GUT REACTIONS: The Odyssey (2026)

In my GUT REACTIONS series, I contextualize films with their cultural significance.

I come to your inbox, like a beggar in tatters, hoping to subtly remind you that I used to be the King of Ithaca. I know I’ve been gone for a while. But Telemachus (the schedule Notes function) held it down to keep the suitors (Substack’s algorithm) appeased.

And oh, Penelope, how I missed you. This time apart was filled with myths of old, fearsome monsters, devilish tricks. I’ve been thinking about it a bunch and gathered my thoughts on the massive, terrifying spectacle below.

review: odysseus is a final girl

Sitting in the theater last week, I couldn’t help but think about how life isn’t linear, but it damn sure is circular. On Saturday night, I linked up my homethorls for game show trivia. We were rolling deep, intellectually, our knowledge pool widened by our hyperfixations: Space, math, anthropology, democracy, trade, cinema, mythology.

I felt my heart swell with pride when one of my teammates hit the buzzer fast, spit out the winning answer: “Demi-god.” Camp Half-Blood in the buildingggg, I hollered, with Greek lore and early 2000s nostalgia top of mind.

I was a voracious reader of Greek mythology and classic literature in general as a kid. But unfortunately, one of the few K-12 texts I ever skimmed, in any capacity, out of the hundreds of books I read as a child and teenager, was The Iliad. That, and WWII Siberian survival memoir The Endless Steppe (sorry to that diva).

But with my adult eyes, last week, I became enamored with Homer’s brilliance. What Christopher Nolan has given us gave me the same euphoria I felt when I finally got to see William Shakespeare’s works on stage when I lived in London the first time. It just made my understanding of the source text that much richer. It made me respect the author that much more. It inspired me to revisit the text again, with renewed enthusiasm.

Ironically, these Shakespeare adaptations were the sliced-and-diced, chopped-and-screwed, modernized, gender-swapped versions of the Bard’s and I adored them. Female King Lear. Black and Asian family members, à la Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Brandy and Whitney Houston. AK-47’s and Spider-Man pajamas in Macbeth.

I watched with wonder, saying to myself, “Oh, I didn’t even know that was an option!” And you know, even then, spoiled brats with access to world-class theatre bitched about those adaptations — even though they were co-signed by the premier British arts organizations and, in many cases, performed at thee Globe Theatre.

I was completely unsurprised that people are complaining about Lupita Nyong’o as a gorgeous, darkskinned Helen of Troy. I’m a veteran of the internet. I remember clearly that people had disparaged Halle Bailey for winning the role of The Little Mermaid, even though real ones had already revered her angelic voice, showcased so well throughout Chloe x Halle’s discography. I remember clearly that people had disparaged Idris Elba — not just for buzz around James Bond, but when he was cast as the god Heimdall in the Thor slice of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

At the end of the day, we’re talking about myths and magic, but all of a sudden, people on the Internet are sticklers for supposed factual accuracy — but just through the lens of racial purity. OK, let’s just say for a single second that I’m rocking with y’all’s neo-eugenicist views. Everyone’s sudden imperative to cast Greeks in Greek roles doesn’t even make sense; a lot of y’all racists are holding up Diane Kruger, who played Helen of Troy in Troy (2004), as the gold standard. But Kruger was nobody’s Greek princess. I need white supremacists to at least get on the same page with their racist crusades.

Likewise, I felt like premature Elliot Page slander was equally bonkers, especially because Page’s role was so much bigger than his off-screen gender identity. In fact, as a trans person, I have to say this was the first time I was really satisfied with the casting of a trans actor in a film — especially a fellow transmasc non-binary person. In Hollywood, we’re like Laestrygonians. Known, but sequestered. A source of fear.

I was heartened to come across the following essay from a history nerd cutting to the truth of the matter: That accuracy itself is a myth, especially when you think about the etymology of mythology. Mythologia (μυθολογία) comes from mythos (μῦθος) and logos (λόγος). Story speech. Words of the people. Oral histories, which is why Nolan chose to have a rapper, Travis Scott, as a bard.

does accuracy matter in the odyssey?

“While we won’t ever be able to recreate exactly how The Odyssey or other Greek texts would have been performed, modern theatre and its stylised, surrealistic approaches to Ancient Greek plays seem more comfortable with leaning into the text’s absurdity,” the author wrote on Bond & Grace’s Lit Society blog.

“In the process of trying to weigh accuracy in an adaptation of a text as influential as The Odyssey, I realized that accuracy, perhaps, doesn’t live in direct realism at all, but rather, in a willingness to lean into the fantastical nature of mythological stories and make something genuinely new from a story we already think we know.”

When I consider the racist commenters flocking to Nyong’o’s posts or throwing unchecked in certain cinephile circles, the idea of “lean[ing] into the fantastical nature of mythological stories” is something that feels so crucial to me. Because what’s the point of adapting a work that has been adapted a million times and doing it in the exact the same way your predecessors have?

I can’t think of a better perspective to have on Nolan’s version of events — for the good of cinema and to simply add some levity to the human condition. Let’s just have fun at the movies, for once. Let’s enjoy the spectacle. I think that’s what Homer would have wanted.

Cinephile’s bookshelf: Bonus reads to check out about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the state of summer blockbuster zeitgeist and modernists’ takes on Greek mythology

♡ Which Odyssey translation is for you? (Lit Society by Bond & Grace)

♡ There is no Ithaca (Genevieve Yue for Film Comment)

♡ the odyssey & the magic of horror (nic of Girl at the Movies)

♡ Review: The Odyssey (J.W. Yablonsky of Genius of Loathe)

♡ The Odyssey Review (Kevin Pettit of See You at the Movies)

♡ Are children the perfect audience for Greek tragedy? (Lit Society by Bond & Grace)

♡ It’s 3am. Do you know where your cinephiles are? (Ezgi Eren of 11am Saturday)