Christopher Nolan said Elliot Page Odyssey prerelease backlash is irrelevant, insisting that people criticizing the film before seeing it do not know what it is yet. He made the case while defending the adaptation choices around The Odyssey, including the online uproar that has already pulled Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page into the debate.
Nolan on Batman
“Remember, I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman,” Nolan said, drawing on the pressure that came with adapting a property writers and artists had been working on for almost 65 years before he came on Begins. He added that the lesson was simple: “What I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all.”
He said the job was to honor the original text in the strongest way possible, then let the finished film speak for itself. “In the end, fans of the property — even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done — enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could,” he said.
X and MAGA
In February, Elon Musk attacked The Odyssey after word got out that Lupita Nyong’o would be playing Helen of Troy, writing on X that “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.” Matt Walsh added that “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’” Musk also pushed the claim that Nolan “wants the awards,” turning a casting decision into a wider political argument on X and inside the MAGA base.
The loudest confusion centered on Elliot Page, because the MAGA base reacted as if he were playing Achilles. He is not. Nolan cast Page as the warrior Sinon, and that distinction matters because the online backlash was built around a role claim that was never true in the first place.
Armor and Accents
Criticism also landed on the armor design in The Odyssey, with some social media users saying it looked too close to Batman’s more modern Batsuit. Nolan answered that by pointing to material evidence and craft: “There are Mycenaean daggers that are blackened bronze,” he said, adding, “The theory is they probably could have blackened bronze in those days,” and explaining that bronze can be mixed with more gold and silver and then treated with sulfur.
That leaves a clear business reality for the film as it heads toward release: the debate has moved from casting rumor to adaptation logic. For readers tracking Elliot Page Odyssey, the useful takeaway is not the noise on X but the actual creative line Nolan has drawn — stick with the source, ignore early pile-ons, and let the film settle the argument once audiences finally see it.
