Now that Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has been released to near-unanimous critical acclaim and significant box office success, we’ve been told that all of the criticisms made against the film prior to its release — mostly by conservatives — have been proven baseless, even embarrassing.
Those who raised concerns about the movie should now hang their heads in shame and crawl before Christopher Nolan on hands and knees, begging for forgiveness, and offering gifts of supplication like an ancient Greek standing before the shrine of Apollo.
This has been the basic conclusion of commentators on the Left, and even a fair number on the Right. The wokeness allegations, they say, have been refuted. The movie is an artistic triumph. A masterpiece. And now it is our job to show that we are culturally in tune by joining in with the applause, or at least ceasing our criticisms. That is the general consensus.
And the general consensus is — as the general consensus so often tends to be — wrong. Now that I’ve actually seen the movie, I can definitively say that every single criticism from conservatives was entirely correct. We were not only correct in our prejudgments, but much more correct than we ever knew.
You can judge a book by its cover most of the time. And the cover of this one had a gender-confused woman in a man’s costume, and a race-swapped Helen of Troy. We judged those to be massive red flags. And we were right.
“The Odyssey” is indeed a three-hour-long middle finger to its source material, to Western civilization, to white people, to Greeks, to literature, and to moviemaking in general. It contradicts itself to the point that every important aspect of the story — from the plot to the theme to the characterization — is reduced to incoherence.
The dialogue, in the rare moments where it’s intelligible, is often clunky, heavy-handed, and wildly out of place. Most of all, the film does not feel like a story set in the ancient world, which is a fatal problem for a film set in the ancient world.
In fact, it barely feels like a film at all. It has more the feel of a rough draft that Nolan was contractually obligated to produce, which probably isn’t far from the truth.
Everyone understands that with the rise of streaming services and the glut of content all over the internet, movie theater attendance has plummeted. Profit margins in the entertainment industry are lower than they’ve ever been.
At this point, now that Marvel has died, there are only two reliable ways to fill theaters and generate significant profit. The first approach is to fund an existing IP — such as, very recently, viral meme IPs like “Backrooms.”
The second approach is to produce an “event film” by someone like Christopher Nolan — an epic with enough set pieces that feels big enough people will be compelled to get off their sofa and pay $20 to see it. That’s what we have here.
Nolan is done making original, risky stories that might not go over well. The days when he made “Memento” are over, for the simple reason that you don’t need an IMAX theater to enjoy a film like “Memento.” You can watch it on your phone and get basically the same experience, because it’s a high-concept, dialogue-driven film, with no reliance on giant monsters or 20 different A-list actors filling out the cast. Not that there’s anything wrong with giant monsters, by the way. That’s actually one of the only good points of Nolan’s Odyssey.
In any case, with very few exceptions, films like “Memento” are no longer interesting to the big studios or to directors like Nolan. They’re only interested in green-lighting films like this one. Whether you like it or not, that’s the economic reality of the industry right now. And there’s nothing wrong with a film like this one, either, at least conceptually. An event film based on an ancient, foundational story of Western civilization could be a wonderful thing, which makes the failure of this film all the more tragic.
To be sure, if any director could withstand these pressures, you’d think it would be Nolan. He’s about as bankable as a director can possibly be. But you have to wonder, especially after the flop that was “Tenet,” if he’s lost his will to do anything particularly novel or outside the box.
“Tenet” lost around $100 million for the studio, which was only partially due to COVID. People didn’t like the movie for the understandable reason that it made absolutely no sense.
So now, after that catastrophe, maybe Nolan is more concerned with protecting his image, which is why he’s increasingly relying on established stories and massive ensemble casts. Whatever the case, “The Odyssey” is a striking example of a director who — whether he’s aware of it or not — is terrified of failing to meet expectations.
Nolan wants to give everyone, from audiences to the suits at Universal Pictures, exactly what they expect. That means he must adhere to every norm in Hollywood, from DEI casting to one-dimensional characters and lots of sentimental nonsense. It also means that Nolan has to participate in Hollywood’s larger objective, which is to subvert American culture by making everything gayer, more feminine, less patriotic, more depressing, and of course, less white.
I’ve seen people desperately trying to describe this film as pathbreaking, awe-inspiring, and even transgressive — almost as if they’re trying to make it true. But infusing modern liberal values into an ancient story is pretty much the least transgressive thing a Hollywood director can do. It’s utterly cliched and expected. Not the slightest bit challenging or interesting or bold.
Nolan isn’t interested in telling transgressive stories. He’s too afraid. That’s one theory, anyway. You can come up with your own explanation for Nolan’s motives. The end result, though, speaks for itself.
To begin with, this movie was just as woke as we thought it would be. The DEI casting in particular is far worse than we knew. Nolan’s version of Ancient Greece is a kind of multi-racial utopia. Well, perhaps not utopia. Actually, Nolan’s Ancient Greece is relentlessly drab, dreary, depressing, and colorless.
All of the buildings look like ancient ruins — which, yes, makes sense for those buildings to look like ancient ruins today. But they would not have all been ancient ruins in ancient times. So this is not a utopia, but in Nolan’s vision, it is nonetheless absurdly diverse and multi-racial. Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics all somehow co-exist in the Mediterranean 3,000 years ago.
Nolan does not softly coax the audience into the DEI net, easing us into it slowly but surely. No, he cranks the diversity meter up to a thousand from the very first frame. The first character we see is the rapper Travis Scott, who somehow manages to turn in a bad performance despite appearing on screen for 12 seconds. And then we see Ellen Page, portraying a Greek warrior, waddling around the desert like a child with a soiled diaper, straining under her rubber armor, looking like she’s about to die even before she gets shot through with arrows.
The defenders of this film, especially on the Right, have tried to claim that Page’s appearance is not a huge problem because she has only a small role. Now, I don’t want to ascribe sinister motives to anyone, or accuse them of lying, so I will generously assume that the conservatives making this claim must have fallen asleep 10 seconds into the movie, which would be totally understandable.
If they actually watched the entire thing, in a state of full consciousness, or at least half consciousness, then they would know that Ellen Page is not a minor character in this film at all. She is utterly pivotal to the plot. She is one of the most important characters in the entire film. She is, more than that, and, as Steve Deace has pointed out, the moral conscience of the story.
Her inclusion in this film, in that role, is without question one of the wokest, most radically left-wing things we’ve ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster film. If any director but Christopher Nolan had done this, he would have no conservative defenders whatsoever.
To claim that a movie isn’t woke when a trans-identifying female actress is pretending to be a male Greek warrior serves as the lynchpin of the plot and the film’s moral conscience is just ridiculous. If we are going to rightly claim that it’s woke to have a brown-skinned Hispanic Snow White, then how can we possibly argue that there’s nothing woke about a trans female portraying an ancient Greek warrior?
The argument from Nolan’s conservative defenders seems to be, rather explicitly, that it’s okay when Nolan does it. I find that argument to be unpersuasive, if not pathetic. Indeed, if you believe that Nolan is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, then the logical conclusion is that it’s worse when he does it. DEI casting in a crappy Snow White remake directed by Random Disney Director Number 1242 is far less significant and culturally corrosive than DEI casting by one of the most influential and marketable filmmakers of all time.
And that’s not where the diversity casting ends. Not by a long shot. Odysseus’ crew consists of multiple Asians, including his second-in-command. This character, played by the actor Himesh Patel, has a heavy presence in the film — he has a ton of screen time — and every minute he’s visible on screen is another minute where total immersion in the story is impossible.
At one point this character says the line, “We’re Greeks from Ithaca,” and it’s one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments in the movie. There are no intentionally hilarious moments, as the movie — unlike Homer’s original epic — is totally humorless and utterly devoid of charm or wit. But there are several moments where you can’t help but laugh, and this is one of them.
Imagine a movie set in 12th-century China where a white actor with a slight southern accent looks at the camera and says, “We’re Chinese, from the Chengdu province,” and you’ll get an idea of how totally ludicrous this spectacle is.
All that to say, this is one of the most out-of-place characters I’ve seen in a major film in memory. And on top of that, his performance itself was flat, bland, and uninspired. He brought nothing to the role. If he isn’t going to look the part, he could at least act the part. But he doesn’t even do that. So why is he there? Anyone trying to rescue Nolan from wokeness allegations, answer me this: why was that guy in that role? It certainly wasn’t due to his acting chops. So what was it?
As a side note, I’ll mention that Patel was actually born in the UK. He has a British accent. Yet in this movie he affects an American accent. All of the actors, even the British ones, use a contemporary American accent. This is a creative choice that just doesn’t work at all. I’m not saying that Nolan had to go full Mel Gibson and have the characters all speak in the original language of the source material — although I personally would have appreciated that.
I’m saying that if you’re going to make a movie set in the ancient world, the characters should speak in a way that sounds and feels ancient. Having them speak in a modern accent using modern slang and colloquialisms interferes with the immersion into the film, which is a theme we’ll return to frequently.
Put another way, in a story set 3,000 years in the past, none of the characters should look or sound or act like someone who’s ever been to a McDonald’s. And yet they all look and sound and act exactly like that.
But back to the DEI elements. Even if you pretend that Himesh Patel is a good actor, the casting doesn’t work. Keep in mind, this is a movie about how difficult it was for Odysseus and his crew to travel just 560 nautical miles, from Troy to Ithaca — a point that Steve Sailer made on his Substack.
In ideal circumstances, with no interruptions, ancient boats could make that trip in about a week. But the journey takes Odysseus years — with considerable interruptions along the way, of course. That gives you an idea of how fraught it was to travel even short distances at the time.
And yet, in defiance of all common sense and logistics, a bunch of South Asians apparently managed to travel thousands of miles to Greece, where they joined Odysseus’ crew. In fact, in this version of the ancient world, people from all over the globe apparently travel and intermingle with ease. The problem here — one of the problems, anyway — is that the casting, by itself, contradicts the internal logic of the story that Nolan is supposedly telling.
When African rappers have landed in Ithaca, and Koreans and Indians and Hispanics have somehow made the trek as well — and they all live there not as exotic foreigners but as regular inhabitants of the region — then you’re sending the message that travel isn’t that difficult. In fact, you seem to be saying that air travel exists. And that makes you wonder, somewhere during the three-hour runtime of this film, why exactly Matt Damon didn’t just log into his Expedia account and book a first-class ticket on Delta. That would have been a lot easier. Although if the only tickets available were on Southwest, he was probably better off on the ship.
Nolan was obviously aware of all of these issues. We have to give him credit — he’s a talented, competent director. So that means the choice was deliberate. Nolan went out of his way to make the crew as “diverse” as possible, even when his casting decisions undermined not just the audience’s immersion but the foundational logic of the plot itself. It’s the worst-case scenario for DEI hiring in a film because you can’t ignore it without also ignoring the setting, the plot, the characters, and everything else.
And yet, you’ll hear some conservatives defending Nolan on this point. Their main argument, as best I can tell, is that the DEI casting is relatively minimal, and doesn’t take up much screen time. But even if that were true — and it’s not, not even close — it’s extraordinary to watch how quickly conservatives are willing to cave, in scenarios where their opponents would never dream of doing so.
It’s the kind of thing that only happens in one direction. If someone made a movie set in Africa based on ancient African folklore, and then populated the cast with white people and other random races and ethnicities that have nothing to do with Africa, everyone would say that the casting is ridiculous and distracting at best. And they would be correct.
If the movie was set in Sub-Saharan Africa in the year 1100, and Chris Pratt showed up in tribal garb and said, “Howdy there folks, I’m an African tribal chieftain,” there wouldn’t be a single soul on the planet who would defend that obviously preposterous casting choice. Yet the same thing is done in the reverse to a foundational text of Western civilization, and even conservatives line up to defend it. Again, the word that comes to mind is “pathetic.”
If you’re a conservative and you’re unwilling to tell the truth about what’s happening here, for fear of being labeled a “culture warrior” or something like that, you should know that the Left has no such reservations. They explicitly want future generations to see Western culture as a universal product — as the outgrowth of modern-day “diversity,” with no distinct contributions from whites.
There’s no better way to undermine the future of Western civilization than to pretend Western civilization was invented by everyone, as some kind of multi-racial democratic group effort. That’s what they’re going for, whether you want to pay attention or not.
When I made this point on X, I was informed that actually, white people are supposedly doing the exact same thing. I was told that there are plenty of films where white actors are taking roles where they don’t belong, as an effort to stamp out other cultures. And as evidence for this proposition, I was informed about the existence of precisely one movie, called “Gods of Egypt.”
As you can see from the poster there, the film features Gerard Butler and Geoffrey Rush, who don’t appear to be Egyptian. And yet they’re starring in a film called “Gods of Egypt.” So there you have it — white people are trying to erase non-whites from Hollywood.
I have to admit, it’s amusing, if nothing else. People are desperately searching for an example of a modern movie that’s been race-swapped like “The Odyssey,” but in the opposite direction, and the best they can do is some obscure film from 10 years ago that nobody watched and has a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. If they intended to prove my point, they succeeded. These race swaps only go in one direction, and everyone knows it.
If I had to play devil’s advocate, I’d say that conservatives are giving Nolan a pass on the casting because they think the overall message of the film is conservative. But that’s not true either. Not even close.
During the film, you’ll get multiple lectures from women about how they’re oppressed by the patriarchy. Late in the film, we’re treated to a cartoonishly anachronistic speech from Odysseus’ wife Penelope about how unfair it is that the suitors won’t let her become king, in Odysseus’ absence.
She has all this knowledge and wisdom, but the patriarchy is keeping her down. And it’s played completely straight, even though it’s clearly a clumsy attempt to air-drop contemporary feminist attitudes into a story where it doesn’t belong and into a time period where such attitudes simply did not exist.
Certainly, at no point in Homer’s Odyssey did Penelope whine about how she could take over as king, because it would’ve been absurd. But in this film with a supposedly “conservative message,” we’re supposed to be okay with the idea that Penelope has the exact same attitude you’d expect from a newly-minted women’s studies major in the Bronx.
Then there’s the fact that the film goes out of its way to strip the story of divinity, as much as possible. Nolan suggests Odysseus’ problems amount to bad luck, rather than divine intervention. No gods show up at all. Zeus and Poseidon don’t appear as characters. Only goddesses appear in the film, and then only as PTSD hallucinations.
Zendaya as Athena pops up incessantly, and again does nothing with the role. She mostly just somberly stares at Odysseus. But the point is that she isn’t real within the context of the story. She is a kind of therapeutic coping mechanism for a man struggling with trauma.
Nolan’s Odyssey, unlike Homer’s, is a story completely disenchanted, devoid of the supernatural — aside from the odd witch or two. Now, Nolan’s apologists will say that he did this because he was going for a more “grounded” film.
So then why does Ancient Greece have the demographic makeup of Los Angeles circa 2026? Why is there a tiny little woman running around pretending to be a dude? Why is there an Asian guy delivering the line “we’re Greeks from Ithaca”? Grounded? Really? Grounded in what? The apologists are letting Nolan have his cake and eat it too, as always.
You cannot argue that Nolan had to take the gods out of a story of Greek mythology in order to ground it, and then also argue that Ellen Page’s appearance isn’t a major problem. Nolan himself has said that he expelled the gods from his films because he preferred to handle the supernatural in a “real-world way.” Well, again, if he’s worried about the “real-world” of Ancient Greece, then why does Ancient Greece look absolutely nothing like Ancient Greece?
To the extent that Zeus does play a role in Nolan’s film, it’s because he’s mentioned about 500 times in the context of “Zeus’ law.” Again, this is a concept that doesn’t exist, at least in the way Nolan portrays it, in Homer’s Odyssey.
The idea of Zeus’ law — as the characters tell you, to your face, in one of the many examples of on-the-nose exposition that treats the audience like it has a collective IQ of 45 — is that Greeks should treat strangers as they’d like to be treated. More broadly, Zeus’ law is Nolan’s spin on the Greeks’ concept of “xenia” or hospitality, which does play an important role in Homer’s poem.
Contrary to what Nolan seems to think, his idea of Zeus’ law is very different from the Greek concept of hospitality as outlined in Homer. You don’t have to squint very hard to see how Nolan is trying to twist this concept into a not very subtle sermon about modern-day immigration policy.
In Nolan’s film, Odysseus spends a significant amount of time moping around, sullen and depressed, after enabling the destruction of Troy by using the Trojan Horse. For those who somehow aren’t familiar: The Greeks presented the horse as a gift, but they had filled it with soldiers; at night, the soldiers opened the gates of Troy and enabled the Greek army to invade. This was a massive and unlikely victory, which was brought about because of the Greeks’ trickery and cunning.
In Homer, it was a heroic maneuver. Odysseus had outsmarted his enemies, which was a virtue. It wasn’t portrayed in Homer as a violation of “xenia” or hospitality or anything like that. There was no sense that Odysseus had committed some grave crime. Odysseus was very self-confident, but he was also effective in crushing his enemies. In Homer, “xenia” didn’t mean that you would never trick your enemy in war. It was about hospitality — a very different concept that applied to your dealings with strangers.
On the other hand, in Nolan’s film, Zeus’ law works very differently. Zeus’ law, as Odysseus explains it, means that you’re not supposed to use gifts (like the Trojan Horse) as a trick to enable a ground invasion. In other words, whether Nolan realizes it or not, he’s completely bastardized a central concept in the poem.
And in the name of this bastardization, Nolan transforms Odysseus into a whiny, solemn shell of a man plagued by “trauma and guilt” because he violated some fake idea of Zeus’ law by destroying Troy.
Of course, the idea of an ancient warrior feeling really bad about a glorious victory is absurd on its face. But the more you think about it, the worse it gets. If you have any familiarity at all with the source material, it’s actually kind of incredible that Nolan would even try this.
First, the Trojan Horse wasn’t the start of the conflict. It’s not as though Odysseus started the war by defying some sacred norm. The film suggests that the war actually started over trade routes, and Helen was basically a pretext and was not, in fact, the most beautiful woman in the world.
So it’s not clear why it’s some grave sin to end a war that’s been going on for 10 years, with all the brutality that war entails. Is the implication that it would also be unethical to execute a clever flanking maneuver that tricked an enemy general? Would the Battle of Chancellorsville be a violation of Zeus’ law? Who knows?
The other problem is that, in the film, Odysseus is so weepy and sad about his violation of Zeus’ law that he decides to go into exile. But first, he has to kill a bunch of suitors who are trying to marry his wife.
Specifically, he has to pretend to be a beggar to infiltrate the palace, at which point he’ll launch a surprise attack where he brutally murders the suitors. In other words, to rectify his violation of Zeus’ law during the Trojan War, Odysseus decides to violate Zeus’ law one more time, by killing the suitors who let him into the palace. But he thinks it’s partially okay, because the suitors themselves were taking advantage of Penelope’s hospitality by getting drunk in the palace and hitting on Penelope while Odysseus was away.
After the massacre, Odysseus decides that he’s tired of violating Zeus’ law, and sails away with Penelope. So he doesn’t reclaim the throne in glory, and he doesn’t die for his sins. Both of those would have been decisive choices that clarified the themes and concluded the story. But Nolan chose the third and most indecisive route, having Odysseus leave and hand the throne to his son, who — portrayed by Tom Holland — will presumably bore all of his subjects to death, as he’d done to the audience for three hours with his insipid, dull performance.
So part of the problem when you create a new interpretation of Zeus’ law is that your characters have to interact with that law. And in this case, the characters interact with the law in ways that don’t make much sense.
This is a problem Nolan created that didn’t exist in Homer. He made the central character of the story become depressed over violating some “law” that doesn’t make sense, which derails the entire story. It makes everyone’s motivations murky and uncertain.
In fact, this is a catastrophic error so severe that even Emily Wilson — the University of Pennsylvania feminist who wrote a woke translation of “The Odyssey” that Nolan relied on for the film — is now publicly calling out the film’s portrayal of Odysseus. This is one of the more amusing developments of this whole saga. Even the woke translator can’t take it anymore. She’s siding with the right-wingers.
Watch:
Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey is itself unfaithful, critiques Christopher Nolan’s adaptation for emphasizing Odysseus’ “shame” over heroic “glory,” calling it a modern psychiatric revision of the character.
Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/Jtq15FR11q
— AF Post (@AFpost) July 21, 2026
This is the same woman who has suggested that Odysseus was a “problematic” hero, and who says he’s “complicated” in her translation. She routinely chose words to make Odysseus seem less heroic and noble. So she’s clearly coming at this story from a feminist, modern perspective.
And even for her, Nolan’s film was a little too weepy and morose. Nolan took a story about an epic hero and made him peevish and insecure — all because Odysseus violated some fake law Nolan invented, which apparently says you’re not supposed to use clever strategies to win wars. It’s reminiscent of “Oppenheimer,” where Nolan made it clear he had a similar attitude about the atomic bomb.
Some of this stuff — qualms about Zeus’s laws and its applications — may seem pedantic. But it is not pedantic to expect internal logic from a film, especially one being hailed as an artistic masterpiece and one of the best movies of the century — which is what some critics are saying. And more importantly, it all points to the film’s greatest fundamental flaw, which was Nolan’s decision to infuse modern psychology and therapy-speak into a story about an ancient warrior three millennia ago.
In the ancient world, to triumph in battle was the greatest virtue. It would not be a source of shame. That is a modern attitude, not an ancient one. If Nolan wanted to make a modernized version of “The Odyssey” that imposes modern psychology and preoccupations — not to mention racial demographics — onto an ancient epic, he could have done an interpretation set in the current day.
There are many examples of that kind of thing, and some of them are pretty good. “O Brother Where Art Thou,” set in 1930s America, comes to mind. But transposing the modern mindset and worldview into the ancient world turns the whole thing into a farce, which is why a number of scenes look and feel like a Mel Brooks movie with better cinematography. It’s totally absurd. What’s the point of a story set in ancient times that doesn’t even try to actually capture the look and feel and perspective of ancient times?
The best films set in the ancient past transport you to and show you that world through the eyes of those people. That is the magic of film — at least good films. Nolan never achieves this. He never comes close to achieving it. He never even tries.
In “Apocalypto,” Mel Gibson transports you into the mind of a Mayan 500 years ago. In “The Northman,” Robert Eggers transports you into the mind of a Viking a thousand years ago. In “The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan transports you into the mind of a liberal woman in 2017.
At no point in the story does Nolan ever actually take the audience to the ancient world. You never feel like you’re 3,000 years in the past. You feel like you’re watching modern liberal Westerners put on a pageant. Nobody would be calling this thing a masterpiece if it was made by a director not named Christopher Nolan.
Hearing all this, maybe you’re saying, “Well, I don’t care about the cultural messaging or the casting or the politics or any of that. I just want to see a well-constructed movie, on a technical level.” The problem is that it’s impossible to overlook all of these flaws because the film itself is not very well constructed, or all that entertaining.
For the most part, the film is disjointed, dull, self-serious, and convoluted. It somehow feels both verbose and overly rushed at the same time. The dialogue is some of the worst I’ve ever heard in a “critically acclaimed” film. “On the nose” and “clunky” are descriptions that can’t even begin to describe this script.
“The Odyssey” is the kind of movie where a character in the Bronze Age actually says “the Age of Bronze is collapsing.” The dialogue is like this throughout. You cannot have genuinely subpar dialogue in a “masterpiece” film. Imagine a character in a Christopher Nolan movie set in the Middle Ages: “Geez, the Middle Ages are pretty tough.” Or maybe in 1917, a character might say, “Thank God, World War I is coming to an end.”
On top of the bad writing, the dialogue itself is often difficult to hear. The score routinely drowns out the words, which is a recurring problem for Nolan. It’s inexcusable. But as the film passes the two-hour mark, you start to think of the problem as more of a blessing. If you’re missing any lines of dialogue, then you can console yourself with the fact that you really weren’t missing much.
The film does not capture the grandeur and scope of the original epic. That’s why it feels truncated and drawn out, simultaneously. None of the scenes are given any time to breathe. We check in and check out quickly. Of course, one of the great challenges of adapting an ancient epic like “The Odyssey” is turning it into a coherent, propulsive film that tells a story in 3 hours — preferably 2 or 2 and a half — without feeling like a series of vignettes loosely connected to each other. That means you need to find the narrative through-line, the core of the story.
In other words, any filmmaker taking on this source material will need to narrow it down and streamline it because of the nature of the medium he’s working with. But Nolan never figures out how to do that. He can’t narrow it down, or if he does, he narrows it around the wrong things. And so the movie, from a pure storytelling perspective, is a failure. An understandable failure, perhaps, in some ways. Maybe even an inevitable one, but a failure nonetheless.
From a structural perspective, the story has a lot of inherent problems as well. Homer’s poem is modular, in many respects. Bards could tell specific tales, like the encounter with the Cyclops, and it would work very well. But when you crunch all of these tales together in a 3-hour-long movie, some cracks begin to emerge.
In “The Odyssey,” in the first half of the film, all of Odysseus’ adventures seem to end the same way. He’ll land on some shoreline with his men. They’ll encounter something promising — like a child who could offer them food or a sheep. And then they’ll be ambushed by some horrible monster, many of the men will die, and Odysseus will order a full retreat to the boat. It’s like the following scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” playing again and again:
There’s one encounter like this in “The Odyssey” where Odysseus and his men come across a bunch of giants wearing armor. The giants end up attacking them, damaging their boat, and killing a bunch of them. As far as I can tell, the point of this sequence is to show off the costume design of the giants, so that the giants can be featured on marketing materials like this:
It looks really cool. They can put it on posters and blast it all over Reddit. And that’s it. The scene doesn’t serve any real purpose. It doesn’t advance the story Nolan is telling. They just immediately run from the giants, like they’re in a Monty Python movie.
That said, I will praise the visuals in one respect. They mark a return to Jurassic Park-style effects, rather than CGI.
You can see how they built the Cyclops here, for example. In general, throughout the film, the practical effects are impressive. They’re easily the best part of the entire project — better than the acting, the plot, the dialogue, the score, everything.
Nolan absolutely deserves an Oscar for visual effects. But not for any other category. Although he will surely win in every other category too. But even the Cyclops scene, despite being one of the best sequences in the film, feels abbreviated and ultimately kind of empty. It’s missing something — and the something it’s missing is the wit and humor of the original, because Christopher Nolan has an apparent religious objection to including anything witty or humorous in his films.
Everything must be approached with ominous self-seriousness, even scenarios that are meant to be absurd — like a bunch of guys trapped in a cave with a giant cyclops and a herd of sheep. There’s something quite silly about the whole thing, and it’s meant to be, but Nolan isn’t capable of juggling two tones at once — absurdity and tension — so he always just chooses tension.
The whole movie is one note for this reason. Compare this to, say, the Coen Brothers, who are able to write scenes that are both hilarious, suspenseful, and disturbing at the same time. I would have loved to see what they could have done with the Cyclops sequence. Actually, we did see that, with John Goodman’s Bible salesman character in “O Brother Where Art Thou.” This movie — and the Cyclops scene in particular — called for that kind of artistic touch, but Nolan is apparently incapable of it.
Despite everything I’ve said, if you feel like you want to watch this movie anyway because you’re in the mood for a historical epic of some kind, I’m compelled to remind you that you have far better options.
Watch “Master and Commander,” “Apocalypto,” “The Northman,” or “Gladiator.” “The Odyssey” is somewhere well below these films on the list of historical epics. And to clarify for all the nerds who are getting ready to nitpick, when I say “historical epic” here I mean an epic adventure film set in a real and recognizable period of the past, whether based on true events or entirely mythological. So I wouldn’t include, for example, “The Lord of the Rings” on this list. Although those films are certainly superior to Nolan’s Odyssey in every imaginable way.
Truthfully, I have to search very hard to give Nolan credit for anything in this film beyond the visual effects. But there was one point where the conservative critics (some of them, at least) were wrong: The movie is not a flop. It’s a massive hit. Christopher Nolan is a cultural force the likes of which does not exist on the right at all. And we have to grapple with that fact. We have to do something about it besides complaining. Otherwise, we’re going to watch as guys like Nolan continue to defile and defame the great works of Western civilization, in front of an audience of tens of millions of people.
It’s not a lost cause. On Tuesday, someone named John Carter wrote the following post on X:
“I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.”
Just twenty-four hours later, Musk replied, “I’m down.”
If this is the legacy of Nolan’s Odyssey — if it actually leads to the creation of art that honors Western traditions and literature — then, and only then, can you make the case that the film served some useful purpose.
Otherwise, the film is precisely what we thought it would be. It’s a mockery of the men who built civilization, an incoherent mess wearing the skinsuit of a foundational text. The film is not “The Odyssey” at all.
In truth, it’s an attempt to transform a distinct literary work into yet another tedious celebration of multiculturalism and Leftist guilt-tripping. And rather than pretending the film is secretly “based” or whatever, we have to admit that Nolan succeeded.
He accomplished all of the goals he was trying to achieve. And in the process, he has created one of the most successful pieces of propaganda in the entire history of Hollywood. The fact that even conservative critics are strenuously defending a movie featuring a trans-identified female with top surgery in a pivotal role only proves that fact.
That’s why we need to get to work. By the time Christopher Nolan is delivering his Oscar acceptance speech about his brave casting of Ellen Page as a Greek warrior, or the many nuances of Zeus’ law, we should have our own faithful production in the works.
The only coherent message of Nolan’s film is that conservatives have become far too complacent. And unlike everything else in the film, it’s a message we should take seriously, before these people destroy any other great works of literature they didn’t create, and which they can’t possibly understand.
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