Hollyweird

Hollywood has become a very confusing place, a very weird place, these days. On the one hand, the big Hollywood studios almost always make business decisions. They’re not going to take a chance on an artistic type of movie with a niche audience that does not guarantee a substantial return on their investment. They continually opt to make the safe big budget movies. That’s why they are stuck in the Marvel, DC, superhero world. How many Spider-Man movies can they make? How many Iron Man movies can we endure? They make the same movies over and over again. That’s why we constantly see sequels of movies that have done well because people will return and watch those movies. The studios are afraid to take a chance on a movie that could be great, but could also be a bust. They prefer the safe choices, the ones with a guaranteed box office return.

And then comes a movie like Christopher Nolan’s, The Odyssey. For a big movie studio like Universal, this appears to be a safe choice. The Odyssey is classic literature. It’s familiar to the culture. Many have read the book. People know what the Odyssey is. And Christopher Nolan is a director with the Midas touch – everything that he touches turns to gold. He didn’t get trapped in his Batman trilogy. He was able to expand outside of that franchise to movies like Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer. He is considered to be one of, if not the best director working in Hollywood today. This movie should be a no-brainer success. You have classic, tried and true source material; you have the best director working today; how could this movie fail? It is teed up for a summer blockbuster success.

And then for no apparent reason, a director and a movie studio in an industry that doesn’t like to take chances, and are in the precipice of making a surefire successful movie, decide to make several casting choices that will most likely cut the viewing audience in half. They decided to cast a transman, Elliot Page as Achilles. Achilles is considered one of the strongest and fiercest warriors in all of classic literature. In the 2004 epic, Troy, Achilles was played by Brad Pitt in his prime. Now Achilles is being played by a 5’ 1” person who use to be a girl. Make it make sense. And then they decided to cast, Lupita Nyong’o, an African woman as Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy is described as the most beautiful woman in the world, “fair haired”, “white-armed”, “fair faced.” And when reading that description, they decided to cast, a black woman.

They didn’t have to do this. The audience for this movie was already set. They didn’t have to pander for any reason. And yet they did. And the question is, why? Why would they make those casting choices when they did not have to. Elliot Page brings nothing to the character of Achilles. Nothing. Achilles was a fierce warrior, a hyper-physical male, oozing testosterone. Homer described him as an unmatched, godlike warrior. He compared him to a “wild mountain hawk” and “a tower of strength”. His iconic spear was so massive and heavy that none of his comrades could even lift it, let alone wield it in battle. And they chose to cast of small frail transman in that role, for no reason?

Why did they cast a black woman in the role of Helen of Troy who was clearly not a black woman? This is not Hamilton the musical. That was their schtick – have all black actors play the white historical figures from the founding of the United States. That was Hamilton’s deal. But randomly playing a black woman as Helen of Troy makes no sense. You wouldn’t cast Austin Butler to play the lead in the Jackie Robinson story. You wouldn’t have Anne Hathaway portray Michelle Obama in a movie. It doesn’t make sense.

People could argue that for years white people were playing characters who were not white – the most famous example is Natalie Wood playing in Hispanic girl in West Side Story. That choice that happened 60 years ago, and has been critiqued and criticized over and over and over again. So, is this casting of a black woman to play Helen of Troy designed to make the movie better or is it designed to make a social statement against Hollywood’s history of casting white people in non-white roles? If it’s making a social statement, it’s not improving the movie, and if it doesn’t improve the movie, it’s making the movie worse. The people who reject the social statement will not open their wallets and go to this movie.

The movie will probably still make hundreds of millions of dollars. And every left-wing media outlet will give it five stars or two thumbs up or at 99 rating on their movie scale. We all know how that works. And a lot of people on the left will go to the movie just because they made these casting decisions; and a lot of people on the right won’t go to the movie because they made those decisions. But those decisions, do not make it a better movie, they make it worse. And that ultimately is the problem when you attempt to make social statements in your art. They detract from the art. They make the art worse. You can make social statements through your art, but the social statements must arise, organically through the art and from the human condition you are examining, not by making social statements through casting or other decisions that are not part of the artistic expression.

These are bad choices. I don’t know if Christopher Nolan cut some sort of deal that he would only get the $400 million to make this movie if he agreed to make these types of casting choices. But they’re bad choices. And Christopher Nolan is too good of a director for us to think that he actually believes that these are good choices. Achilles was a fierce warrior; he was not 5’ 1’ and 135 pounds. That’s miscasting. It’s not good for the movie, and it’s not good for Elliot Page. Maybe Christopher Nolan wanted to integrate Elliot Page back into acting after the transition, but this is not the vehicle to do that. This decision merely underscores the absurdity of Elliot Page for all to see. Elliot Page becomes a joke and an embarrassment by being cast as Achilles. And this is the problem with all of the woke stuff. When you try to shove absurdities down other people’s throats and shame them into swallowing them, you are merely highlighting how absurd these ideologies are.

Hollywood has become about making safe choices these days. They eschew the directors who strive for greatness by taking chances because they prefer and they need safety; they need the guarantee return at the box office. And if that has become Hollywood’s business model then that’s what their business model is, but if you’re going to make a risky choice that runs the risk of alienating a certain segment of society from your movie, the risky choice should be one that is striving for artistic greatness, and not pandering to wokeism. The only people who are going to say that this is a good movie are the people who are embedded in the woke culture. And 15 to 20 years from now, this movie is not merely going to be woke; it is going to be a joke. It’s going to be a punch line.

But this is endemic of the whole woke culture. There is so much potential for greatness in this movie. You have a great director; you have classic source material. All the elements are in place. And then woke does to this movie what it always does to whatever it injects itself into; it destroys it. And it’s sad. This is a gigantic missed opportunity. It’s going to be an epic failure when it could’ve been an epic classic. And the problem is that these people never learn. This isn’t the first time that potentially good movies have been destroyed by this ideology whether it’s Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear, that injected homosexuality into a kids movie or not casting authentic dwarfs in the movie, Snow White and the seven dwarfs, or every woke thing that has been done to the Star Wars franchise since Disney purchased it. All of these types of choices, continually destroy movies and destroy our culture, and the people doing this never learn because they are so blinded by their moral self-righteous that they believe the forced pandering applause is actually authentic.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.