Will Women Love Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey'? A Critic Reflects on Gender and Female Portrayals
A film critic recalls past hostile reactions to her Nolan reviews and examines how the women in 'The Odyssey' are reduced to passive or altered roles, raising questions about the film's appeal to female audiences.
A former film critic for The Sunday Telegraph, who witnessed the industry's gender disparity firsthand, shares reflections on Christopher Nolan's latest epic, 'The Odyssey.' She remembers receiving abusive comments after reviewing Nolan's 'Tenet' (2020), including accusations of being 'bitter' or a 'feminist.' While not the director's fault, some fans react emotionally to dissenting opinions.
Most reviews of 'The Odyssey' have been raves, written predominantly by men. One of the few critical voices, Stephanie Zacharek of Time, whose take the author broadly agrees with, found the film lacking. This raises the question: will women enjoy it as much as men?
The central issue lies in the portrayal of female characters. Nolan's Athena (Zendaya) mostly nods and shakes her head sadly, like a disappointed teacher. Calypso (Charlize Theron) is reduced to a beach bar hostess serving drinks and lotus flowers, omitting Homer's detail of her keeping Odysseus as a sex slave for eight years. Circe (Samantha Morton) starts promisingly but reverses her spell through a brief conversation, not a year of sex and complex rhetoric.
These changes make women either more boring or more unhinged, while Matt Damon's Odysseus is transformed from a trickster womanizer into a gentle feminist and super-cool warrior. The author, though not reviewing the film herself, wonders how many in the audience might feel alienated and hesitant to say so.
