Somewhere on the press tour for &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; director Christopher Nolan appeared with Jimmy Fallon and watched his cast play Cyclops beer pong. Then he went to Beijing, sat down with a political philosophy Ph.D. student named Zhong Shu, and was asked a series of questions about his <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/what-christopher-nolan-couldnt-bring-himself-to-do">interpretation of Homer</a> and whether he was a “bard for a civilization at dusk.”
The viral Beijing interview was so much more than a well-read academic finally giving Nolan an intellectual challenge. It was a snapshot of the new story “arms race” that’s been quietly brewing between the U.S. and China — a narrative cold war where each civilization is grappling with its relationship to the guiding stories of the past in an effort to determine which culture will lead the world in the future.
The interview with Nolan ran nearly 20 minutes and instantly went viral in the West for good reason. Zhong asked thoughtful questions about hubris by way of Thucydides and the fall of Athens. She asked whether the gods in the film were merely projections of the human psyche and if Nolan had intentionally “Christianized” Homer in any way. She challenged Nolan on whether a story that originally celebrated Odysseus as a cunning, noble king had to be refitted into a story that demands greatness and must repent. 
 
“We turn greatness into privileges and we demand apologies for it. That’s a fact of Hollywood,” Zhong stated before asking Nolan if he agreed. Nolan told the young Chinese intellectual that, in a democratic age committed to equality, storytellers have to manage the audience&#8217;s built-in resistance to greatness. Do we have to apologize for that greatness? &#8220;And the answer is yes, we do,&#8221; he said, or the audience rejects it. He did not demur or deflect. He wasn&#8217;t defensive. He described it the way an engineer describes a load-bearing wall: This is simply how the mechanism works in our culture today.
The West&#8217;s most prominent living filmmaker calmly conceded that his civilization can no longer receive a story about greatness unless greatness acknowledges wrongdoing first. This admission — delivered in Beijing to an educated Chinese classicist who came prepared with provocations from our own civilization’s foundational myths and stories — revealed a deeper civilizational conflict over what guiding story and set of values are most suited to lead the world. How we relate to Homer, the stories of the Bible, Dante, and even our modern mythological heroes such as Superman matters, and the Chinese know this. The line of inquiry in that interview was not incidental.
For years — and with very little media attention — China has been quietly engaged in a narrative arms race with an American culture and the broader Western world that it believes is in decline. There’s a <a href="https://ia801806.us.archive.org/12/items/america-against-america/America%20Against%20America.pdf">belief within the Chinese government</a> that the modern West abandoned its own inheritance by deconstructing its foundational myths and values, and that now is the time to build where we have faltered. So for years, the Chinese have been mining the “classics” of Western Civilization for the insights that once gave us a civilizational advantage.
In November 2024, Beijing hosted the first World Conference of Classics: 600 participants and scholars, a congratulatory letter from Xi Jinping read aloud by the CCP&#8217;s propaganda chief, and a new Chinese School of Classical Studies established in Athens. Over the past decade, Peking University and Renmin have built classical studies programs too. 
A key figure in China’s modern fascination with Western classical education is political philosopher Liu Xiaofeng, who spent the 2000s importing “Great Books education” into Chinese universities at precisely the moment Western universities were more focused on critiquing, subverting, and deconstructing these stories. Three of his students now run a classics division inside the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While there is no evidence of any direct relationship between Liu Xiaofeng and the viral interviewer Zhong Shu, Zhong’s own approach and line of questioning were clearly influenced by Liu’s philosophy.
Here in the U.S., we too are reexamining our relationship to the stories of old and grappling with their importance. Even if Nolan’s interpretation of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-homers-odyssey-explains-the-american-soul">Homer’s epic myth</a> is a matter of contested debate, the fact that he believed it was the right time to return to a 2,800-year-old story means something.
Hollywood has been in a confused state of nostalgia for quite some time. Prequels, sequels, and reboots have dominated our narrative landscape. Oftentimes, they’re revisiting classic fairy tales or our modern mythic heroes to deconstruct them, and other times they’re going back to celebrate them. What is undeniable is that the relationship to these stories of our past matters.
This isn’t just a Hollywood entertainment phenomenon either. Throughout America, a new alternative to the SAT and ACT as the standard college entry exam has been quickly gaining traction. Developed by Jeremy Wayne Tate and a bipartisan network of educators and philosophers, the Classic Learning Test puts understanding of the “Great Books” and foundational myths of the West on center stage. Pete Hegseth, head of the U.S. Department of War, called it the new “<a href="https://x.com/PeteHegseth/status/1918730699500089459?s=20">gold standard</a>” of tests and is working to make it the norm at West Point.
At the highest levels of government, among the two most powerful superpowers in the world, there is a shared admission: Civilizations run on stories. They are the operating system of a society. They give a people who are not bound by blood a shared identity, shared values, shared customs, and even a way to mark their days through shared holidays and mass cultural celebrations. 
This is a lesson both nations learned about the “soft power” of story during the 20th-century Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Cold War wasn’t just a conflict between two different economic theories. It was a civilizational collision between two different guiding stories about God, human nature, and the purpose of life, with the economics being downstream of those guiding stories. Many have even half-jokingly wondered over the years whether the movie &#8220;Rocky IV&#8221; is what finally beat the Soviets.
Both sides in today’s new cold war know that the stories we tell about our past are essential to any sense of shared cultural identity and that they determine the direction of our future. Going back to even the early 1990s, Chinese officials could see that the developing culture war in America was really a story war. “Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit,” was the <a href="https://ia801806.us.archive.org/12/items/america-against-america/America%20Against%20America.pdf">famous conclusion</a> that Chinese political scientist Wang Huning came to after an extensive tour of American universities. 
As I first wrote about in &#8220;<a href="https://a.co/d/09v1C2CN">Based on a True Story</a>,&#8221; the Chinese government believes so strongly that a civilization’s destiny is bound up with the foundational myths and stories of its culture that officials now forbid time-travel stories from primetime television out of fear that the very notion that these core myths could be critically reassessed could cause their civilization to self-destruct.
This gets to the tension in Nolan’s confession about our association of greatness with “privilege” and the underlying assumption that all power is inherently oppressive. That story has not always been part of our shared cultural identity. There was a time when we unashamedly celebrated a modern mythic character like Superman as the most powerful and greatest being on the planet, and didn’t ask him to apologize for anything, because we believed that virtuous character could shoulder the weight of that power.
Zhong was clever to probe whether Christian notions of repentance were somehow influencing Nolan’s take on Odysseus. Certainly, a central emphasis of historic Christianity has been “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,” but this is not what Nolan, by his own admission, was trying to communicate. Jesus was not claiming that greatness was inherently a byproduct of some sin of “privilege” that requires repentance just for being great, but that the shape of greatness should resemble his own virtues and sacrifice. This is the central guiding story of Western civilization.
Whatever civilization rediscovers this truth first will be the one that averts civilizational armageddon and stands the test of time.
***
Paul Anleitner is a cultural theologian whose work focuses on the role of culture and story in our quest for meaning. He is the author of “Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning.”
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Christopher Nolan Exposes Hollywood’s Strange New Rule About Greatness

China

Christopher Nolan

The Odyssey

Upstream

Happy Friday, folks. Let&#8217;s talk about the most accidentally prophetic screenplay in Hollywood history, shall we?
Somehow, someway, Christopher Nolan got his hands on a time machine, took one look at America&#8217;s political future, and built an entire trilogy to warn us about it. I rewatched &#8220;The Dark Knight Rises&#8221; last weekend and dang-near slid off my couch during Bane&#8217;s Blackgate Prison speech.
To set the scene: the bombs have gone off. The police are buried alive under Gotham, sealed in like a city-sized panic room without an exit hatch. Every prisoner in Blackgate has just been handed a rifle and a grudge. The football players have sunk into the earth, America&#8217;s favorite sport swallowed whole. Bane climbs onto the wreckage of the city he just hollowed out, and he starts preaching:
<blockquote>We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you… the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please. Start by … freeing the oppressed! Step forward those who would serve. For an army will be raised. The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests, and cast out into the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed. Blood will be shed.</blockquote>
I mean, come on. Put a claw mask over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, Michigan U.S. Senate nominee <a href="https://x.com/theblaze/status/2085031755669471487/video/1">Abdul(etc) </a>El-Sayed, Colorado congressional nominee Melat Kiros, and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, and you genuinely cannot tell the difference.
Bane isn&#8217;t a comic book villain. He&#8217;s every DSA candidate&#8217;s final form, minus the gym membership.
The monster who hijacked and crashed a CIA plane with no survivors, stormed the stock exchange, and held a city hostage with a nuclear bomb spends his big speech insisting that capitalism has failed us, that oppressors have oppressed for generations, and that he alone can hand control back to the people, while the crowd claws over each other and the city burns. As the stadium disintegrates, Bane lays out his class-based populist playbook: seize the institutions, redistribute by force, and claim moral legitimacy while preparing total annihilation.
I don&#8217;t know how he did it, but Nolan clearly cracked open the Democratic Psychos of America platform mid-time-travel and decided it made a better villain origin story than a legitimate governing philosophy.
The echoes are enough to make you sick.
The DSA calls it putting &#8220;people before profit&#8221; (never mind that it polls abysmally with the poor, working-class voters they claim to speak for). Bane sneers at the “myths of opportunity.” Both regurgitate the same lie: that the American Dream and free markets were built to keep people down.
The DSA calls it &#8220;taxing the rich&#8221; (or eating the rich, if they&#8217;re feeling ravenous). Bane calls it ripping richies from their decadent nests and enjoying the spoils. How inspiring.
The DSA relishes the idea of ending mass incarceration. Bane&#8217;s opening act as a monstrous dictator was storming Blackgate and declaring the prisoners the true oppressed, then convening kangaroo courts where being a capitalist, a cop, or a creator is itself the crime. Bane-style justice looks a lot like sending the good guys out onto thin ice to die.
They dress it up in the flowery language of &#8220;returning power to ordinary people,&#8221; delivered through a mask or with a smarmy Joker smile. But what the Bane Bolsheviks actually want, and fully intend to bring to fruition, is a communist society: classless, stateless, moneyless, and full of fear, chaos, and pain.
Once you gulp down the black pill and accept that the existing order is irredeemably corrupt and must be replaced by the proletariat, the road forks toward exactly one destination: strongmen, emergency powers, and &#8220;purification,&#8221; dressed up however the decade demands.
You can clearly see in the film how hope gets weaponized. You can also just read a history book and see the same thing (but kids don’t do that nowadays). The French Revolution, the Bolshevik uprising, Mao&#8217;s Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution all followed the same pattern. They sell like sex and then kill like an STD.
Luckily, every previous socialist uprising of this intensity has eventually been throttled by people smarter and sturdier than the tyrants selling them, whether that was the Soviet Union collapsing under its own weight, the Khmer Rouge finally meeting its match, or the long, grinding resistance that kept Western democracies from going the same way. In the movie, Batman beats Bane, and Gotham chooses to save itself instead of accepting annihilation. But it&#8217;s a constant choice, one we make over and over, because full-blown tyranny is always just one bad election away.
Doing the harder thing, working, following the law, building instead of burning, choosing gratitude over grievance — those things have never been the easy sell; it&#8217;s not supposed to be. We&#8217;re at one of those pivotal moments again: let the stadium collapse under us, or stand up to the Banes of our own era and choose to be great again.
For now, we can find peace in knowing Bane was jacked, built like a tank on roids. Our homegrown revolutionary wannabes, by contrast, are weighing in at 135 pounds of pure nonbinary fluff, more likely to pull a hamstring storming aluminum barricades than an empire.
If we play our cards right, the business-minded, Christian Bale-esque builders, the Batmans of the world, won’t even need to break a sweat.
Turns out Nolan never needed a time machine. He just needed C-SPAN, a couple of DSA press releases, and some old tweets to cast the perfect villain.

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Gotham City’s Bane Is Every DSA Candidate’s Final Form

Democratic Socialists Of America

DW Opinion

Gotham City

It’s no secret that conservatives are the David to Hollywood’s Goliath on the pop culture front.
Much of that isn’t their fault. The Heartland is mostly shut out of Hollywood, Inc. Conservative stories rarely get a close-up on screens of any size. The list of openly conservative stars remains microscopically small.
Yet conservatives may have hurt their own cause by going to war with “The Odyssey,” mostly sight unseen.
Director Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic poem drew endless online attacks from both Right-leaning YouTube creators and conservatives. It’s woke! It’s D.E.I. gone wild! The source material’s translator is a <a href="https://www.slashfilm.com/2219268/how-emily-wilson-feels-christopher-nolan-the-odyssey-adaptation/">woke feminist</a>!
A woke feminist, for what it’s worth, who had some unkind things to say about Nolan’s finished product.
Now, with the film generating rapturous responses from <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_odyssey_2026">film critics</a> and <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/odyssey-audience-cinemascore-even-beyond-031733557.html">audiences alike</a>, that knee-jerk response is looking worse. The film earned a whopping <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/the-odyssey-box-office-christopher-nolan-opening-weekend-shatters-expectations-1236815861/">$264 million globally</a> in its opening weekend, and the subsequent numbers show little sign that it’s a one-weekend wonder.
Nolan isn’t your average Hollywood storyteller. He never weighs in on politics directly, lets his art speak for him, and once made a blockbuster that side-eyed the Occupy Wall Street movement – “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012).
He spent an entire Oscar campaign for 2023’s “Oppenheimer” without shouting “Free Palestine” or attacking a certain U.S. president. He’s also not a social media diva. He reportedly doesn’t own a smartphone and has his assistants <a href="https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/jaelaniturnerwilliams/christopher-nolan-no-smartphone-email">print out emails for him</a>. (Maybe we can all agreed that’s a bit much.)
That should have earned him some respect on the Right, the sense that this wasn’t your average Hollywood progressive weaponizing a classic against Red State USA.
No.
Social media allowed some Right-leaning souls to predict the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldGE53GwLlc">film’s financial doom</a> and slam the film sight unseen. Even Elon Musk entered the chat, pummeling the film for weeks prior to its release.
On one key front, the Right had a point.
Nolan cast trans actor Elliot Page in “The Odyssey,” but he and his team refused to explain what role Page played. That sparked rumors that the part was Achilles, known to all as a fearsome warrior.
Page is five-foot-one and slender.
No matter. That Fake News story ricocheted around the web, desperate for a fact check that took too long to arrive. It’s notable that Nolan didn’t immediately debunk the misinformation, nor did his marketing team.
The latter likely possess smartphones.
Casting Page deserved some raised eyebrows. The actor is intensely political, before and after the transition. Page’s on-screen appearance is a distraction, no matter where you stand on so-called “representation” and trans rights. Period. Good filmmakers should understand that, but like even the very best storytellers in Hollywood, Nolan isn’t perfect.
Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o co-stars as Helen of Troy, a character described as fair-skinned in the text and played by white actors in previous takes on the source material. It’s a race swap! Yes, yes, it is, but it’s a very minor point in a much larger story.
Some savaged the star for not being beautiful enough for the role, a characterization that is both subjective and silly. Plus, Nyong’o has little screen time.
Nolan spoke repeatedly of his attempt to “modernize” the epic tale for modern audiences. Nyong’o’s casting may have been part of that effort. Some other minor “Greek” roles also clashed with the time period. Was Nolan pulling a minor “Hamilton” move, where casting choices took a creative turn to say something about the culture at large?
Right-leaning podcaster Bridget Phetasy leveled the cruelest dig at the film’s conservative critics. She called their <a href="https://www.phetasy.com/p/walk-ins-welcome-400?utm_source=podcast-email&amp;publication_id=348276&amp;post_id=208139218&amp;utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&amp;utm_content=watch_now_gif&amp;r=2rv17&amp;triedRedirect=true&amp;utm_medium=email">attacks “liberal” in nature</a>:
<blockquote>
You had a criticism of making everything political for a decade, and now you haven’t seen the movie and you’re making it political and telling people not to go enjoy a good movie.
</blockquote>
That’s not to say some conservative arguments weren’t solid or leaned on little more than tired talking points to fit their agenda. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh skewered “The Odyssey” while bringing up salient arguments about the casting, the impact of Page’s character and more.
He actually saw the film and gave his two cents thereafter. Agree? Disagree? He stated his case well.
Andrew Klavan mostly praised the film but found the screenplay wanting, to put it mildly.
The Critical Drinker, who isn’t overtly conservative but leans to the cultural Right, served up a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_W0z6hZlrI">nuanced take</a> that mixed criticism with praise.
Conservatives should take great care in “jumping the gun” on pop culture matters. In a way, that’s what the Left often does. Consider the L.A. Times’ <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/la-times-daily-wire-run-hide-fight-racist/">recent assault on “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,”</a> a movie that doesn’t hit Daily Wire+ until the Fall.
The newspaper read a generic synopsis of the film, set on a college campus where Islamic radicals take charge, and declared the film deeply problematic. The film could inspire violence, the paper argued, while implying it should be censored.
The worst part of this ugly culture war battle? The anger and absolutism behind the critiques. “The Odyssey” is just a movie, albeit a massive one with cultural heft. We can love or loathe it, find it inspiring or wanting.
Walsh is right, to a degree. So is The Critical Drinker and the Left-leaning mainstream critics who adored “The Odyssey.”
Conservatives should still engage in the culture wars, create art on their own terms (when feasible) and not cede Hollywood to the modern Left. The latter would be disastrous.
They also should hold their fire until they see the art in question and bring vital context to their culture war crusades. The Right is working at a distinct disadvantage here. They shouldn’t make matters worse.
***
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of <a href="http://www.hollywoodintoto.com/">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News&#8217; Big Hollywood. He&#8217;s also the host of <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hollywood-in-toto-podcast-w-christian-toto/id1186449155">The Hollywood in Toto Podcast</a>. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto?lang=en">@HollywoodInToto</a>.

“The Odyssey” New York Premiere

Conservatives Lose A Culture War Battle Over ‘The Odyssey’

Andrew Klavan

Culture wars

Elliot Page

Entertainment

Hollywood

Lupita Nyong’o

Matt Walsh

Woke Culture

Punch-Odyssey-2

Is ‘The Odyssey’ A Sign America Is Post-Woke?

Homer

Shane Gillis

Spencer Klavan

Weekend Punch

All social media is abuzz with talk about &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s classic epic poem.
And many of you may be thinking to yourself, “Gee, I would like to join this scintillating conversation, but I’m afraid if I say anything, everybody will realize I’m a complete ignoramus.”
Well, have no fear. If you’re an ignoramus, you’ve come to the right place. We’re here to help you post intelligent-sounding content on a poem you know nothing about without actually having to read this foundational work of Western culture, which you also know nothing about.
If you want to discuss &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; as if you were an educated person of sophistication, first, get in the mood by taking that stupid look off your face. Next, when composing your post, try to use at least a few multi-syllabic words like “concatenation” or “sacerdotal,” as in the sentence, “Boy, that concatenation sure is sacerdotal.”
If all else fails, try posting your early opinions on the platform X. That way, if it turns out you really are a total moron, you’ll fit right in.
Now, of course, if you want to talk about &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; with an air of expertise, it might help if you know something about the author of the original poem, Homer. This is not easy because, as famous as his poems are, Homer himself was a mysterious figure who would come and go like the wind, leaving as his calling card only a single kiss on the lips of a sleeping woman.
Experts believe he lived in the 8th century BC, but they’re not sure exactly when because the math is just too hard. But we do know that many people think Homer was blind because he kept bumping into things, and all the statues of him have white eyeballs without pupils.
Homer wrote two famous poems, &#8220;The Iliad&#8221; and &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; but you don’t have to know much about &#8220;The Iliad&#8221; because Christopher Nolan didn’t make a film about that, and the one with Brad Pitt sucks. &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; however, has many famous stories in it, some of which are still relevant today.
For instance, there’s the passage in which the hero Odysseus and his crew sail past the Sirens, who sing beautiful and alluring songs that cause unsuspecting fools to try to follow them so that they dash their ship to pieces on the rocks, sink into the sea, and drown. Today, these same Sirens serve as consultants for the Democratic Socialists of America.
Then there’s the story about the witch Circe, who turned men into pigs, and later went on to become a famous feminist author also named Circe. Her book, &#8220;Men Are Pigs, So Live a Life of Rage and Loneliness Until you Realize Too Late You’ve Missed Out on Everything Worthwhile,&#8221; was a number one New York Times bestseller, even though it only sold seven copies, all of them to women who work at The New York Times. Many of Circe’s admirers later felt betrayed, however, when she married a ruggedly masculine billionaire in an elaborate Catholic ceremony with a “Spank me, Daddy,” motif and then gave birth to fourteen children, all named after pork.
Another famous incident in the poem that remains relevant today is the story of the Trojan Horse, in which the Trojans opened the gates of their city and let in the enemies who then burned Troy to the ground. This later became the immigration policy of the Biden administration.
Now some people may ask: why should we be interested in a poem that was written so long ago that people can’t even compute when it was? These same people may also find it difficult to walk and chew gum at the same time unless they keep looking down at their feet and have instructions on how to chew gum written on top of their shoes.
The reason you should read &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; and other great works of literature is that it will help you become a more rounded and informed human being with a sense of where you came from and who you are.
The downside is that you will no longer be welcome on X.

Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Inspires Millions To Pretend They’ve Read Homer

There are things that define the artists we love. Wes Anderson has daddy issues and was once friend zoned by a girl who liked heavy eye makeup. Snoop Dogg likes weed. Quentin Tarantino wishes he were Snoop Dogg. Taylor Swift gets her heart broken; at least she did until getting married. Christopher Nolan obsesses over what kind of man he is and what his legacy will be. Also, his wife is probably <a href="https://youtu.be/IpN_wAlYZSs">going to die</a>. Together, they form <a href="https://x.com/DKThomp/status/2080014836709154914">the yin and the yang</a>, the night and the day, the summer and the winter, the chocolate and the peanut butter.
They may seem different. Swift makes works for stadiums and car speakers. Nolan’s productions are for the screen. They’re both fond of IMAX, though. More importantly, both are our bards, our cultural leaders, people who can set off silly firestorms, ones that really shouldn’t be as expansive as they are. Swift has been criticized for being not political enough, then for being too political. Also, she takes lots of private jets. Nolan, well, he made a cinematic version of an ancient poem, and criticisms are all over the place. Some are even legitimate, but the discourse has become absolutely retarded, and not just because I’ve contributed to it.   
If only he’d adapted something from Shakespeare that drew the same sort of fury, a tempest in a teapot, if you will. That’s not why we’re here, though. No, we’re here to discuss how a Millennial former teen country star turned pop sensation and an elder Gen X autist with a passion for insanely complicated filmmaking mirror one another. It’s not just the wealth, the controversies, or the IMAX. It’s the stars themselves.
Swift got her start as a songwriter and, while she has done some covers live, has written 100% of the songs that have appeared on her albums. They are deeply personal and introspective, covering her dating life. They’ve also covered her dating life. Additionally, she’s discussed her dating life.
Nolan, on the other hand, isn’t even a little afraid of covers. See, for example, “The Odyssey.” He does put his own spin on things and does produce 100% original films, but five of his 12 major studio films were based on the concepts of others, six if you include “Memento,” which started as a short story written by his brother and frequent screenwriting collaborator. And while there is romance, none of these films are even remotely personal, unless in a surprise twist it turns out that Nolan is a vigilante or perhaps does magic tricks at children’s birthday parties. We truly have no idea if he and his wife Emma Thomas even go on dates.
Then there is the matter of monoculture. Here, they are more similar, if also entirely different. Swift is the pop diva, producing hit songs for teenage girls and girls who used to be teenagers, but are now more likely thirty-something wine moms or, failing that, cool aunts. More than a few dads, particularly ones with daughters, are also known to jam her tunes. Additionally, famous non-parent Dave Portnoy is an avowed Swiftie. Tay Tay may not be the most complex songwriter, but she knows how to write the same song many different times, attracting legions of fans and having stacks of cash so tall she could fill a complex with them.
When it comes to Nolan, on the other hand, Portnoy is <a href="https://youtu.be/bMcP_a4UuqA?si=XpnOFeYTkWamNvXh&amp;t=90">not really a fan</a>. Regarding “Tenet,” he said everyone involved “should be in jail” and that “Einstein couldn’t follow it.” He does like the Batman movies. Regardless, it’s the complexity of Nolan’s movies that bothers him, and delights Nolan’s fans. His singular approach to writing and directing is to make the same movie over and over again, except each one is a labyrinthine maze of time and space, a veritable cornucopia of misdirection and sweeping artistic landscapes. And while he also stacks cash, his stacks are only in the millions compared to Swift’s billions.
The thing about the yin and the yang is that they come together. And when it comes to focusing on producing original works that delight their respective fanbases, both Swift and Nolan put in the work. These aren’t people who sit in their trailers waiting on others to do things for them. Swift releases surprise albums while on tour for a different album. The Eras Tour featured shows stretching to three hours in length, including one performed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwfK0j83WzA">in a storm</a>. She reinvents herself every few years. Eventually, she’ll sell cake and brownie mixes à la Dolly Parton.
Nolan is famously strict on set. He <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwfK0j83WzA">banned Uggs</a> from filming of “The Odyssey,” because they “weirdly take you out of reality.” (And if there’s one thing to keep focused on when filming a movie about a man fighting sea monsters, it’s reality.) He doesn’t sit in his director’s chair. He tries to keep his actors and crew from <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/christopher-nolan-disputes-chair-ban-phones-cigarettes-1234570631/">using cell phones and smoking</a>. He releases films <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Nolan_filmography">more quickly</a> than many streaming shows release <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/wait-between-tv-seasons-study-1236606660/">new seasons</a>. As with <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl4054352641/">Swift</a>, in another yin-and-yang moment, he gets people to actually <a href="https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/christopher-nolan-is-becoming-one-of-hollywoods-most-dependable-franchises">go to theaters</a>.
The most amazing thing about this dynamic duo is that there is no romantic overlap, and not just because of the age difference. Nolan met his wife in college, and they wed in 1997. Swift’s romantic history is well known and not relevant here other than the fact that she’s never dated an actor from Nolan’s roster. She and Harry Styles did spend some time together, and Styles was in “Dunkirk,” but she hasn’t been linked to anyone else from his roster.
Other than that, though, Taylor Swift and Christopher Nolan are two sides of the same coin, two individuals furiously working to create output that draws people in and keeps them invested. Both are creating works that will outlive them. Both have their detractors. Only one of them <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CJhv0Myn2ow/?img_index=2">likes Uggs</a>. That’s okay, though, because they couldn’t complement one another so well if they were the same.
As to compliments, Nolan has actually praised Swift, albeit for her decision to bypass traditional studios and <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/news/christopher-nolan-taylor-swift-eras-tour-skipping-studios-1235762277/">deal directly</a> with AMC for “The Eras Tour” and not for her music, but still. Because if that’s not a you got peanut butter in my chocolate/you got chocolate in my peanut butter <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7oD_oX-Gio">connection</a>, I don’t know what is.
And that is why, dear Hershey marketing executives, you should greenlight this insane campaign for Reese’s. It will defy time, place, and reason altogether. It will appeal to Einstein and to Portnoy. It will send people to the concession stand, whether the movie is “Eras 2: A New Era” or “The Odyssey 2: The Next Voyage.” Trust me, it’s going to be epic.
***
Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin&#8217; Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cookin-up-a-story/id1624969096">here</a>. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4

Connection

The Metaphysical Yin And Yang Of Christopher Nolan And Taylor Swift

Dave Portnoy

Eras Tour

IMAX

Taylor Swift

When you are a young father, you have to make a choice at some point about what is, to my mind, an important thing: what will be the first movie your children will ever see? It matters even if they don’t remember it. If they love it, it matters more. So you have to spend more than a moment of thinking about it, particularly if, as many of us are, the idea that you would put a barely cognizant child before a flickering screen begets responsibility for what comes from it.
For this reason, my three children have all had the same movie play before them before their first birthday, intentionally and without hesitation: “Isle of Dogs,” Wes Anderson’s stop motion journey through the Japanese archipelago of the future. My daughters have memorized it fully — they quote the jokes and even the Japanese lines with readiness. There is, in the early days, a confusion that not all dogs sound like Bryan Cranston or Liev Schreiber. But they understand that there is a language gap. They know the label of man’s best friend. And they know what it means to say: I’ve gone to find my dog.
Amidst the overheated discourse surrounding Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” — the summer flick which launched ten thousand takes — there was one thread which stuck out to me, even as someone who lacks the linguistic and antiquarian knowledge to fully analyze what that vest-wearing troublesome child of Westminster threw into our discourse. That was the rejection by the supposed poorly-tattooed muse for the screenplay, Emily Wilson, of key aspects of Nolan’s creation: she found it too modern, too wrought, too different from both the original and her own interpretation. Fine. But this was the line that stuck out to me: an irritation at an iconic scene of Odysseus’ reunion with his long-serving pup, Argos. Her dismissal was that it was too modern, too mawkish: &#8220;everybody&#8217;s a sucker for a dog&#8221;.
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Emily Wilson after watching the Odyssey:
‘The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he&#8217;s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrised way – and needs drugs to do so! He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we… <a href="https://t.co/m0rfyHd7Ux">pic.twitter.com/m0rfyHd7Ux</a>
— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) <a href="https://x.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/2079887117618946245?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 22, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Ms. Wilson is entitled to her opinion, but the role of Argos in “The Odyssey” is an emotional connection she seems unfamiliar with. Perhaps she is, as her appearance suggests, a cat lady. But even so, she should understand the unique nature of man’s relationship with dog, which the Greco-Roman era highlights throughout our discovery of their unique and heartfelt tributes. The ancients buried their dogs with markers; they wept and mourned them; they wrote verses for them; and they knew them as loyal friends, fellow hunters, and protectors of home and hearth. To dismiss Argos as if he is some inserted bit of sappy emotion — the sort of lazy, emotionally manipulative, unearthly thing that appears, CGI hair ubiquitous, in the films of James Gunn, brought to you by James Gunn — is to dramatically underestimate his importance.
Am I saying Odysseus might have left Calypso just to find his dog, to say goodbye?
Yes, I am.
“Surely, even as you lie dead in this tomb, I deem the wild beasts yet fear your white bones, huntress Lycas; and your valor great Pelion knows, and splendid Ossa and the lonely peaks of Cithaeron.”
This is the memory etched in the tomb of a Thessalian hunting hound, and it is of a piece with the memories that Greeks and Romans alike left behind for their companions. There is the dog of Eumelus of Malta — whose name was Bull, or Tauros — “This stone holds the white dog from Melita, the most faithful guardian of Eumelus; Bull they called him while he was yet alive, but now his voice is imprisoned in the silent pathways of night.” Or for the woman Rhodope, who buried her devoted protector beside her eventual grave. Or for Tauron, who protected his master to the end:
<blockquote>
A dog is interred beneath this marker — Tauron who was not undone when faced with a killer. For he encountered a boar in direct combat… But the dog struck two feet into its back and grabbed the bristling beast in the middle of its chest and drove it down into the ground — he made a gift of the beast to Hades and died himself … He saved the life of Zenon, the hunter he followed. So he is buried here beneath this light dust.
</blockquote>
The encounter with Argos is a particularly poignant one: he recognizes Odysseus after 20 years of absence, wags his tail in greeting, and dies an honorable death having stayed alive to welcome his master home. The story is so iconic that it is echoed across media for centuries, and it’s not like it’s gone now. Is there any question that the one episode anyone who ever watched “Futurama” remembers is Jurassic Bark, where Fry’s dog remains steadfast in wait of his master? Sam&#8217;s sacrifice in “I Am Legend” is the heart of a relatively forgettable movie. Or what about John Wick, a series which is entirely based on the premise of what a retired expert assassin would do if you kill his dog?
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As a former speechwriter, the notion that this love of dogs is some modern tendency is at odds with the understanding that the greatest single speech in American history isn’t the Gettysburg address; it’s a random speech in defense of a lonely dog, delivered by future Senator George Graham Vest in a courthouse in Missouri in 1870. The case was decidedly against the now deceased canine — but Vest won based on his eulogy, which is unmatched in American rhetoric:
<blockquote>
Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son and daughter that he has reared with loving care may become ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has he may lose. It flies away from him when he may need it most. Man&#8217;s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees and do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend a man may have in this world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is the dog.
A man&#8217;s dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground when the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master&#8217;s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer. He will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince.
When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an outcast into the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all comes and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws and his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfullness, faithful and true even to death.
</blockquote>
A statue is erected in Johnson County in honor of <a href="https://historicmissouri.org/items/show/2">Old Drum</a>, who was, despite his faults, a very good dog. Let Emily Wilson have her vagaries about “The Odyssey,” about masculinity and PTSD, modernity and its insufficient feminism — but do not, for one moment, let her take from us the friendship of a man and his dog.

Old engraved illustration of Diogenes of Sinope sitting in his tub

From Ancient Times To Today, We Love Good Dogs

Emily Wilson

Futurama

George Graham Vest

Isle of Dogs

John Wick

Old Drum

Wes Anderson

‘The Odyssey’ Was Even Worse Than I Expected. Here’s Everything Wrong With It.

Ellen Page

Film

Zendaya

After criticizing Christopher Nolan&#8217;s &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; over its casting choices, billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk said he would be willing to bankroll an alternative adaptation of Homer&#8217;s epic. 
Musk, who previously <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/05/elon-musk-the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-cast-lupita-nyongo-helen-1236901704/">blasted</a> Nolan for &#8220;race-swapping&#8221; characters and suggested he was chasing awards with casting decisions, said he would be willing to pony up $100 million to produce an alternative adaptation directed by Mel Gibson.
It&#8217;s unclear whether Musk was serious, but the idea quickly gained traction after an X user suggested he bankroll Gibson&#8217;s version of Homer&#8217;s classic.
“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,” the user <a href="https://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2079640327170728085">wrote</a> on Tuesday. 
“I’m down,” Musk replied.
The original poster was blown away by the response, and even if nothing comes of it, there are already alternative “Odyssey” projects in the works. 
Later Tuesday, Musk posted that his artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Grok, would take a stab at it.
“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Musk wrote, sharing a clip of a dialogue scene posted by another X user.
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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.
— John Carter (@martianwyrdlord) <a href="https://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2079640327170728085?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 21, 2026</a></blockquote>
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The idea of competing adaptations has already begun taking shape. Days before Nolan’s blockbuster debuted, content generator Ash Koosha announced plans to release an AI-generated version of &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; later this year.
Koosha is best known for debuting another AI-generated feature, “Dreams of Violets,” at this year&#8217;s Tribeca Film Festival.
“We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey, is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha <a href="https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/07/15/ai-slop-version-of-the-odyssey-announced-prior-to-release-of-christopher-nolans-epic-block">said</a> of his version.
Meanwhile, “The Odyssey” has become the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/conservatives-had-concerns-about-the-odyssey-now-theyre-praising-it">biggest box-office opening of Nolan’s career</a>. 
While some conservatives initially criticized aspects of the casting before the film&#8217;s release, many have praised it despite those reservations. Others, however, continue to object to several casting choices, including the decision to cast Elliot Page, a transgender-identifying woman, as a male soldier.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk Says He’s ‘Down’ To Fund A Rival ‘Odyssey’

Artificial Intelligence

Mel Gibson

Movies

This is republished with permission from <a href="https://www.civitasoutlook.com/">Civitas Outlook</a>. The original essay can be found <a href="https://www.civitasoutlook.com/research/nolans-odyssey-and-the-search-for-wisdom?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_content=ap_vztotndg1r">here</a>.
***
The last major director in Hollywood is Sir Christopher Nolan. We have other famous names — think of Tarantino — but they’re not working. There are more prestigious men still alive and working — Scorsese — but they seem lost in their own art, uninterested in the viewing public, never mind the future. Nolan dedicated his career to finding out what the future holds and making that future a reality. He was early to the superhero genre and made his definitive contribution to cinema with The Dark Knight. He also made the most successful sci-fi movies of our time with Inception and Interstellar.
His astonishing success is more clearly seen if we ignore the Oscars (18 wins out of 49 nominations for his movies) and the exorbitant fortunes made (over $6 billion) in order to look at the effect on the audience, which skews male (very rare in any endeavor nowadays outside of tech), younger, and more interested in digital technology. He tries to bring together the interest in tech and manliness, in innovation and popularity — his admirers call his protagonists heroes and are spellbound by his spectacular IMAX movies. Accordingly, he dominates the IMDb Top 250 (with a unique 8 movies on the list).
Therefore, it should surprise us to see his turn to the past in the last decade. In 2017, Nolan made Dunkirk, his only war movie, a gripping vision of the British retreat from France in 1940, “the end of the beginning,” as Churchill famously called it. In 2023, Oppenheimer, also set in WWII, his only biography, was a remarkably successful movie about the making of the atomic bomb (just shy of a billion dollars) that reminded everyone that men want to work hard and save the world, women want to look pretty and rule the world, or so it was seemingly advertised in conjunction with Barbie, a much bigger success.
Now, Nolan made The Odyssey, his only epic, which goes back all the way to the beginning of our storytelling tradition, to Homer. If WWII was the end of history, the last major war, the moment war became, potentially, a power to end all life, the Trojan War was the beginning of history, the moment war made the difference between the Greeks and the barbarians. The Odyssey is also unusual because of the character of the marketing: If there were giggles with Barbenheimer, there is culture war with The Odyssey, from casting controversies (we have a black Helen and Clytemnestra, played by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o in a double role, a trans actor, Oscar nominee Ellen/Elliot Page, and any number of other unusual choices — to begin with, everyone is too old) to a very popular and hated (50M views in six months, 600k dislikes) to disagreements about the translation used (since liberal elites have spent about a decade trying to foist the mediocre feminism of Emily Wilson on readers) or the spectacle (Viking longboat, American accents to make sure nobody confuses Nolan with Shakespeare or Tolkien).
Nolan’s interpretation itself is the cause of this controversy — what The Odyssey is about and why it is important for us now. I believe he will be heard loudly — I expect this to be an incredible hit — but I do not believe that he will be understood, so I will try to lay out his major choices and show the intention behind them. The first thing to say is that he has no interest in conveying either the form or the tone of the epic — there is almost nothing noble or heroic portrayed in the film. He offers a deconstruction: the most predictable thing. But if even our most prestigious artist can’t avoid the most predictable thing, isn’t that very telling?
Surprisingly, for the “gritty reboot,” Nolan starts from Christian premises. Agamemnon, the leader of Greek forces against Troy, is portrayed as a giant among men, a master, a tyrant, cruel, demanding, and destructive. Everyone, but especially Odysseus, is a slave to him. What Homer calls heroes are also what Homer shows these men to be: Murderous pirates who live by plunder, putting everyone to the sword, raping and enslaving. Inasmuch as we admire our intellectual and poetic tradition, we must choose between the beauty in Homer, a splendor built on murder and theft, and the ugliness in Homer. Nolan chooses the latter, as people have in our times. He takes the victim’s side against the perpetrator. Almost every woman in this movie has many grievances, and they’re more than justified. The males who are not damned are ashamed before these women. By the time Penelope complains that the patriarchy is ruining her life when she should rule, you feel like you’re back in 2026 America.
The movie is based on the important observation that the Odyssey depicts the world after the Trojan War, which was catastrophic and caused many subsequent calamities, according to Homer as well as later poets, for example, the tragedians. Nolan simply concludes that the Trojan War was unjust. The Christian source for the argument is venerable: Augustine in The City of God Against the Pagans IV.4 says: “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?” Men are defined by the desire for domination. The violence that follows is most of what we see of the Greeks — they self-destruct.
Nolan has noticed, as all attentive readers have, that the monsters and fabulous voyages of The Odyssey are stories told by Odysseus himself, as well as that Odysseus is famously a liar. But Nolan brings these two observations together in a search for therapy: Odysseus is just talking to himself, after he wastes years of his life, like a soldier suffering from PTSD, failing to take responsibility for the evil he has done because it is too much, taking drugs instead (the lotus flower) to forget. Odysseus won the war for the Greeks by desecration: The meaning of the Trojan horse is the willingness to kill people in a temple. The sack of Troy is emotionally depicted from the Trojan point of view.
The problem of returning Odysseus to his home is how to see through the delusions and destruction of the war. It goes without saying, therefore, that Odysseus declares for atheism — “defy the gods” may be taken to be his motto, justified by his guilt over his dead soldiers, his only concern. The problem of naming a poem for this man is accordingly interpreted as an attempt to teach people to live after they’ve lost everything they admired or aspired to be, which is not unlike Homer’s depiction of life after heroism was wiped out on the plains of Troy. As in all his movies, Nolan is trying to confront the nihilism of our times by promising to get Odysseus back home.
The movie largely lacks the poem’s interest in home or strangers. But it is very interested in xenia, the duty of friendship that makes a man a host to a stranger, whom it makes a guest, which is guaranteed by Zeus. Nolan freely reinterprets it as the command of Jesus in the Gospel: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12). The act of reinterpretation itself we may compare to St. Paul’s defense before the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:23), introducing Christ to the Athenians as the unknown god they were already worshipping.
It goes without saying that there is no Achilles in this story. His place is taken by a reinterpreted Sinon, a gullible innocent who judges and blames Odysseus for his iniquity (the Homeric basis would be the sailor Elpenor). The movie is altogether humorless, attempting to brutalize the audience in both sight and sound. The major reassurance offered is that Odysseus cannot escape the consequences of all his cleverness, because he’s not fundamentally cleverer than anyone — unless his cleverness means he is the first to learn that his speech about his famous deeds should be apologizing.
The greatest innovation in the story seems to be an attempt to reconcile the Enlightenment with its end. We owe many things to the Enlightenment, including philology — the study of ancient texts, the spur to archaeology, including the discovery of the ruins of Troy, and an entire vision of the Bronze Age collapse, which is woven into the movie. But altogether, the movie is about the collapse of civilization and its recovery through poetry, written and uttered. Somehow, this is all about America: The framework in which we come to see Ithaca is a desire or demand to sail into the setting sun and find a new world.
Unquestionably, Nolan’s Odyssey is a work of decadence. His art is an attempt to make sense of Homer&#8217;s art, of its place at the head of our poetic tradition. Nolan attempts to do so in the face of the collapse of all our intellectual authorities, but the attempt fails. What we see onscreen that causes scandal is our own decadence, which we call a culture war, deluding ourselves that we know what we might win or what we might defend. Nolan is admittedly honest about all this, but he lacks wisdom. He may resemble us in that regard, having forgotten to seek wisdom.
***
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.

Universal Pictures presents THE ODYSSEY Mumbai Premiere

Homer’s Odyssey, Nolan’s Cinema, And Our Search For Wisdom

Inception

Interstellar

Martin Scorsese

Oppenheimer

Quentin Tarantino

The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan&#8217;s “The Odyssey” delivered the biggest opening weekend of the director&#8217;s career, generating $264.1 million worldwide, including $139.6 million internationally and $124.5 million domestically, according to <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-biggest-global-debut-1236815981/">Variety</a>. 
“The Odyssey” has become the biggest worldwide opening of Nolan’s career, a record previously held by “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), which earned $249 million, and “The Dark Knight,” which earned $198 million, as the outlet noted. 
The film&#8217;s record-setting debut comes despite pre-release criticism from some conservatives over several casting decisions. After seeing the movie, however, many have praised Nolan&#8217;s latest epic.
Several conservatives admit that despite a lot of build-up about casting decisions Nolan made, including putting in transgender-identifying actress Elliot Page as a male character and race-swapping Helen of Troy by casting Lupita Nyong’o, the movie is absolutely worth seeing. 
Ben Shapiro, Editor Emeritus of The Daily Wire, had heaps of praise for the film, saying there were flaws, but they weren’t enough to spoil the entire movie. 
“Nolan is unparalleled. He’s the best director working today, without a doubt. He just creates iconic movie after iconic movie,” Shapiro said during his review. 
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He also said Matt Damon shined as the movie’s lead. “I think he’s great in nearly everything. He sort of disappears into the part in a way that he doesn’t in a lot of other movies. He’s great as Odysseus.”
As for other casting decisions, Shapiro was also full of praise, save for a few of the more glaring choices. “Robert Pattinson as Antinous is an excellent antagonist. He’s sleazy and gross. Tom Holland as Telemachus is excellent, well cast. Anne Hathaway does a great job as Penelope,” he said.
Shapiro said Nyong’o was actually a fine choice of Helen of Troy unless Nolan was going to cast an actual Greek star in her place.
“So, I know a lot of people were like, ‘Oh my god, Lupita Nyong’o is supposed to look like Diane Kruger.’ I don’t know. Diane Kruger doesn’t look very Greek. She’s German,” Shapiro said. “Lupita Nyong’o is a beautiful woman. But here’s the thing, actually, in the script, Nolan goes out of his way to explain that the war wasn’t really launched over Helen being gorgeous.”
Shapiro did mention Page’s casting as Sinon, saying it was an “absolute puzzler” from Nolan because the actress is “about 5’2 and 105 pounds soaking wet and has the voice of a woman. It doesn’t work.”
Madeline Fry Schultz <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/go-ahead-watch-the-odyssey">reviewed</a> the film for The Daily Wire&#8217;s Upstream, calling it, “a big, glorious summer blockbuster based on a pillar of the Western canon. It explores mercy, hospitality, vengeance, family bonds, honor, and, of course, homecoming.” 
Like Shapiro, she said the issues with the film don’t outweigh the benefits. “With the ‘Odyssey’ controversy, conservatives are getting hung up on the details (some more troublesome than others) when the headline is that one of Hollywood’s best directors just made a three-hour-long film about a father returning home to his family, facing terrifying monsters and deftly wielding his bow and arrows on the way.”
“It’s beautifully shot, it has mass appeal, and there’s little in the film itself to subvert Homer’s epic tale, which is now reaching a new audience,” Schultz wrote. 
Another Upstream reviewer pointed out what many others were saying: that the film is infused with Christian themes.
“Christian morality has become so deeply embedded in Western life that even secular people treat many of its assumptions as universal. They reject Christianity as a religion while continuing to believe that compassion is superior to force, that the weak and downtrodden possess inherent moral worth, that guilt should result from cruelty, and that forgiveness rather than retaliation is a sign of strength,” Rob Henderson <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/what-christopher-nolan-couldnt-bring-himself-to-do?topStoryPosition=undefined&amp;author=Rob+Henderson&amp;category=Upstream&amp;elementPosition=1&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=Top+Stories&amp;rowType=Top+Stories&amp;title=What+Christopher+Nolan+Couldn%E2%80%99t+Bring+Himself+To+Do">wrote</a>. “Nolan can’t resist placing a Christian (or secular Post-Christian) moral code within a pagan hero.”
Critics and audiences agree that, despite its flaws, “The Odyssey” is a masterpiece. It currently has a 95% critical rating and an audience score of 97%.

Conservatives Had Concerns About ‘The Odyssey.’ Now They’re Praising It.

Box Office

Amid the controversy over Christopher Nolan&#8217;s odd diversity casting, the director&#8217;s biggest change to &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; has been ignored. This is not the Odysseus of Homer. He is a man shaped by the later Western tradition, especially Christian ethics and Machiavelli’s vision of human agency. That shift may make him less recognizable to scholars of ancient Greece, but it turns him into a hero today’s audiences can understand.
Three elements make &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; feel timeless. First, it is about a journey home; the hero tries to return to the place where he began. Second, he succeeds, but his ordeal has permanently transformed him. Third, Odysseus is accompanied throughout his journey by the goddess Athena. She advises him, rescues him, and intervenes on his behalf.
The film retains these aspects of the poem. Still, as film critic Roger Ebert is credited with saying, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” In Homer, the great flaw of Odysseus is hubris. In Nolan’s film, it’s moral injury.
Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-14055-003" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-14055-003&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784655581680000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2yn5bZ-LTHT4libmtCBkBQ">moral injury</a> is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.
In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.
But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.
During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.
This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.
This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?
Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.
Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers&#8217;s 2022 film &#8220;The Northman&#8221; asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But &#8220;The Northman&#8221; was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.
Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.
In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.
The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.
The ancient Greeks lived within what is often called an honor and shame culture. Moral conflict was largely external. A man worried about his standing, his reputation, his obligations, and the favor or anger of the gods. Their moral psychology was not organized around the same kind of private guilt that later became central to Judeo-Christian ethics.
Christian morality has become so deeply embedded in Western life that even secular people treat many of its assumptions as universal. They reject Christianity as a religion while continuing to believe that compassion is superior to force, that the weak and downtrodden possess inherent moral worth, that guilt should result from cruelty, and that forgiveness rather than retaliation is a sign of strength.
Nolan can’t resist placing a Christian (or secular Post-Christian) moral code within a pagan hero.
The film also gives him a more modern sense of control over his fate. He does not merely endure the will of the gods. He seems to believe that he can bargain with destiny and take responsibility for the outcome. This gives him an internal moral life that feels familiar to us.
Nolan’s Odysseus is skeptical of supernatural power. “We can’t live by omens and sacrifices,” he tells his crew. “The gods help those who help themselves.” This is not quite the Odysseus of Homer. It’s closer to the modern man who believes that fate may set the conditions of life, but human beings must still decide what to do within them.
The film makes this point through Athena. During a flashback to the sack of Troy, Odysseus sees a young Trojan priestess (portrayed by Zendaya) seized by Greek soldiers. The scene is intercut with soldiers beheading a statue of Athena inside her temple. The woman and the goddess become fused in Odysseus’s mind.
The Athena who appears to Odysseus during the rest of the film is not a goddess intervening on his behalf. She is also the memory of an innocent woman. She represents his guilt, suggesting that what drives him is not divine guidance but his own conscience.
This leaves the film suspended between realism and the supernatural. The gods might exist, but the characters are not their playthings. Human beings possess agency and bear responsibility for what they do. Calypso (Charlize Theron) identifies this quality in Odysseus when she tells him, “You’re a man who needs to control his fate.”
Machiavelli explored the same tension five centuries ago. As he wrote in &#8220;The Prince,&#8221; “I judge that it might be true that fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.”
In this sense, Nolan’s &#8220;Odyssey&#8221; can be read as a vindication of Machiavelli. Writing in the 16th century, Machiavelli was not shy about his preference for the Roman pagan virtues of strength, glory, and real-world effectiveness over the Christian ideals of mercy, compassion, and otherworldly salvation.
Both pagan and Christian morality can produce admirable lives, <a href="https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-machiavellian-maze" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-machiavellian-maze&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784655581680000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0VW9M3fW15k5w0yZ2Ln5pV">Machiavelli believed</a>. But they cannot be obeyed fully at the same time. Each moral system asks something different of us, and each defines goodness in a different way.
As the political philosopher and Machiavelli translator <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3641326.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3641326.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784655581680000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0RqEIZuz7ar32hICH_jJ2p">Harvey Mansfield wrote</a> of pagan morality, “Men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”
The most notorious metaphor in &#8220;The Prince&#8221; is as objectionable to modern readers as many scenes in Homer’s &#8220;Odyssey.&#8221; Machiavelli compares fortune to a woman:
<blockquote>“It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down. And one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a woman, she is the friend of the young, because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity.”</blockquote>
The metaphor is repellent by modern standards. But its meaning is central to Machiavelli’s thought. Fortune favors those who act rather than wait, who impose themselves on events rather than submit passively to them.
Nolan gives Odysseus this Machiavellian impulse. He does not trust omens, sacrifices, or the goodwill of the gods. He believes that fate can be bargained with and contested. Yet the film also gives him a Christian conscience that judges the methods he uses to contest it.
This version of Odysseus feels modern and psychologically rich, but is not recognizably Homeric. In trying to make Odysseus morally legible to us, Nolan makes him less true to the world that created him. Perhaps Nolan softened Odysseus not because he misunderstood the ancient character, but because he understood the modern audience.
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Rob Henderson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Troubled/Rob-Henderson/9781982168551" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Troubled/Rob-Henderson/9781982168551&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784657341321000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0E7N7sJKfTzIT7So29tckK">Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class</a>.” His <a href="https://www.robkhenderson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.robkhenderson.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784657341321000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3rvkr_Sr1eCYyNdIhTYZXY">Substack newsletter</a> is sent each week to more than 80,000 subscribers.
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