Conservatives sometimes criticize modern adaptations of old stories for including changes to make them consistent with today’s political sensibilities. But put yourself in the shoes of a director creating a movie about The Odyssey in 2026. To me, it seems like there are two options:
Tell the story accurately, in which case the audience will hate the protagonist and not be able to relate to him at all
Tell the story with a modern twist in order to make it palatable
Christopher Nolan made choice number two. But I don’t think it was much of a choice at all. While some on the right have criticized the film for its multiracial casting, another kind of argument says that the movie made Odysseus too much like a veteran suffering from PTSD.
I personally did find the forced diversity ridiculous. The movie left me wondering why you wouldn’t just go all the way with it and reflect the demographics of the world, or even the United States. Maybe 80% of the actors in The Odyssey are of European descent. There is something to be said for historical accuracy, which would require it to be 100%. But if Nolan really had the courage of his convictions and thought race doesn’t matter, why even have a white majority? Take an explicit stand the way Hamilton did, and discard white domination completely. Make it a third Indian and Chinese, reflecting the demographics of humanity. Instead, we got this political compromise. Keep it as a “white” story, while being able to at the same time say you checked some diversity boxes. This is a marketing choice, but artistically it makes no sense. The Elliot Page thing is too ridiculous to even be worthy of comment; you can just refer to any right-wing X account to get my take on that.
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One casting decision I did like was having Jon Bernthal as Menelaus. He looks and acts like a Fast & Furious character, which makes sense for a Bronze Age Greek involved in a love triangle. But sorry, I cannot approve of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen. Go ahead and cancel me, I don’t find her attractive.
On the film’s embrace of a more sensitive Odysseus, here is Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books:
As this resounding speech echoed in my ears, it occurred to me that it sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer—who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies—but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways. Speaking to the Times on the eve of his movie’s release, Nolan acknowledged how, as he read various translations of the Odyssey, he realized that it was the “ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”
But whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer. Is his new vehicle for Odysseus’s tale impressive in its visual impact and distinctive in its structural ingenuity? Yes. But is its “essential” Homeric? On that I’ll let Penelope have the last word: “The structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.”
See also Scott Greer for a similar take. I agree that Odysseus having feelings of shame and regret is not in any way consistent with the source material. He is haunted by all the people slaughtered at Troy and believes that sending his enemies the wooden horse was dishonorable and violated the laws of Zeus. Throughout his adventures, he has to deceive his men for the greater good, and this causes clear distress. The war is generally seen as containing very little glory in the collective memory. Instead of voluntarily signing up in order to gain honor, men are conscripted, including among the aristocrats, and even the winners end up dead or damaged and feeling betrayed by their leaders.
