The Odyssey Sucks. Or Maybe It's Good. I Haven't Seen It.

You may be aware that Christopher Nolan, of the Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies, Inception, Dunkirk, and most recently Oppenheimer, has directed a feature-length adaptation of the Odyssey, the once-oral classic of ancient Greece. I say “may” because I assume at least some of my subscribers live under rocks. You have definitely heard about The Odyssey (2026), the movie event of the summer, lightning rod for online controversy, cultural phenomenon.

The amazing thing about The Odyssey is that it became the movie event of the summer, a lightning rod for online controversy, and a cultural phenomenon before (and not after) its theatrical release. Thousands, if not millions of people, have passed judgement on The Odyssey without having actually seen the movie, with only screenshots, clips from trailers, and general knowledge of what the Odyssey and Christopher Nolan are to guide them. This includes me. It’s out in theaters now, but I still haven’t seen The Odyssey. Not yet, anyway. Despite this, I will now join the throngs, the huddled masses, and cast my judgement upon The Odyssey based solely on what people are saying about it online.

You may say, “how could you do this? How can you review a movie without seeing it?” To which I say, I am simply the latest in a time-honored Western European tradition.

In college, I took a course on medieval European political theory. The professor framed the intro texts to the course as covering the three “pillars of the West,” as embodied by three cities: Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens.

My professor’s thesis was, specifically, that the West was formed by reading texts from these three cities, and here is where I must disagree. The West was formed by NOT reading texts from each of these three pillars.1

Rome

In much of Europe, Rome arrived as the first of the three pillars, and arrived in a way that did not require literacy. Rome arrived in the form of groups of dudes with swords, who said things like “fuck you” and “give us all your shit.” The way in which we in the West have carried this tradition forward is self-evident and does not merit further explanation.

Yes, yes, they did leave the Aeneid and Metamorphoses and other classic works of Latin literature, but most people couldn’t read, so most people didn’t read them.

Jerusalem

The Jerusalem pillar, my professor said, specifically referred to the bible, and even more specifically the gospel. Let’s take a look at how the gospel spread across Europe.

Here’s how to spread the gospel. First, you build a church. Second, you get nearby townsfolk to show up to the church. Next, you get a priest to walk into the church holding a big, shiny book.

The priest then walks to the front of the church, opens the book on a fancy pedestal, does some other stuff…

…and then reads the book facing away from the crowd! Softly, almost under his breath! In a language the parishioners probably don’t speak! Will the townsfolk love it? YES! They’ll eat this shit up! They’ll keep going to church every week for a thousand years!

Now, if you talk to a religious Catholic, they will say that I’m being reductive,2 that the priest is the head of the assembled body leading them in prayer towards God and the east, and would a pilot face the passengers while in flight? Which is exactly the way that God would want you to do it if the parishioners were as good at reading as you and I are at flying planes.

You know what literacy is good for? Heresy. Arius, Luther, Calvin, Robespierre, Dawkins, all of them could read, and all of them are heretics. Better not to read the gospels at all and let the priest tell you what’s right.3

Then again, if everyone can read and the mystery is gone, you might as well turn the priest around and have him read the book facing them. You could even have some people in the audience do the reading. 500 years after the invention of the printing press, God even said it was okay. Certain Catholics think that’s heresy, but they all seem to be hyper-literate people with active Substack newsletters, so I’m inclined to say they must be the heretics.

Athens

This is the pillar that gave us the Odyssey, and also the pillar that the West traditionally reads the least.

Who read the Greek classics in Western Europe? For a thousand years or so, nobody, because after Rome collapsed, no one could read Greek! Scholars debate when we “re”discovered the Greeks, but they all agree that between the fall of Western Rome and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, Western Europe lost most of the classical works of ancient Greece. In the intervening thousand years or so, the West experienced the Greek classics either not at all, or for the literate few, through oblique references in Roman literature.

The role of the Greeks is that we know of them, not that we know them. The Romans revered their works, and tried to be like them, so we should also try to be like them, but we don’t have the actual texts, so we’re not sure what they were like. What is a Westerner to do? Ascribe your version of knowledge and virtue onto them, of course! The only thing better than knowledge from the ancients is knowledge that you invent in your own mind and project onto the ancients.

You could say that western Europe experienced the Greek classics as shadows of shadows on the wall of a cave, dark and shrouded, lit by a false light, and that they thought this to be truth. You could say this to them, and they would think “what an original allegory I’ve never heard before!”

In keeping with the time-honored traditions of the West, I will now review The Odyssey without having seen it.

The Odyssey is woke trash that isn’t horny enough, gives women short shrift, and also a masterpiece, made by the worst and/or greatest director to ever live.

Ah, the big kahuna. This is the take that has dominated social media, and also easily the most in line with the West’s tradition of not reading.

Much of the hubbub centers on the choice to cast Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page as Helen of Troy and Achilles respectively, with twitter’s finest engagement baiters posting things like this for months on end:4

End Wokeness@EndWokeness

Helen of Troy & Achilles 2004 vs 2026:

2:26 PM · May 12, 2026 · 753K Views

1.23K Replies · 1.31K Reposts · 14K Likes

Nyong’o as Helen has drawn particular ire. The folk answer seems to have been “Nolan should have cast Sydney Sweeney instead:”

Wall Street Mav@WallStreetMav

This didn't need to be so complicated for casting. Sydney Sweeney as Helen of Troy ... $1 billion box office smash.

6:22 PM · May 12, 2026 · 331K Views

910 Replies · 1.62K Reposts · 24.6K Likes

See, this is perfectly in line with the Western tradition. You’ll notice that both of the above posts were made on May 12, 2026, well before the movie actually came out. We have not read the Odyssey, we haven’t even seen the movie adaptation of the Odyssey, we have no connection with any classical tradition other than pretending to like it, and because we don’t really understand the Odyssey we can project our own, modern racism onto it.

Hell, maybe Page doesn’t actually play Achilles, and instead plays the young soldier Sinon, a later addition from the Aeneid! Wouldn’t that be crazy, if there were months of ragebait over an actor playing one character and the actor actually played a different character in the real movie?

Much of the objection here is on the basis of perceived authenticity, that the Odyssey is a product of Europe and that any adaptation should only be played by European actors. But the Greeks, with an older racism based on “barbarian” and “not barbarian”, would’ve objected to all of these actors and actresses playing their beloved (and, to at least some degree, literally divine) heroes, because they’re all barbarians. You’re from south of Egypt? Barbarian. You’re from north of the Balkan mountains? Barbarian. Unless you have an all-Greek cast, it’s not authentic. What right do these blond haired, blue-eyed, cave-dwelling Celto-Germanics have to a culture as noble and as ancient as the Greeks? That they can adapt this work, because they formed a culture around not reading the classics?

Is there any merit to this reading?

I doubt it. Although we all know Helen of Troy and Achilles play extremely prominent roles in… the Odyssey? … it seems like much of the film will focus on Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, who are both the antiwoke color of barbarian.

Now that it is no longer May 12, 2026, another “it’s too woke” take has emerged: That Odysseus is a massive pussy for having feelings. Specifically, he’s a massive pussy for having feelings of guilt. This is the more sophisticated take.

Richard Hanania, whose review I did not read, phrased the objection this way:

Odysseus having feelings of shame and regret is not in any way consistent with the source material.

He says this in the context of agreeing with Daniel Mendelsohn, whose review I didn’t read, and Scott Greer, who has the decency to make his thesis a single sentence above the paywall, and in the third person:

Scott Greer reviews Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and tells how it subverts the source material to tell a story fully aligned with modern liberalism.

Allow me to summarize and synthesize these single sentences. Nolan’s Odysseus feels grief for having tricked, deceived, and sacrificed his men. The film goes out of its way to make sure the audience understands this. But this is not how the ancient Greeks, who famously loved dying in war, would’ve felt. Why did Nolan change this? Because of liberalism, and also woke.

Is there any merit to this reading?

I completely buy that Nolan made the famously wily, creative, and vigorous Odysseus into a sullen, miserable sack of shit, but I don’t think it’s because of woke. I can think of a couple other explanations:

• Many of our model social ideals are bullshit, and many of the ancient Greeks’ may have been as well. Nolan knows this and is deliberately trying to comment on it.

• In keeping with Western tradition, Nolan has projected his own morality onto a Greek classic. That morality, rather than coming from woke, is Christian morality, the morality of the Jerusalem pillar, which Nolan’s barbarian ancestors likely heard about when they chatted with a priest after he read a book in front of them.

• Nolan just loves to write his men as sullen, miserable sacks of shit. I elaborate on this later, but Christopher Nolan does not have range, and makes many of his artistic decisions on the basis that they’re the only ones he knows how to make.

It sort of seems like they’re seeing images of woke liberals where there are none in reality. Then again, I’m the one reviewing their reviews without having read their reviews or seen the movie they’re reviewing. Boy, these shadows on my cave wall sure are fantastic.

This take is big with people who post in all lowercase.

Here’s Sam Kriss’ rendition, which I would say summarizes this entire take:

watched nolan’s odyssey. what a pile of crap lol. his odysseus doesn’t even remotely work as a character, because the sad grey mopey figure we see on screen would never have been curious enough to tie himself to the mast and hear the sirens’ song. which is why in nolan’s version as soon as they pass the rock of the sirens odysseus has to suddenly start screaming like he’s being tortured. nolan has literally no understanding of seduction or desire, he is possibly the least horny person to have ever held a camera. the only actually good image in the entire thing is his mute agamemnon in ridiculous anachronistic armour with a human spine hanging from his helmet. this is what he actually likes, this is what he’s into, and it shows; all the desire that’s missing in the rest of the film is concentrated in the big hulking scary man, you can tell he’s stuck trying to make cinema when really he just wants to do batman again

As well as BDM’s, implicitly:

You see, BDM’s post does not mention The Odyssey, but its context of a wider conversation about a major blockbuster directed by Christopher Nolan, she’s saying that the Odyssey lacked sensuality! I am, in fact, media literate, I just choose not to apply my media literacy to real media.

Is there any merit to this reading?

In the spirit of charity, let us forgive these two for seeing the film and evaluate what they’re saying.

I completely buy it. Christopher Nolan has the unfortunate burden of not just literacy, not just having read the Odyssey, but having understood it, as demonstrated by this interview where he brings up the concepts of “xenia” and “nostos”. Even worse, I suspect that Nolan has received a real, serious education in the Odyssey’s effect on literature, one that has inoculated him with an understanding of the work as a very important fossil. Here’s a revealing interview exerpt from Nolan:

I wanted the world of 'The Odyssey' to feel like a world that a modern audience could relate to… We wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the story.

This is the language you use when you’re trying to resurrect a fossil. But fossils aren’t sexy, no matter how important they are, and they aren’t alive no matter how much electricity you zap through them.

You know what a sensual adaptation of The Odyssey looks like? O Brother Where Art Thou (2000). It made a gazillion dollars, its soundtrack won a Grammy, it’s fun end to end, and that movie’s directors are on the record as having never read the Odyssey.

Christopher Nolan is a boy director who makes boy movies for boys. Inception is for boys. Dunkirk is for boys. Oppenheimer was for boys, part of why it made such an alluring double-header with Barbie. All of the Dark Knight movies are for boys. Explaining Memento and The Prestige in great and excruciating detail to a girl at a party who doesn’t care, is, you guessed it, for boys.5

This has lead to some very rude and completely merited criticism that Christopher Nolan writes all his male leads stoic & heroic while the female leads, if you can even call them leads, are there to be pined after, to die tragically, or to have already died tragically. Very rude, completely merited, and yet still a little mean, because Christopher Nolan could not make any other kind of film than the exact kind of film he makes. He’s no Scorsese, he has no range. Even the posters for all his films look the same:

If Nolan made a movie with a real female lead, she’d be tough & stoic and have a dead husband, and everyone would complain that he wrote her like a man. Boy director Christopher Nolan does one thing, that thing is for boys, and that thing happens to make billions of dollars off of his boy audiences. What do you want from him? To stop making movies entirely?

Anyway, people are making the same criticism about The Odyssey, that he doesn’t do anything interesting with his female characters.

Is any of this true?

It wouldn’t surprise me if all of it was true. Not like I’ve read the Odyssey or anything, but it is like 70% Odysseus hanging out on a boat with a crew of dudes. Christopher Nolan is, as previously discussed, a boy director who makes boy movies for boys. The ancient Greeks were so misogynist they didn’t even want to have sex with women. No way this film features women prominently.

Tied into, yet distinct from the point that the film gives short shrift to women, is that the film is annoying.

sam bodrojan, in the pre-paywall section of her Odyssey review that sets up a twist (probably, I don’t know, I haven’t read it), hits all the big notes:

I don’t like Christopher Nolan movies. I don’t think he’s a bad filmmaker, but I am totally allergic to the neutral qualities of his work…

I dislike his sound mixing…

I dislike the logic of his action scenes…

I dislike his political pretensions, which range from thoughtlessly conservative to correct-but-oversimplified. Lots of ink has been spilled over whether he is reactionary or he is “woke.” The answer is of course neither…

I struggle to understand why Nolan is so beloved.

Of particular interest when it comes to The Odyssey is that Nolan shot the film entirely in IMAX format, which means the whole thing is very tall and very loud. “Too loud,” rather than “too woke,” seems to be the chief complaint from people who’ve actually seen the film. That does sound annoying to me.

There are many people who say the exact opposite, that Christopher Nolan is an auteur filmmaking god who only puts out masterpieces, but I don’t subscribe to their newsletters.

Is any of this true?

Movies are a middlebrow medium, Christopher Nolan delivers perfectly middlebrow movies, and in that respect Christopher Nolan is an annoying genius. The Odyssey probably is too loud though.

Universal Pictures made the regrettable decision to actually release The Odyssey in theaters, and in so doing has allowed audiences to see The Odyssey, significantly diminishing the quality of online takes about The Odyssey.

J.W. Yablonsky, friend of this newsletter and a total fucking coward, had the audacity not only to watch The Odyssey before reviewing it, but to insist that others should. He writes:

I am bound and determined to discuss the primary text (the film) and only the primary text in these reviews. If I bring up concepts or companion/ comparison works, it’s solely to illustrate my own headspace. The Odyssey is making this difficult simply because, as the tentpole blockbuster of midsummer, it has arrived at the end of a monthslong hype parade of extrapolation, speculation, and interpretation of what this film (which was released mere days ago at time of writing) is be, would be, or must be. A lot of people were very confident that this film was going to exist pro or contra some specific politic or worldview literal months in advance of our being able to watch the thing.

Well lah di dah, aren’t you sooooooo much better than the rest of us. Listen, buddy, when you’re a real adult who spends 12 hours per day consuming tweets, newsletters, and shortform video, you’ll realize nobody has the time to watch full movies anymore.

Yablonsky then goes on to talk about how the “special effects are well-done” and then he has some “praise” for the “casting” or whatever. Blah blah blah. I haven’t actually read his full review.6

Clare Frances also admits to having seen the movie, but has the decency to be blasé about it:

If Oppenheimer relishes in the awesome nature of the universe—something man reproduces in vain—The Odyssey avoids wonder at all costs. Despite its sets and format, source material and context, the film’s world is brusque, aesthetically limited by man’s violence. But then, I wonder—as I did after the cinematic Wikipedia article Oppenheimer—what is the point?

She may or may not go on to say something interesting about the movie’s depiction of human treatment of animals, which - look, commentary on the treatment of animals, even as a metaphor, can’t be easily mapped onto woke or antiwoke. Is humane treatment of animals woke, because it’s empathy towards the vulnerable? Is it conservative, because it celebrates God’s creation? I can’t tweet about this! I don’t know who to be mad at!

The Odyssey is a fine movie. Probably. I haven’t seen it. I’ve been busy. It could suck. It could be really good. I might see it this weekend. Maybe. If I do, I’ll let you know what I think.