They tried to make "The Odyssey" the next culture war casualty. They failed.

Right-wing outrage merchants spent months attacking Christopher Nolan's epic for its diverse cast. Audiences didn't seem to notice.

By: Josh McCormack

Trigger warning: Much of this blog recounts an overtly transphobic and racist YouTube movie review.

Earlier today, I clicked on an alt-right YouTube channel's review of “The Odyssey” expecting to be angry, but instead I was amused by its monotonous predictability.

"Geeks and Gamers," a film and pop culture review YouTube channel with more than 409,000 verified subscribers at the time of this writing, recently uploaded its discussion and review of Christopher Nolan's latest epic.

At the start of the review, Ryan Kinel, a content creator for his own alt-right pop culture channel "RK Outpost," asked "Geeks and Gamers" creator Jeremy Griggs what he thought of “The Odyssey.” Griggs — stone-faced, as if this conversation were going to be as difficult as a discussion about the political turmoil in the Middle East — responded by saying it was "a mixed bag."

He went on to say the film was neither the disaster its detractors (of which there don't seem to be many) are calling it nor the masterpiece others are praising it as. He emphasized the traditional story of a father and son as a highlight, but within 30 seconds of his answer (I timed it), he immediately said the following:

"You're also going to find a fucking trans freak and a bunch of Black people that don't belong in a Greek story."

From then on, Kinel, Griggs and Jay David — another YouTube personality who goes by the screen name "Drunk3po" — offered a few begrudging compliments about many of the film's core aspects, including its visuals, music and some performances by only white actors in the cast.

Mostly, however, they continued leaning into their negative feelings, most of which had nothing to do with the quality of the film but rather their complete disgust at having to see a trans person and people of color. Elliot Page (whom they continuously referred to by his deadname, Ellen) and Zendaya wound up being their two biggest targets.

As the review trudged along for 34 minutes, their reservations were so eloquently phrased in statements such as these:

"John Leguizamo was annoying the entire fucking time." [1:53]

"Do you think he just put Zendaya in [the movie] just cause she's, like, a popular actress?" [8:48]

And my personal favorite:

"You're in Ancient Greece and it looks like Chicago." [8:39]*

Hilariously, whenever the three men found themselves getting too positive, as they did around the video's halfway mark, they circled back to Elliot Page and repeated the same complaints about what a bad decision it was to cast him in the film.

Now, I absolutely loved “The Odyssey”, and I completely reject the abhorrent conservative viewpoints on display here. In fact, I could make the remainder of this blog a proper rebuttal to the video if I wanted to.

I could defend the use of colloquial language — something the "Geeks and Gamers" crew took umbrage with — as an effective tool for bringing audiences into a world they might have previously found too off-putting. I could explain that the diversity of the cast represents the universality of Homer's original tale. If you're going to complain about the "inaccuracy" of a fantasy story having Black and brown faces, why don't you have that same level of vitriol for the majority of Greek myth adaptations that have long chosen not to cast Greek actors in the leading roles, instead favoring white British or American actors?

Instead of defending the film, however, I want to look at this review as a microcosm of where the modern conservative movement currently stands in its never-ending culture war.

This incarnation of conservative vitriol peaked in popularity around 2016, before Donald Trump's first term and around the time the female-led “Ghostbusters” set social media ablaze. At that point, these types of content creators came to prominence because they represented a vast sector of the disillusioned male fan base.

But as the years have gone by, their grievances have become not only easy to predict but completely disingenuous regurgitations of the same right-wing greatest hits: "This movie's too woke." "They're trying to chase a diversity trend." You know all the talking points.

You can even see the uniformity of these takedown videos simply by searching "Odyssey negative review" on YouTube. You'll be greeted by a cavalcade of AI-generated thumbnails — mostly centered around Lupita Nyong'o or Elliot Page (both of whom probably have a combined screen time of five minutes in the film, by the way) — with headlines reading, "The Odyssey Is Pretentious and Boring," "The Odyssey Is Awful!" and "The Odyssey Is the Worst Movie EVER Made."

Now, more than a decade after their cultural apex, these rage-bait content creators are so lacking in ideas and so concerned with latching onto any aspect of a film that might be controversial to their fan base in order to generate clicks that they have become the very thing they swore to destroy: a hyper-monetized industry that can't come up with a single original thought.

For as loud as these conservative content creators are, they only know how to interact with art as a fast-food product: something consumable and something that should be the same every time. Anything that makes them uncomfortable must be the product of a vast liberal conspiracy to placate people of color and members of the LGBTQI+ community, as if Christopher Nolan — hot off his billion-dollar, best-picture-winning “Oppenheimer” — is in desperate need of approval from audiences.

This is also why, aside from not being real fans, they can never truly be critics. To critique art requires a love of art, and a love of art is, in my opinion, reliant on open-mindedness, which most of these folks don't have. In fact, in the case of “The Odyssey”, they had already made up their minds the second they saw the cast list.

While genuine film buffs like myself have been fighting these dorks for the better part of a decade after more successful attacks on films like “The Last Jedi” and “The Matrix Revolutions”, it's particularly heartening to see their prepackaged attacks on “The Odyssey” completely backfire.

For years, these individuals have considered themselves some sort of silent majority, claiming established critics and Hollywood insiders don't really speak for the people.

But following months of online ranting about the "forced diversity" or "woke-ifying" of “The Odyssey,” the film now stands at a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and has just received the coveted "A" CinemaScore from audiences polled after various screenings. By the end of its opening weekend, “The Odyssey” is also projected to earn approximately $130 million in the United States alone.

When I saw “The Odyssey” the other day, I was surrounded by more than 200 people in the IMAX theater. I didn't know their politics, and I wasn't aware of their belief systems, but when the movie started, almost everyone in that theater — regardless of their final verdict on the film — seemed ready and willing to engage in a cinematic experience with an open mind.

Meanwhile, the hosts of "Geeks and Gamers" sat complaining into a webcam, surrounded by toys that represent broken childhoods and consumed by a deep hatred that's no longer in vogue.

Let's hope they stay there.

*Author’s note: Most of the sequences set in Greece were actually shot there. So, the “Chicago” comment is clearly racially motivated.