Culture war ideologues have hijacked Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey

This article was first published on the 24th July 2026 in the Australian Financial Review. A selection of Josh’s columns will be published here on Substack a few weeks after they appear in print.

Elon Musk has opinions about Homer now. When Christopher Nolan cast a black actress as Helen of Troy and a trans man as a Greek soldier, Musk branded him an “anti-white racist” who “desecrated” the Odyssey.

Donald Trump Jr piled on. X went berserk. Nothing less than the fate of Western civilisation hinged on getting your knickers in a knot about what late-Bronze Age Greeks really looked like. More than half a million people reportedly bombarded the trailer with down-votes on YouTube. This was before anyone had seen a single frame. Tough crowd.

At the same time, a reverse furore erupted on the opposite side of the internet’s hall of mirrors. In left-wing crazy town, Nolan is guilty of Western civilisation’s greatest sins – colonialism, occupation and genocide – for shooting scenes in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. Javier Bardem, Pedro Almodovar and Greta Thunberg joined the official campaign to get the offending footage cut. The film’s London premiere was protested by activists chanting “shame!” and “free Sahara!”

What’s more, The Odyssey cast isn’t too diverse, but not diverse enough. Progressive critics complained that a story about Greeks contains not a single Greek actor. Where’s Con the Fruiterer when you need him?

It’s easy to make too much of internet flare-ups. Few genres of journalism are more tiresome than “the internet is blowing up about X”, in which a reporter cherry-picks a dozen tweets and declares a global trend. But the campaigns against The Odyssey were so premature, so self-certain and so sealed inside their own bubbles that, collectively, they’re a fine example of how online polarisation works. That matters at the ballot box as much as at the box office.