"Elliot" Page, Who Plays a Great Greek Warrior in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey: Gender Is Just a "Quaint Myth"

If you see this movie, you love Elliot Page.

She's a transgender Rachel Zegler. She's taking down a movie because she just can't shut her enormous mouth.

Transgender actor and The Odyssey star Elliot Page came out against traditional gender roles, calling the male-female dynamic a "quaint myth" and insisting that if animals can engage in "queer" sex, why shouldn't humans.

Appearing on the extremist, left-wing Democracy Now podcast, Page attacked the "cis hetero patriarchal structure" and claimed that the traditional way we view gender is scientifically inaccurate.

...

On the podcast, Page, who narrates the film, insisted that the normal gender ideas that mankind have supported for all of recorded history are "absurd."

"In terms of looking at nature as if it's some sort of cis hetero patriarchal structure is absurd, and that this, you know, gender binary that we've created is nothing but a quaint little myth," Page said.

The actor added that Second Nature, the documentary he is flogging on the podcast, "really shows what we have been taught in school in regards to these structures -- men being superior, women being inferior. You know, submissive or what have you -- it being this heterosexual existence is just completely false."

Page goes on to assert that the idea that queer is normal and traditional gender roles are "false" has been "suppressed" from general knowledge.

...

The five foot one, 106-pound actor recently sparked controversy by being cast as a Greek Warrior in director Christopher Nolan's epic remake of The Odyssey. Detractors thought it was absurd to cast a tiny trans actor as a powerful warrior in the epic tale.

It turns out the 5'1" woman is not playing mighty Achilles, but another great warrior, "Sinon," I think they said, who was called "the greatest soldier" in the Greek army.

Chris Gore and Alan Ng saw the movie. They split in their reviews: Gore says it's disappointing and boring but "not a disaster," while Ng says it is a disaster, and so boring it's hard to get through.

They do say that the Stunt Casting isn't too much of a factor because those are small roles with little screen time. I mean, yes, we knew that Helen of Troy would just be in the beginning, but still this absurd casting stops any audience member from enjoying what should be the point of making a historical, or mythic, epic: feeling that this is something like what it must have really looked like.

Some of what they said, if you don't want to watch the vid:

Ng checked out early. "I was bored out of my mind," he says, adding he was gone "pretty much from the beginning." The sound didn't help. He says he couldn't make out the dialogue at first, and once he could, he realized "how bad the dialogue is."

His verdict: "This is the most pretentious movie I've seen all year." And the kicker: "I can't wait to not see this movie again." When the two wrapped up, the one-word summary of Ng's reaction was simply "disaster."

Gore: 'Not A Disaster,' But Mixed

Gore lands softer, though it's no rave. The modern-sounding accents "diminished the film" for him and made Nolan's period epic play more like Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, "a modern epic," in his words. He also says parts drag, especially in the first half.

The highlights, per Gore: the Cyclops material, the fall of Troy, and Samantha Morton as the witch Circe, the same performance Nolan has been comparing to Heath Ledger's Joker. He also calls the way the soldiers transform "very clever," while declining to spoil how.

I think Circe turns his men into pigs.

"I'm still marinating on it," Gore says. "It's not a disaster." His final word is "mixed," and unlike Ng, he's going back for a second viewing.

That's a quote you want on your movie poster -- "It's not a disaster."

Here's a digest of some reviews, echoing most of what Gore and Ng said -- the film is very slow in its first half, and of course it's three hours long, and no one seems to be in character. As Gore said, it's just Matt Damon and Tom Holland reading lines. You never feel like you're watching people who aren't celebrity actors.

abe Hernandez | Urban Fantasy Author @MrGabeHernandez

Early, TRUSTED reactions of The Odyssey are confirming what I feared would happen. The Odyssey is a pretentious slog to get through.

The specific critiques are fairly consistent.

Casting controversy: Ellen Page and Lupito Nyong'o appear in glorified cameos. For all the controversy their casting generated, they had no meaningful presence in the film, which gives weight to the theory that they were brought on as stunt casting and Oscar bait.

Music/Sound: A consistent Nolan criticism across several of his films is the bad sound mixing. That problem persists here. Further, the Travis Scott "rap" at the end is described as "painfully cringey."

Main Actors: Aside from the one or two standouts, such as Samantha Morton as Circe, none of the actors embody or immerse themselves in their roles. The ensemble presents as actors simply reading through the script.

Visuals: The historical foibles regarding armor, weapons, and ships have been dissected to death, but the bigger problem is the overall aesthetic that's grey and dark. It's as if Nolan shot the film in a frequently overcast corner of Northern Europe instead of any locale that resembles the Mediterranean regions.

Pacing: The film doesn't "get going" until at least 30 minutes in. A 3-hour film is a lot to ask of an audience, so if the opening hook is sedate, you've got a problem on your hands.

Dialogue: The modern language frequently takes viewers out of the story, particularly with all the actors speaking in their respective native accents. There's no sense of period or commonality around a culture and its people.

Will The Odyssey be a commercial hit or bomb?

Too soon to tell, but it does appear clear that the controversies were self-inflicted, that this "interpretation" of Homer's Odyssey was meant to appeal to a very small set of cinephile elitists and Hollywood backscratchers, and that Christopher Nolan forgot the one thing that a director should never forget...

A film's first and primary job is to entertain.

The movie comes out on Thursday. I already have my tickets to not see it reserved. If you haven't gotten your tickets to not see it yet, you better act quick, they're running out.

Not seeing The Odyssey is going to be the cultural event of the year.

Meanwhile, the remake of Little House on the Prairie is just as woke as everyone feared it would be.

Fandom Pulse @fandompulse

Little House on the Prairie showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine on why she rebuilt the frontier classic around a new lens:

"I think a lot of our pop culture portrays the West as men riding around with guns and solving problems with violence and posturing, but that is just not how it was settled... We really are trying to do a show that does not fall back on tropes of sort of masculinity."

Is a story about settling the American frontier supposed to avoid masculinity?

More:

There's no other way for me to put this: Netflix did indeed woke-ify Little House on the Prairie. This new version makes a deep bow to contemporary concerns about the politics of the source material. Some of the Ingalls family's closest new friends on the show are an Osage couple, a black doctor and black storekeeper, and a French Canadian woman who wears trousers and practices free love."--Rebecca Onion, Slate

Odyssey: Gender Is Just a "Quaint Myth"&bodytext=If you see this movie, you love Elliot Page. She's a transgender Rachel Zegler. She's taking down a movie because she just can't shut her enormous mouth. Transgender actor and The Odyssey star Elliot Page came out against traditional gender...&topic=world_news"> posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:10 PM

| Access Comments