This is because, obviously, Greeks count as white people, and white people are literal Satan, ergo they simply cannot be part of a movie based (extremely loosely) on Greek mythology — and most definitely not if the producers have any hopes for an Oscar, which literally has racial quotas to qualify.
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Mind you, Helen of Troy was supposed to be a woman of such immense, singular beauty that men were willing to go to war for her.
And this is who got that role.
Yet no Greeks were permitted in front of the camera.Via Telegraph (emphasis added):
Sir Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey has divided Greece before its world premiere.
The Oscar-winning director’s latest film, which is based on Homer’s epic poem of ancient Greece, will be screened in London on Monday.
But the adaptation, starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Zendaya, does not feature a single Greek actor…
Over the course of The Odyssey’s production, Greek and Greek Cypriot media platforms wrote open letters to Sir Christopher’s team and Hollywood, stating Greek people “did not vanish” and are “still here” as “a living people whose story has never stopped being written”.
“We are not asking for exclusion or limitation,” wrote one such letter in Greek City Times. “We are not arguing against diversity, nor against reinterpretation. Greek culture itself has always been shaped by exchange, migration, and encounter across centuries.
“What we are asking is something simpler and more human. That, when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them.”
In other contexts, of course — like if the characters of fictitious Wakanda were all blonde-haired Vikings — this omission would be a glaring example of what Social Justice™ people call “cultural erasure.”
But, again, the Greeks were white, so they are exempt from ever being victims of any such crimes against humanity on account of colonialism, or whatever.
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All that to say: The Odyssey will perhaps go down as the most reviled Hollywood production since they cast surly Latinx communist Rachel Zegler as Snow White, who went on in interviews to smear the prince as a “stalker” and declare her general contempt for the entire story based on some weird feminist revisionism about her version of Snow White “not going to be dreaming about true love” but rather “dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”
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All of that notwithstanding, the legacy media is out in full force pimping the production hard with maximalist rhetoric, presumably because they can see the writing on the wall and hope to get ahead of the box office hemorrhaging by polishing that turd up real nice.
Via The Guardian (emphasis added):
“Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion and a loss of innocence witnessed by the dead,” wrote the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, ahead of the reviews embargo lifting next Wednesday and next Friday’s worldwide release.
IndieWire editor-at-large Anne Thompson called the film the best picture contender to beat, and added that Matt Damon “could win best actor”. “My high expectations were met,” she added, calling the film “stunningly mounted”.
Multiple pundits described the film as “flawless” and “breathtaking”, with others singling out Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous for particular praise.
Erik Davis called the film “an absolute triumph and a crowning cinematic achievement from one of the great film-makers of our time. It feels like everything Nolan has been working toward with Imax has culminated here.” The film was shot entirely using large-format Imax film cameras, although it will also be screened in non-Imax cinemas.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
But maybe it’ll actually turn out to be a cinematic marvel, as advertised.
