The people complaining (or at least the 1 person I know who complained to me about it) wouldn't watch the movie even if it was an all ethnically correct cast.
(I'm not watching it because Tenet spoiled my hype-o-meter for Nolan)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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You didn't like the volume changing drastically between the speaking parts and the explosion parts?
I love telling this story.
I watched I opening night. Didn't get it.
Watched it again a few weeks later. Friend goes to the bathroom at the boat racing scene. Comes back. "What did I miss?" "I don't know"
Whilst funny, someone just wanted an excuse to draw Batman.
Honestly, this tabs into two issues I have with the Woker(tm)
1. Corporate Wokeness
Is not real wokeness, it's a cheap plastic copy meant to virtue signal to consumers without any understanding about the issues that move many consumers today. And corpo-wokeness pumps into a feedback-loop with people who do the same (virtue signal without understanding, lifestyle-lefties who have never really been in someone else's shoes).
But then again I'd rather have Corpo-Woke than Corpo-Fash, I just wish we could do without the commercialization of our culture.
2. The reduction of our cultural story-landscape to eurocentric narratives and history.
We have SOOOOO many movies and films set in ancient Rome/Greece or medieval Europe and we get basically no stories out of ancient subsaharan Africa or pre-colonization Australia and India. Many of these stories are lost thanks to colonization, but there should still be SOOOO many stories to tell and our eurocentric culture focuses on continually recycling the same two dozen stories (Troy, Spartacus, Caesar, Beowulf, Vikings, Arthur, etc.) that continually only provide the same roles we've seen a thousand times.
But then again I'd rather have some representation in a eurocentric landscape than no representation at all. I just wish we could shake off the eurocentrism, so that representation would be build into a system, that sources its stories out of every culture, instead of artificially gluing representation onto it.
The issue here isn't "white erasure". The issue is virtue signaling tokenization. Insidious racism.
Would you rather have 0 representation, or 1 token representation?
We aren't limited to those 2 bad choices, so I choose neither. Make original stories with proper representation.
Unless you are creating them, that's not your choice to make. The third option is getting nothing then.
Regardless of what you choose to consume or not consume, you have the option of voicing your opinion. That's great, I love that.
And if/when we have plenty of media that offer true representation, you can judge token representation as much as you want. Because you are right.
But until we get there, don't underestimate the power of a little bit of representation, please.
That choice is being made, maybe not by mainstream but it does exist.
Tokenization isn't representation. Tokenization undermines representation. I don't believe we should accept it as such.
I genuinely believe no representation is better than tokenization. It is much easier to educate someone who knows nothing, than to reeducate a misunderstanding.
And this is the core of our disagreement. I guess time will tell.
I think casting a black woman in a role for the most beautiful woman in the world as a little more than a token gesture, personally
The core issue is that producers likely wanted to ride off the popularity of a classic story, but also wanted to score diversity points.
It's still tokenization.
What are you basing that on?
Probably an empath. How else would they know what the producers wanted
This reads like "I believe they had ill intents so I won't engage with your point at all and assume they did have ill intents."
Like having not seen it and not being this terminally online, let me look up the cast.
IMDb has (credits in order of list):
- lupita
- Zendaya
- himesh patel
- John leguizamo
- will Yun Lee
- Travis Scott
- Corey Hawkins
- Jovan adepo
These all pass as non-white to me on first glance. Are they the biggest roles or have the most screen time? Idk, I haven't seen it, probably not, but it's far from no representation. Is the cast list overwhelmingly white? Ya, totally. Is this such a bad cast list that I'd go so far as to say it's tokenization? I don't personally think so.
Like I'm not here trying to defend the movie or the industry or the white patriarchy that leads to unjust casting situations but a lot of this issue reads like a bunch of racist white people being racist and your comment reads like a weird over-reaction like the movie didn't go far enough with diversity despite being a Greek fantasy tale that could go pretty much anyway and still be acceptable. Race doesn't seem important to the story at all so the whole cast could have been native American for all I care but like dismissing it as tokenization seems... I guess obviously better than being mad about the non-white cast but still kinda strange. Idk. Would the preference have been a diverse cast of soldiers under Matt Damon? I guess that would have been my preference but even as I write that this seems so silly. I guess it's not silly when we look at it from an industry trends perspective where we need more equitable casting/treatment.
I'm talking in circles. Person A says casting Helen of Troy as black is more than just tokenization, person B says ignoring that I think the casters were being bad people, I'm just saying Person B might not realize they're not actually engaging with Person A's point and they sound a bit illogical. I just want better discussions around terminally online topics so we can beat the distract and rage machine.
Were you involved in the casting process? Is it really that hard to believe that a person of color was the best person for the role?
You are being racist by assuming this is tokenization and not just the casting director choosing who they felt was best for the role.
What I find funny is look at Moana. Its important that the correct race is represented. But when it is a European storey it's open to anyone. What ever but stick to a lane either race doesn't matter and or it does.
It matters if it matters to the character, otherwise it does not matter.
There isn't a single blanket answer.