The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan Movie Review

 

The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan

 

One movie lover's response

 

Chrisopher Nolan's Odyssey is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in contemporary American culture. Nolan cast Lupita Nyong'o, a Kenyan actress, as Helen of Troy. Himesh Patel, of Gujarati descent, plays Odysseus' right hand man. Patel and a black actor have the thankless task of insisting, in a key scene, "We are Greeks!" Nolan cast a woman who identifies as a man as an Achilles-like character.

 

Leftists are exploiting Nolan's casting choices to stir up one of their "Two-Minutes-Hate" rituals. Of course not all leftists are participating, and those on the right also engage in divisive invective. But today, in relation to Nolan's Odyssey, many on the left are doing everything they can to foment hatred of one American for another.

 

Those who applaud Nolan's casting choices are the saved; those who don't like Nolan's casting choices are the damned. Americans are no longer citizens who must work together to serve the country we love; we are no longer people who must listen to each other with respect and in good faith. Rather, straw man fallacies are the order of the day. "I didn't like the movie" translates to "You racist transphobe!" The left has labeled those who don't like Nolan's Odyssey as sewer-dwelling "chuds," that is "cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers."

 

Catholic author Mark Shea denounced The Odyssey's critics as "orcs," "white supremacists," "racist nerds," "basement dwellers," "mouth breathers," and illiterate "toothless hicks." It's ironic that the left says it cares about the poor, and then mocks rural people lacking dental care as "toothless hicks." 

 

Classism runs through leftist dehumanization of those who criticize Nolan's film. An enlightened leftist smirked, "I can't wait for The Odyssey to be a hit so the trailer trash chuds can cry and s--t themselves over it;" and another responds that those not liking Nolan's film are "poor white trash" and another says that they "are just white trash who can't read anyway."

 

"No one was white," in the ancient Mediterranean, Mark Shea insists. "Skin color didn't matter because everybody was some shade of brown." Some leftists insist that the ancient Greeks, as well as Egyptians and Jews, were black. In fact ancient Greeks, as well as Jews and some Egyptians, were not black, and Greeks did care about skin color. Archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, through meticulous analysis of chemical traces on what appear to our naked eyes to be pure white marble statues, has revealed that these statues were painted, and Greeks depicted themselves and their gods as Caucasian. See, for example, here. And skin color mattered to Greeks. As in other hierarchical societies – think of the antebellum South – Greeks judged elite women on the whiteness of their skin. Elite women did not labor in the sun like slaves or like men; thus, they were pale. Homer describes Helen, and also Hera, as "white-armed." Women might use lead or chalk to whiten their skin. By the way, most slaves in Greece were, like Greeks themselves, also white.

 

Greeks had exacting standards of beauty. Youth and health were prized. Hermes takes on the form of a human appealing "in the likeness of a young prince at that age when a beard first starts to grow, and youth’s charms are at their greatest." To be beautiful, one had to meet mathematical ratios. In men, according to historian Bettany Hughes, "a beautiful body was considered direct evidence of a beautiful mind. They even had a word for it - kaloskagathos - which meant being gorgeous to look at, and hence being a good person." A beautiful woman, on the other hand, was "kalon kakon" that is, trouble.

 

Whoopi Goldberg, on The View, launched lengthy, overwrought diatribes attacking anyone who has critiqued Nolan's film. Sunny Hostin, also on The View, promoted a book titled Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. "I taught Greek mythology to eighth graders and people who say that Helen of Troy could not possibly be played by a black woman don't know history," she says. "Ancient Greeks were Black: The truth shall set us free" reads a 2025 Medium essay. A prize-winning dissertation argues that "the Greeks have been consistently invoked to demonstrate White, European superiority" – and that understanding Greeks as white is mistaken. "The First Greeks Were Black!" insists a YouTube video. A Quora user asks a deeply absurd question, "Were Greeks black? I see in my university history books that one stating that Greeks were African Americans."

 

In 2018, Netflix released Troy: Fall of a City. Achilles was played by a Ghanaian, and Zeus by a Nigerian. In the Iliad, Homer describes Achilles as having golden hair. Assassin's Creed's Odyssey edition features black Greeks. See here. A Reddit user had to step forward to explain, "Hi, Greek here. Greeks are not and were not black … You can find very fair skin people with blonde or red hair to olive skin people with light or dark brown hair."

 

In his op-ed praising Nolan's Odyssey as a critique of MAGA, David French declares, "How stupid and petty much of the right has become." The New York Times' Sharon Waxman denounced any criticism of Nolan's film as "tiresome drivel." In the mind of one Times reader, a lack of enthusiasm for a black Helen of Troy is a prophesied sign of the End Times. "Nolan gave us space to mourn our fallen state and with it the desecration of kindness and honor, allowing us to recognize the monsters we've become." Variety condemned an "inevitable crowd of bigots and MAGA-enthusiasts that would wail and scream."  

 

A beloved friend deems as frivolous the ongoing discussion of Nolan's film. "The international situation is so perilous … I have no patience for discussions about Nolan’s casting choices … My concern budget has been exhausted elsewhere."

 

My friend shares, with me, ancestry in Poland. I reminded her of a line in the Warsaw Ghetto diary of Chaim Kaplan. Kaplan quotes poet Leopold Staff. "bardziej niźli chleba, poezji trzeba w czasach, gdy wcale jej nie trzeba." "More than bread, sometimes, poetry is necessary." Yes, my beloved friend, the international situation is perilous, and believe it or not art, and how art is discussed, play a role in that. In the last US presidential election, some people voted based on how they feel about being told that humans can change their sex. Some people voted based on how weary they are of constantly being called "toothless hick racists."

 

Movies, like all art, can travel to regions in our minds and hearts that are unreachable by mere logical speech. Jesus knew this. That's why he spoke in parables. That's why Catholic churches are jam-packed with art, and why Catholic schools teach kids stories about St. Christopher carrying Jesus across a stream; and St. Teresa's wagon stuck in the mud; and Father Damien, writing to his brother, using the pronoun "we" to refer to lepers after Damien had, inevitably, contracted leprosy from the people he had chosen to serve.

 

Just so with Homer – who may or may not have been one person – whose tales have been shared for three thousand years. Some call Homer the "father of Western civilization." First century Roman rhetorician Quintilian says of the man who lived eight centuries before him, "Like his own conception of ocean, which he says is the source of every river and spring, Homer provides the model and the origin of every department of eloquence." Irish writer James Joyce admired Homer's protagonist, Odysseus, so much that Joyce used The Odyssey for his own novel, Ulysses. Derek Walcott was of mixed European and African heritage. He won a Nobel Prize in literature. He wrote the Homeric epic poem Omeros. T.E. Lawrence was one of sixty translators of The Odyssey into English. "I have hunted wild boars," he wrote. "built boats and killed many men. So I have odd knowledges that qualify me to understand The Odyssey." George Patton was inspired by Homer as was Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote deeply spiritual books about Jesus and Saint Francis. Chris Hedges, in the New York Times, says that "Every recruit headed into war would be well advised to read the Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading The Odyssey."

 

I was introduced to these tales the way that Greeks three thousand years ago were introduced to them – orally. My older sister Antoinette read Homer's Odyssey and recounted the episodes to me as we lay in bed at night. Penelope kept suitors at bay by weaving and then undoing her father-in-law's shroud. I was impressed by Penelope's smarts, strength, and commitment. Once Odysseus returned, Penelope hesitated before accepting him, and her final recognition of him moved me. The very words – "recognition scene" – hinted to me of something erotic but also transcendent. So often we don't see what we should see. That moment when we finally do see is a spiritual, rather than a sensual, climax. It is a foretaste of heaven. In so many relationships, we suffer because we do not see the other, sometimes, until long after he or she is gone.

 

My very sharp sister admired Odysseus because he was clever. His cunning guile, my sister taught me, was assessed as a high virtue by the Greeks. This was one of my first introductions to cultural relativism. Cunning guile was very much not a virtue in our Catholic school. Learning that people long ago and far away have their own culture intrigued me. I didn't need to make Odysseus more like me to make the story worthy for me.

 

I do not speak Ancient Greek; I have not seen every Christopher Nolan film; I'm no Trojan War expert. Contrary to my leftist betters, I am not a "cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller." What I am is a movie-lover. In my comments, below, I apply my own criteria for assessing a film to Nolan's Odyssey.

 

Antoinette took me to see Lawrence of Arabia. I didn't have vocabulary to express my diagnosis of the Lawrence character as depicted in the film. I can report, now, that the character I saw in that film was doomed by his own Messiah complex, his eccentricities, and his inability to have normal, human relationships. When I saw the film, I had absolutely no idea what sex was, never mind sexual assault, and, boy oh boy did I have no idea of male sexual assault of another male. 

 

In spite of my lack of vocabulary, Lawrence of Arabia hit this little girl right in her kishka. My soul throbbed with intense grief for this man I never met. I was thrust into a much more complex view of the world than my small town could provide. David Lean's virtuosic filmmaking and Peter O'Toole's supernova performance raced right past my virginal brain and reached my atavistic collective unconscious. I felt the full horror of the assault scene. I didn't know what the Turkish official, played by a coughing Jose Ferrer, had done to Lawrence, but I somehow knew that it involved violation of the most precious, private self.

 

I value movies that can do what Lawrence of Arabia did for me: immerse me in a fictional world so thoroughly that I experience "willing suspension of disbelief" and expand my mind and heart beyond their habitual borders. I value films that can, through this immersion, help me to forget my daily cares and woes. Rewatching the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup is a therapeutic mini-vacation. Research reports that laughter boosts our health.

 

Movies invite us to puzzle out life problems before we actually encounter them in the flesh. I watched movies with my mom as she ironed. One day it was 13 Rue Madeleine, a black-and-white, 1947 movie about Allied spies behind Nazi lines. In its final scenes, Sharkey (Jimmy Cagney) is tortured by Nazis. Sharkey knows the D-Day plans. The Nazis hope to crack him. Sharkey's Allied handlers want to save Sharkey from further torture, and they also want to protect the D-Day plans. They bomb the Nazi torture chamber. Before he dies, Sharkey laughs in the face of his Nazi tormenters.

 

It's a movie made under the Hays Production Code, so no torture is depicted. Rather, we see Nazis drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, as sounds emerge from behind a closed door. One of the Nazis begins to sweat. He can't take witnessing what they are doing to another human being. He rises, paces, approaches the closed door, paces away from it, paces back to it and opens it. We see the torturers. One of them is shirtless, blond, and holding a whip.  

 

I saw this film as a child and it has haunted me ever since. The Nazis could take over again. Those who resist them could be tortured again. The sacrifice of good people would be required again. Would I be brave, like Sharkey? And would my comrades come through and kill me – snuffing me out being the only happy outcome?

 

The Inn of the Sixth Happiness taught me that a middle-aged spinster could, if she were physically fit enough, rescue hundreds of Chinese orphans escaping from Japanese bombs. They hike over mountains, singing "This Old Man." And, yes, when, years later, I taught in Nepal and hiked over mountains, I sang that song.

 

Movies can present unlikable and even evil people in such intimate detail that they move you and encourage you to contemplate the human condition. Emerald Fennell's 2025 Wuthering Heights is weird and often disgusting. Even so, it talks to me about the rigid prisons erected by socioeconomic class and gender roles in rural, nineteenth-century England, and also about people cultivating pain to the point that they cripple their own souls. That latter theme is also explored in a 2026 farce, The Invite. I laughed out loud throughout The Invite and I cried during Wuthering Heights. I've taken graduate level courses in psychology that never inspired me to examine human nature so minutely as these two films.

 

And then there's beauty. I saw Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan in a movie theater. I didn’t much care for it. I sat through it twice, though. I needed – really needed – to see the Queensboro Bridge scene one more time before I left that theater. It's just. So. Beautiful.

 

I was unmoved by the 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ but I sat through that, twice, too, because I needed to hear Peter Gabriel's soundtrack again. "It Is Accomplished" is what plays when Christ dies on the cross. It's a jubilant piece of music, not what one might expect to accompany the depiction of a good, innocent man, naked and blood-streaked, expiring on a hideous torture device. But this music shares a feature with Sharkey's laugh in 13 Rue Madeleine. The Nazis lost in the latter film; Satan lost in the former. Both Sharkey's laugh and "It Is Accomplished" are blasts of triumph defying what is otherwise the ultimate defeat – death. Jesus' "last temptation" is Satan tempting him to lead a normal life. "It Is Accomplished" accompanies Jesus taking up his cross, and, through his sacrifice, saving the world.

 

"It Is Accomplished" – the title quotes John 19:30 – marries ululating Middle Eastern women, African polyrhythmic drumming, and European church bells. You're not thinking of Gabriel's sonic choices as you, wiping tears from your eyes, watch the final scene. I have to wonder if some audience members did not come to know Jesus thanks to this music and its ability to convey what words struggle to express.

 

In the 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film Troy, Achilles (Brad Pitt) has killed Hector (Eric Bana). Achilles desecrates Hector's body. Priam (Peter O'Toole), Hector's father, sneaks into Achilles' camp and begs Achilles for Hector's body. This is a confrontation from ancient myth. It is also a cinematic duel. Before Pitt was born, O'Toole was the most beautiful male movie star in films. In 2004, O'Toole is seventy-two, and Pitt wears the crown. I cry every time I rewatch this scene. I am also in awe. What is Peter O'Toole doing that elevates from the dust of centuries and animates a three-thousand-year-old character such that Priam's woe becomes my woe? I can't begin to tell you. O'Toole's eyes, his hand gestures, the angle of his spinal column. What? I cannot verbalize this.

 

The comments under the YouTube clip testify to the scene's power to inspire serious thought. One comment reads,

 

"I like how Priam says 'Your father was lucky not to live long enough to see his son fall.' On the surface, he's, of course, talking about himself watching his son die, but at the same time, and more importantly, he's essentially telling Achilles to his face, 'Your father would be ashamed of you.' You can see by Achilles' reaction that he knows that Priam is right."

 

There's appreciation, "I've watched this scene more than any of the action scenes or any of the erotic scenes." One poster writes, "This is a far better scene than the whole 'The Odyssey' movie."

 

I have never allowed ideology to get between me and a good movie. I'm a lifelong feminist and two movies I saw on TV when I was a kid continue to impress me. Both The Collector (1965) and Hoffman (1970) share similar plots. A desperate, lonely man forces a woman to live with him. The Collector is horror, and the kidnapped woman dies. Hoffman is a bizarre comedy. One film arouses shudders; the other makes you laugh in spite of yourself. The movies invited me, temporarily, into the heads of very bad men. The 1974 film Swept Away depicts a man beating and possibly assaulting a shipwrecked woman. The movie tells truths about human nature by getting you into the heads of the male and female lead characters. I think Roman Polanski should have been punished for his confessed and alleged crimes against women. His scummy behavior doesn't change the fact that he is a masterful filmmaker and that The Pianist is one of the best feature films about the Holocaust.

 

Ideology doesn't blind me. There are films I can't enjoy but whose power I can't deny; these include the Soviet propaganda films Alexander Nevsky, Battleship Potemkin, and I Am Cuba, and, yes, the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will, Olympia, and Jud Suss.

 

I really resent having to say this. The presence of non-whites does not interfere with my enjoyment of a film. Thanks to PBS TV, I was exposed to, and entranced by, Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray's Two Daughters. When I finally made it to India and sat in a movie theater with hundreds of Indians watching the Amitabh Bachchan film Coolie, I achieved a movie lover's dream, and also the goal of someone long fascinated by the subcontinent.

 

Real movie-lovers don't allow snobby bullies to tell us what to love. I have never, for example, seen any of the Godfather films. Back in the day when my dad strayed outside the lines, Mafiosi came to our home and threatened to kill us all. The wife and kids first, and only then my dad. We had been playing on swings in the backyard when the lowlifes arrived. That was enough "Mafia entertainment" to sate me for a lifetime.

 

And we lovers don't allow snobby bullies to tell us what not to love. Cineasts would relegate me to the balcony of human worth not just for loving, but insisting on the excellence of the Confederacy-friendly film Sweet Home Alabama, the Orientalist Bitter Tea of General Yen, and, yes, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol.

 

Above are my movie-lover criteria for films. Applied to Nolan's Odyssey, how does his film score? I've seen it twice now, and I give it five out of ten. I submitted my review to the International Movie Database. I've posted almost five hundred reviews there. IMDB "declined" my review. I can conclude from this that the rumors that websites are manipulating the numbers on this film are not a "right-wing conspiracy."

 

The movie opens on dreadlocked Travis Scott, aka Travi$ Scott. Scott is an American rapper. He once encouraging fans to "f--- up" an audience member. “Get that m----------r, get him! F--- his ass up." Ten people, aged nine through twenty-seven, died at another Scott concert. Scott's behavior at this event has been criticized. After one arrest, Scott sold merchandise featuring his mugshot. His lyrics include "My dick longer than a Pringle box," "dick so hard, pokin' likе the Eiffel" "I can s--t all day," and "f--- her till she die." Scott has fathered two children by reality TV celebrity Kylie Jenner; they are no longer a couple.

 

In the opening scene of Nolan's film, Scott bangs a stick on the floor and shouts out monosyllables: "man, face, war, trick." Scott is the bard, and thus analogous to Homer himself.

 

Given that Scott is playing a figure analogous to Homer, let's compare his lyrics to lines from Homer's Odyssey.

 

"Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say

 

that we devise their misery. But they

 

themselves – in their depravity – design

 

grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns."

 

I value films that can immerse me in another world and allow me willing suspension of disbelief. Looking at Scott, I am not looking at Bronze Age Ithaca. I am not looking at a rapper or tabloid celebrity, either. I am looking at Nolan's ham-handed stunt. Leftists convince themselves that through stunt casting and applauding stunt casting and bashing anyone who doesn't like it, that they, the leftists, become Civil Rights heroes. They are on the front lines with Rosa Parks. Leftists' transparently delusional narcissism is laughable.

 

The Academy requires films to be diverse to win awards. In Scott, I see Nolan's desire for an award. Hiring black actors to play ancient Greeks is a white-man's-burden move. The logic behind casting black actors as white characters run thus: poor, sad black people are underrepresented and white directors must be charitable and white audiences must be tolerant. This is so condescending. And it's false. Blacks are not underrepresented in media, according to recent scholarly studies. Scott, Nyong'o, and Zendaya are not the Little Match Girl and they don't need Nolan to rescue them. They are highly successful and visible entertainers and every one of them is a multi-millionaire. The Odyssey must make an estimated $750 million just to break even. Casting black actors as Greeks was a brilliant – and cynical – publicity stunt. In his very first scene, Nolan pushed me away from his story. No immersion. No willing suspension of disbelief.

 

I will have to resort to a trick of my own to discuss the next scene. Internet sites, I have learned, censor mention of a certain celebrity. In an attempt to elude these censors, I will refer to this celebrity as Ethel Pine.

 

After the Scott scene, we see Ethel Pine lounging on a beach. She is dressed in armor. Pine is about five feet tall. Pine weighs about a hundred pounds. Pine's diminutive size is evident in a July, 2026 video of Pine, accompanied by a security guard, as both exit London's Corinthia Hotel. In Nolan's Odyssey, Pine runs toward the Trojan horse. Her running style is critiqued in internet memes. Pine runs like a girl. Nolan tapped Pine to play a character, Sinon, who is not in Homer's Odyssey. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in Hades, and praises Achilles, calling him the "greatest of warriors." In Nolan's film, Odysseus meets Sinon, not Achilles, in Hades, and calls Sinon the bravest soldier. Thus, in Nolan's Odyssey, Sinon, played by a tiny woman, is analogous to Achilles.

 

Leftists accuse, "Why do you care what Pine does?" Here's why. Pine published, online, images of her body after a medically unnecessary double mastectomy and extensive, and expensive, cosmetic surgery. Dr. Lisa Littman's research demonstrates how social pressure causes girls to consider themselves "born in the wrong body" and how they are convinced by powerful others that the solution to that imaginary condition is self-mutilation. Many girls deeply regret undergoing the kind of surgery Pine advances as desirable. Too many leftists will congratulate themselves on their "open-mindedness" and "tolerance" as they watch Pine. The rest of us will mourn the damage done to vulnerable girls by the misogynist social hysteria pushed by Pine. No one is thinking about Greek heroes.

 

One of the oldest and truest dictums for immersive storytelling is "Show don’t tell." If you want the audience to, say, believe that Sinon is the bravest soldier, don't tell us that; show us Sinon exhibiting bravery. There is a great deal of exposition in Nolan's Odyssey. Characters appear onscreen in order to recount what has happened previously in the plot. They say things like, "My name is Menelaus. I am the king of Sparta. My wife is Helen. Her face launched a thousand ships. I fought in the Trojan war." Expository dialog's unnaturalness pushes the audience away from an immersive experience. That would be bad enough, but Nolan purposely renders his dialog garbled, so you can't make out what people are saying.

 

There is one shot that deserves the adjective beautiful. Odysseus, wearing his crested helmet, is backlit, and in silhouette, as he enters Cyclops' dark cave. It's a beautiful shot and it suggests to me that Nolan could have made a beautiful film if he wanted to; he just didn't want to.

 

There are two prominent settings: the palace in Ithaca where the suitors feast by firelight, and various beaches and other oceanfronts. I've lived in African and Asian villages where, after the sun goes down, fire provides the only light. Firelight is beautiful and it is protean. Firelight and its shadows can be sexy, hypnotic, menacing, soothing, timeless. Nolan captures none of that. The Ithaca palace scenes are all a vague, muddy orange.

 

I'm from New Jersey and I know sun, sand, rocks, gulls, and water. Sparkling, lowering, bright, blinding, gray, somber, golden. There is none of that in Nolan's film. His seaside scenes are muted gray.

 

You could watch Lawrence of Arabia with the sound off; it might still awe you. For a one-minute sample of David Lean's masterful treatment of the desert, see this sunrise or the famous well scene here or this scene from the crossing of the Nefud Desert. When I watched these scenes, I felt gritty sand on my skin; I thirsted after rationed cups of brackish water. Greece was and is a maritime civilization. Greeks lived and live close to a coast. They swim, fish, and sail. I got no sensual sense of this lifestyle from Nolan's film. Even the scenes with Calypso fishing and sloshing through water didn't take me there. The lighting on her face could have been the lighting in a modern office cubicle.

 

The narrative is disjointed – it shuttles back and forth between the present and the past, between Ithaca and the suitors and Odysseus and his slog. Once the film settles on Odysseus' trip home, it becomes episodic. Odysseus and his men approach an island; monsters or some other misfortune strikes; some of Odysseus' men die, and some survive to move on to the next island; the process continues until all of Odysseus' men are dead.

 

Bill Irwin as Cyclops and Samantha Morton as Circe perform very well. The Laestrygonians look terrific and move with a creepy, determined, and lumbering gait. I wanted to be scared. I wasn't. Horror requires support from narrative structure. Horror scares us thanks to slow, careful build-up. We hear a bump in the night. The main character, naively, goes to investigate. Something menacing but inconclusive happens. This process, of eerie occurrence, investigation, and consequences, increases in intensity. Through this suspenseful build-up to the climactic battle with the evil entity, horror manipulates us into the roller coaster ride we paid for.

 

Nolan's horror scenes were too brief and self-contained to deliver the punch. I wanted to know more about those very well-costumed Laestrygonians. What motivated them? How does one defeat them? They're just a blip in the plot so there's no horror pay-off. If Satan had just been a five-minute walk-on in The Exorcist, that movie would never have become a horror classic. I was especially disappointed by Nolan's Hades. He smears some potting soil on Ethel Pine's face. I've seen better Hells in high school plays.

 

I couldn't help but think of Saving Private Ryan, and also of Star Trek. In Star Trek, "redshirt" characters are bloodlessly killed off during the crew's excursions. These characters have no names and no backstories; their deaths are appropriate for a 1960s TV show for kids. In Saving Private Ryan, a masterpiece for grown-ups, six members of Tom Hanks' eight-man team are killed. I felt every one of those killings, and I remember them, almost thirty years after seeing the movie. Nolan gave me zero reason to care about the many members of Odysseus' crew who die in his Odyssey.

 

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus' dog, Argos, lives for twenty years. He is  in bad shape when Odysseus returns home. Feeble Argos recognizes Odysseus, wags his tail, and then dies. Odysseus wipes away a tear. In 2024, Ralph Fiennes starred in The Return, a film focused only on Odysseus' return to Ithaca. In that film, Fiennes, as Odysseus, looks at Argos, and, as in Homer's original, he cries. Somehow Nolan manages to take a scene that should rip out this dog lover's heart, and he makes it boring. Ralph Fiennes' acting in this same scene makes me cry. The scene where Fiennes' Odysseus strings his bow is also superior, as is Odysseus' and Penelope's reunion.

 

I did like some things about Nolan's movie. I thought the cast handed in okay performances except, I must say, for Pine. Samantha Morton was the stand-out. John Leguizamo as blind swineherd and trusty slave Eumaeus earned my sympathy, in spite of his onscreen act of killing puppies. Anne Hathaway embodied the beauty and dignity I associate with aristocratic females in Greek art. I liked Agamemnon's helmet. It is black with a golden vertebrae-shaped ornament. It is not accurate but it gave me something to look at. I liked the soundtrack Ludwig Göransson composed to accompany Odysseus' hearing the Sirens, and I liked it that that same music played when he reunited with Penelope.

 

I want to like movies. I wish I could go to more movies. What I really don't want movies to do is bore me, and Nolan's Odyssey bored me, for all the reasons mentioned above. Nolan sticking his finger in our eyes with his stunt casting, the exposition, the garbled dialog, the inert visuals, the episodicity that resisted any narrative arc, the flat characterizations, made it impossible for me to care about anything that was transpiring onscreen.

 

Which brings me back to Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. Nolan stuck his finger in the eye of ancient Greek beauty standards. That rejection signals a wider problem. Art, to do its job, must make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I appreciate a painting of a sunlit glass of water on a white window sill. Glass, water, windows: all every day things. But the artist captures them all so well that the painting is arresting and invites the viewer to see every day objects as if they had never been seen before.

 

Art must also make the strange familiar. Above I mentioned three movies that depicted despicable male lead characters. I valued those movies because they made the strange – perverted men – familiar to me. I don't like those male leads, but I came to understand them well enough that, at the end of Swept Away, I felt pity for a male character who'd been shown abusing a woman.

 

Commentators point out that Nolan has Christianized Odysseus. For example, Odysseus is wracked by guilt because he was a warrior. Ancient Greeks took pride in being warriors. Glory in battle was a cherished goal. Nolan depicts the Greek concept of "xenia" as the equivalent of the Christian Golden Rule. It was not; see here. Odysseus does not kill all of the suitors, in Nolan's film, nor is he nor Telemachus shown executing the female slaves who had sex with the suitors, even though the text suggests that the suitors raped these slave women. Telemachus executes the slave women by stringing them all up on the same ship's cable, and then standing by watching them gasp and their feet twitch, rather than offering a coup de grace to end their suffering. The slave Melanthius is mutilated in ways too barbaric to detail here. Let's just say the dogs eat the better part of him.

 

Odysseus' entire crew dies. I didn't care about Nolan's Odysseus for this reason, inter alia. My dad commanded men in combat in World War II, and he communicated to me how an army leader serves his men, not vice versa. Ancient Greeks, scholars say, admired a hero who lost his entire crew. He was aristocratic; he was more worthy. That Greek attitude is foreign to me.

 

In other words, Odysseus, just like the male leads in the three movies mentioned above, is strange to us, with our Judeo-Christian worldview. A movie I might have liked better would have made this strange, pre-Christian, Pagan warrior familiar. I would have at least understood, if not applauded, this strange Bronze Age Pagan. I would have been grateful to the filmmaker for expanding my understanding by getting me into the head of a man utterly foreign to me. Instead I was given a hero who says the F word.

 

In my city, Paterson, NJ, I sometimes stumble across outdoor Santeria shrines dedicated to Yemaya. Local Botanicas, stores that sell Santeria supplies, offer statuettes of Yemaya as a beautiful black woman wearing a blue robe. Yemaya was originally a West African ocean spirit. Corn Maiden is sacred to Native Americans. La Llorona is a tragic and frightening figure in Latin American folklore. John Henry is a super strong "steel driving man" from African American folklore. John the Conqueror is another black male folk hero with roots in Africa.

 

Make a movie about any of these figures and put a white actor in the role. Ryan Gosling as John the Conqueror. Sydney Sweeney as Yemaya. Florence Pugh as Corn Maiden. Elliot Page as John Henry. Any such casting is completely inconceivable. We all know why. The left respects non-white cultural products and disdains white cultural products. Moviegoers don't have a problem with looking at Lupita Nyong'o. Moviegoers bought enough tickets to make Black Panther, featuring Nyong'o, the highest grossing solo-star superhero film. The left mocks these moviegoers as subhuman, while never addressing the real issue – the left's own hatred for their fellow citizens.

 

On July 10, 2026, "S. Richey" of Augusta, Montana, posted a response to one of many New York Times op-eds spanking moviegoers for objecting to Nolan's stunt casting. Richey's post is long, and it is heartbreaking. It begins,

 

"I'm not racist. I think Lupita Nyong’o is beautiful … The ancient Greeks were white Europeans of Mediterranean appearance. The Odyssey was written by a Mediterranean white Greek man about the adventures of Mediterranean white Greek people … My beloved, beautiful cultural heritage is being stolen from me … My ancestors are being erased … I am being erased."

 

This person is clearly hurt. I hope and pray that all Americans decide to respect, rather than revile, their fellow citizens, and that we all commit ourselves to civil disagreements.

 

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery