Go See The Odyssey. You Won't Regret It

Ok. So my daughter and I saw The Odyssey last night...and it is yet another Christopher Nolan masterclass in exciting, gripping, and visually stunning storytelling in film. It does the Homeric epic justice in my view. It was a very short 2hrs 52min.

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And a word to the conservatives out there, re: their knee-jerk prejudgment of the entire 3-hour film based on one minor character’s casting. Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy...and people on the right are WAY too hung up on this. Helen is a MINOR character--this isn’t The Iliad--with maybe five minutes of screen time and a few lines out of a 3-hour epic.

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Some are saying, “Pfft! That’s ‘the face that ‘launched a thousand ships’”? Actually she IS quite beautiful. But more to the point, her being whisked away to Troy was a mere pretext for King Agamemnon of Sparta’s war on Troy--which, as the film even states, was more about trade routes than returning his brother Menelaus’ stunning bride to him. Many are pointing to Diane Kruger from “Troy” as the ideal Helen. But I don’t recall Homer describing her as a Saxon German either?

Christopher Nolan does it again with another keeper!

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The cast is, in fact, multi-racial/ethnic. Hamish Patel plays Eurylochus, Odysseus’ XO, Cory Hawkins plays Polybus, one of Helen’s suitors, Hispanic John Leguizamo is the blind Eumaeus, Zandaya is the goddess Athena, and each character has far more screen time and lines than Lupita Nyong’o...and it does not diminish one iota from the story. It never comes up even.

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The only casting issue I have a slight problem with is Elliot (nee Ellen) Paige as Sinon, the Greek soldier “left behind” to convince the Trojan’s that their deceptive horse filled with soldiers--a great scene itself btw--is a gift. Not because of the transgenderism per se, I mean, whatever, but he/she is just too petite, too childlike, to be believable as an ancient warrior. However, even here I give Nolan some rope, as Sinon to my knowledge is never actually described physically by Virgil (from whose Aeneid we get the character), other than as putting on the affectation of a frightened, abandoned, trembling, and weeping left-behind. Maybe Sinon was just a boy? I could be wrong there. Classicists feel free to correct me if so.

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Interestingly, the same people who cannot get past a minor character Helen being black have no issue with a giant man-eating Cyclops sheepherder, an army of 50-foot tall Laestrygonian warriors, a witch with serious daddy issues, Circe, who turns men into animals, or a six-headed/twelve-legged Scylla, etc. I mean, pick your lane guys.

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I will say one or two actual Greek actors would have been a nice shout-out to the great civilization that gave us this story of determination, hubris, cunning, deep human failings, regret and redemption that still resonates 2,700 years later. But that’s between Hollywood and Athens I reckon.

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Were this a true historical film, then I would want more casting accuracy--one cannot imagine Denzel Washington, great an actor as he is, playing Col. Munro in Last Of The Mohicans, or even Daniel Day Louis as Malcom X in X! But this is an ancient tale of fiction...with some overall general history at its core for setting/timing.

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This talk about casting from those who dismissed the film as “woke” before it even hit the theaters is, in my view, a tempest in a teapot that unnecessarily obscures another Christopher Nolan masterpiece. There is little “wokeness” at all here...none that I could see anyway. So go see The Odyssey. You will not regret it. We didn’t.

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Brad is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, The Washington Examiner, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. His latest book, A War For Half The World: Why the Real Battle for the Future was Fought in the Pacific, will be released in February 2027.