The Right has learned a tough lesson with The Odyssey, and in some ways, they were led into a trap. When the trailer for The Odyssey first came out, it was met with a muted response; some even said it looked bad or boring. Not long after that, news of the plot conveniently leaked that Lupita Nyong’o would play Helen of Troy and Elliot Page would play a major role. That sent the Right into a tailspin that this would be the Most Woke movie and that it would fail because movies they’ve attacked in the past, like Snow White and Supergirl, tanked.
The problem was that The Odyssey was never going to tank. It isn’t Snow White or Supergirl, as it turns out. Blink, and you miss Nyongo’s total screen time as both Helen and her sister. Elliot Page is fine in the role – reminiscent of Ellen Page in Inception. In other words, these were minor characters who sparked a massive culture war, and the Right overplayed their hand.
Listen to what one of the guests on Piers Morgan says around the nine-minute mark, which is exactly the truth about Helen on screen for less than a minute. Less than a minute!
This was never going to work out well for those who were complaining about the “woke” casting because they had no idea they were being played. Whether the studio deliberately leaked the news to change the conversation or it just leaked out to drive buzz and controversy, I do not know but whatever strategy they employed it worked like a charm to drive people to the theater who would never have gone in the first place.
My mother and sister are both disabled. My mother is in a wheelchair and you can count the times she’s been to a movie theater in the past five years on one hand. My sister goes more often but in her current state, it’s hard for her to get around. Both of them were excited enough to see the movie that they were willing to drive to the theater and sit there for three hours.
My mom was excited because of Rotten Tomatoes and the controversy, which was covered on The View. My sister was excited because she loves the story of the Greeks and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I realize this is anecdotal, but my theater was full of women, older white women, and somehow I doubt they’d have been there on opening day otherwise. So the controversy — so-called — juiced the female audience, as they hit the Amy Poehler podcast, the Daily Show, etc.
All of this to say that those who were hoping the movie would bomb, and I wasn’t one of them, were always walking into a trap. It was never going to bomb with or without the controversy (so-called). Someone sent me this message – because there are no bigger assholes than the assholes on the Left, I can promise you that:
But anyone who knows me knows that isn’t true. I am happy when any movie does well in Hollywood, especially one like this. It’s original, it’s theatrical, it’s done with practical effects. This is what movies are meant to be. Did I like the movie? Not really, but only because I had no idea what was going on for most of it. I kind of pieced it together by the end. I liked Matt Damon a lot. My mom hated it. My sister was disappointed in it. But none of us would want to see it fail. We know, or at least I do, how high the stakes are now.
I’m the person who pushed Sinners to win Best Picture last year because it did so well at the box office. So if the Oscar race is over in July, so be it. It’s a fine winner. It’s what the Oscars were made for. I can’t complain about that. It isn’t
And it’s true that some of the memes on social media were cruel and unnecessary and it felt, for a time, like Lupita Nyong’o and Page were thrown out as bait and savaged in some kind of ritual sacrifice. But I also know the perspective of those who have been abandoned by Hollywood. I know how it feels to be shut out, hated, and ignored. I know how it feels to hate everything in an industry that used to be so prolific before it was overtaken by a fundamentalist religion. I get it from their side. I just knew it would always end this way, with the Left rounding bases and celebrating another battle against the Devil won.
The Odyssey isn’t a “woke” movie, the way One Battle After Another is. It doesn’t distort the narrative to meet activists’ needs. It does that with the casting. And in that way, I describe it as Peak Woke because it reflects the worldview of Woketopia: everyone gets a seat at the table, and all of the “ists” and “phobes” have been eradicated. To the film’s credit, it doesn’t label all white people as bad. There are, shockingly, even people of color who are villains. It is “colorblind casting,” as they call it.
It doesn’t reflect a worldview that takes us anywhere specific, except to Woketopia, and honestly, that’s preferable to the other way, where the narrative relies on identity. At least here, it’s less about identity and more about a movie with every kind of person in it. That is what audiences, especially Gen-Z, expect now and it will absolutely mark these films in time, the 2020s and the Great Awokening.
What bothers me, as always, is that we’re all demanded and commanded to conform. We’re not allowed to ask questions or have conversations or even discuss things like the “male gaze” without a horde of screeching, self-righteous scolds telling all of us to shut up and suck it up. At the same time, in the opposite direction, digging their heels in about the casting can often spill over into actual bigotry. That’s just the truth of it. It is, in the end, yet another battle in our ongoing Virtual Civil War that has sucked all of culture into it. The Left almost always wins because they control the culture.
But regardless of my own take on the movie, I am excited about this and for Matt Damon:
This is good news for Hollywood. They made a movie people had to see, for one reason or another. The bad part is everything that will come next – the Left smugly sticking it to the Right. It will go on for months, all through award season and beyond. I just miss movies that weren’t overtly political such that we can get lost in them. The casting didn’t bother me in this film because you realize right away you are not any real place. As with the Dune movies, I just wish I’d understood the plot better.
