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His name is Tom Holland, and he has plenty of strong opinions about “The Odyssey.” Just don’t mistake him for one of the film’s stars.
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Holland, a U.K.-based historian, has built a following of more than 372,000 on X, where he shares insights on topics ranging from the Greco-Persian Wars to the height of the Roman Empire.
But this month, as Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic “The Odyssey” arrives in theaters, Holland has found himself stepping into a very different arena: the culture wars.
The Greek epic, which follows Odysseus on his perilous 10-year journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is a foundational work in Western literature. The tale has been continuously retold, translated and adapted into various formats over nearly three millennia.
Hype around the movie, which co-stars the actor Tom Holland as Odysseus’ son Telemachus, has been building for more than a year, with tickets for early showings sold out.
But in recent months, the movie has become the subject of an ongoing culture war clash over what some on the right see as historical inaccuracies and casting choices designed to appease the left.
Several have zeroed in on the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the mythic beauty whose face “launched a thousand ships” and ignited the Trojan War, and Elliot Page as Sinus, a warrior who fought alongside Odysseus during the Trojan War.
Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, has been among the more vocal critics. He recently hurled an insult on X at Holland, who has praised the film.
Holland, who was invited to the London premiere and posted a picture of himself from the blue carpet, replied.
“Very happy to say it again,” the historian wrote. “The Odyssey is an amazing film, and missing out on seeing it because you think it’s woke or whatever is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Your loss.”
A representative for Holland did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The post was among several the historian made on X in which he praised the film.
“Lots of people telling me The Odyssey is a terrible film on the basis of not having seen it…FWIW, I’ve now watched it twice, and it is by some way the best cinematic adaptation of a Greek myth I have ever seen. It honours Homer while simultaneously making something new of him,” he wrote Monday on X.
When one X user asked him about Nolan’s decision to have the actors use American accents, Holland said the film “makes brilliant & evidently conscious play with a host of Hollywood genres — superheroes, science fiction, the mythologies of modern America — yet never lets them overpower our sense of an ancient & alien world.”
He also wrote that, in his opinion, “One particularly key marker of Nolan’s success with The Odyssey: steering between the Scylla of making the gods seem risible and the Charybdis of leaving them out together.”
On Wednesday, after responding to Musk, Holland shared what he described as his “last comment on this whole business (which I hadn’t realised was a lightning rod for an entire culture war).”
“if you like Nolan’s other films, you will love The Odyssey. If you didn’t like them, then miss it,” he wrote.
As for the actors themselves? Nyong’o told Elle magazine she’s “not spending my time thinking of a defense.”
“I’m very supportive of Chris’ intention with it and with the version of this story that he is telling,” she told the publication in a recent interview. “Our cast is representative of the world.”
The movie releases in theaters on July 17.
