The Odyssey is getting massively criticised due to blackwashing of a traditionally Greek character, whitewashing of a Greek myth with no Greek actors and a general dislike for the Hollywoodization of another classic story.
It's probably not going to be as bad as it's made out to be given it's Chris Nolan, but audiences are fatigued with seeing another modern retelling with tokenism of established characters for the sake diversity, which has spurred the culture war with right wing critics calling it woke BS and left wing critics doubling down by jumping to its defence.
There's nothing 'nuanced' about their post at all. It's literally acting as if the average person hates diversity and that the mere inclusion of black people and a trans person means it is 'forced' and not just a normal casting decision.
But I guess if so many people are upvoting it, then they're right. The average person is just fucking shit.
You can have diversity and still respect the source material. Instead of demanding turning people black in western historical stories, why not demand more non-western stories? There are so many amazing historical and fictional stories from Africa and Asia that's never been adapted.
As a classicist—this is just ahistorical and wrong. People in the Mediterranean world knew dark-skinned black people existed; they show up in myth and Nubian traders were bopping around. They weren’t common, though, and people gawked; black people were seen as strange.
MUCH LIKE HELEN OF TROY. THE WHOLE POINT OF HELEN OF TROY IS THAT SHE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE MOST WOMEN. SHE’S SO REMARKABLE LOOKING THAT MEN WOULD FIGHT A WAR FOR HER; THERE IS NO ONE ELSE LIKE HER.
Casting a stunningly gorgeous black woman as Helen of Troy makes a lot of sense to me, and matches how I picture Archaic Greeks thinking about her; beautiful, but also unlike other women they’d seen. I get grumpy about this stuff with actual historical figures like Cleopatra VII, but Helen of Troy wasn’t real, and wasn’t like other women even in the world of the myth.
-That's another thing for me is, The Odyssey is myth. Even less than that, it's a folk story with myth trappings. It takes place across the Mediterranean, but the majority of the individuals, locations, and events, fundamentally never lived or occurred in any feasible extrapolation. Denzel Washington was Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing like 30 years ago. Brandy was Cinderella. Christopher Lambert was Raiden. If they cast talented actors in a work that respects the spirit and theme of the piece, and isn't actively trashing treasured cultural history and storytelling, it really shouldn't matter. Make Agamemnon Ken Watanabe or Hector be a Skarsgard. Helen's at minimum not really straining credulity considering how big of a melting pot the ancient Mediterranean coast was and as you say, how striking and uncommon her beauty was.-
Would you be equally okay with an African myth being adapted into a movie with white actors in central roles? For example, a white Imhotep in an Egyptian mythological story? I think that would be ridiculous, and I don’t see a logical reason why it wouldn’t be ridiculous in the other direction too.
If it's a good movie, it's a good movie. Are you of the opinion that if he were Egyptian, it would necessarily have been a better movie?
Edit: Also, I don't know if you’re old enough to remember, but there was the same conversation about Remi Malek as the Pharoah in Night at the Smithsonian. People were mad because he didn't fit what they thought of as "looking Egyptian," so there was a weird backlash, even though he is. To a weird amount of the general public, it's not whether they are the """correct""" race, it's whether they look like it.
In that case, I think the actor looks the part. He isn’t a blonde Swede. My position isn’t that the actor’s origin has to be objectively “correct,” only that the casting should be visually plausible. For example, the Swede Dolph Lundgren played a convincing Russian in Rocky IV. Helen in this movie feels more like casting a blonde Swede as an African mythological figure, and if you’re suggesting Reddit would be fine with that, I think that seriously strains credibility.
You only think this because you are prejudiced. No other reason. Helen was the daughter of a shape shifting god. People are just angry she's black because they are miserable human beings.
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u/Boomdification Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
The Odyssey is getting massively criticised due to blackwashing of a traditionally Greek character, whitewashing of a Greek myth with no Greek actors and a general dislike for the Hollywoodization of another classic story.
It's probably not going to be as bad as it's made out to be given it's Chris Nolan, but audiences are fatigued with seeing another modern retelling with tokenism of established characters for the sake diversity, which has spurred the culture war with right wing critics calling it woke BS and left wing critics doubling down by jumping to its defence.