The Odyssey, directed by English filmmaker Christopher Nolan, is now playing in theatres worldwide. It had a massive opening weekend at the box office, grossing $260 million globally; however, it has also gotten a huge amount of backlash in the months leading up to its release, including from the world’s richest man and owner of the social media platform X, Elon Musk.
Musk has been one of the fiercest critics of the movie online.
When news started circulating that Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o would be playing Helen of Troy, Musk wrote on X in response, ‘Christopher Nolan has lost his integrity.’
Now, he fired out another tweet on the subject that has garnered a lot of attention.
X user John Carter has posted: ‘I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.’ To this, Musk responded with a crisp, two-word reply: ‘I’m down.’
Will anything come from this declaration?
Those who want to quickly dismiss it as just a little social media banter should remember the events that led to Musk’s acquisition of (as it was then-named) Twitter. Before buying 100 per cent of the social media company for $44 billion in October 2022, he spent months criticizing the way it was run on the very platform and making suggestions to the ownership at the time on how to run it.
The $100 million for a feature film budget is evidently just a fraction of the $44 billion investment Musk made into the acquisition of Twitter.
Also, in December 2022, Elon Musk made the decision to unban Former US President Donald Trump’s account after he put the question up to an X poll and the ‘yes’ option won. That is despite the fact that this took place only a couple of months after a very disappointing midterm election cycle for the Republicans, at a time when most observers considered President Trump’s political career to be over.
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey vs Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto
There is a reason Mel Gibson was mentioned in the original post about the production of a historically accurate film adaptation of the Odyssey by Homer.
Internet users have been comparing Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey to Mel Gibson’s 2006 historical epic Apocalypto. Nolan cast no actors of Greek ancestry but cast an actress of African descent to play Helen of Troy. Mel Gibson, on the other hand, hired a cast of all indigenous actors from Central America in his 2006 epic, and the entirety of the movie’s dialogue was spoken in Yucatec Maya, the modern version of the language spoken by the Mayans in the early 16th century, when the plot takes place.
Many people see a level of irony in that contrast, given that Gibson is known as one of the few right-wing figures in Hollywood, who was also captured going on an infamous anti-semitic rant during a DUI arrest in Los Angeles, California, in the same year Apocalypto came out, in 2006.
If the Mel Gibson project fails to come to fruition, Elon Musk has other plans for a more historically accurate Odyssey as well. According to his X post, he wants his AI model Grok to make the new adaptation of the great European literary classic.
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