Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is the map home
Homer’s Odyssey is often mistaken for a story about monsters and voyages, but at its heart, it’s a story about homecoming. Specifically, it’s about recovering a world that makes home possible. The journey it describes is not merely a sailor’s voyage from distant lands, but also the quest to return to Ithaca in the deeper sense of what Ithaca once was, and to recover the customs and sacred laws that make home, and civilization itself, possible.
Yet when Odysseus finally reaches those familiar shores, he finds a household whose moral architecture has collapsed. In Book One, the suitors who seek the comfort of his queen’s bed are shown devouring another man’s estate. These are not foreign invaders, but Ithacans themselves, ravenously enjoying their king’s gifts while preying upon his wife and violating the code of hospitality the culture once held dear. Ithacan society has quietly come apart in the absence of its king, and importantly, the threat came not from foreign invasion—the Greeks have already vanquished the Trojans a decade before the opening verse—but from within.
In Book Two, Odysseus’s son Telemachus condemns the suitors for abandoning the norms of society that govern marriage, inheritance, and household. The suitors are not conservative in that sense. They do not keep the old ways. They scarcely believe in the ancient gods. But Telemachus knows well where such permissiveness will lead. “You should be ashamed yourselves,” he tells them. “Fear the gods’ wrath before they wheel in outrage and make these crimes recoil on your heads.”
But the suitors ignore his warnings, and behave as though binding norms have become optional. They embody an entitlement that treats grievance as authority, an eternal rot that threatens every great civilization, one from within that has no respect for its own culture, plays the victim, and believes what’s righteous is whatever one personally identifies as best, rather than what the old codes ask of them. It’s easy to see our current age in this, or the need for a figure like Odysseus to make his winding way back to our Ithaca and lay down the law once more.
It’s not in the film, but before Ithaca, Odysseus lands in Scheria, among the Phaeacians, a prosperous, orderly, and deeply civilized people who respect lawful authority, revere the gods, celebrate great art, honor athletic competition, and prize beauty. In our time, these things—law and order, faith, the Western Canon, honorable sports, and the hierarchy of beauty—code as politically conservative. But once upon a time, such notions were common sense, so much so that Homer never bothers to explain why this society flourishes. He simply shows us what a healthy civilization looks like when its customs remain intact.
It’s in this orderly society that one of the poem’s most mysterious moments occurs. A bard sings of the fall of Troy and of Odysseus’s role in it as the designer of the Trojan Horse, and Odysseus clutches his cloak in both hands, draws it over his head to hide his face, and weeps. “Whenever the rapt bard would pause in the song,” the poem says, Odysseus would “wipe off his tears and hoisting his double-handled cup, pour it out to the gods. But soon as the bard would start again … Odysseus hid his face and wept.” Later, Odysseus asks the bard to sing again of Troy. This time, he breaks down again, and Homer compares him to a woman weeping over her dead husband’s body as she is beaten by spear-butts and dragged away into slavery by the enemy. Homer never tells us why the song of Troy affects Odysseus so, but although these scenes are not in the movie, Nolan offers an explanation in one of the most powerful sequences of his career. For Nolan, Odysseus does not weep because Troy reminds him of his greatness. He weeps because it reminds him of what his greatness unleashed.
Did Christopher Nolan make a woke Odyssey?
Elon Musk says Christopher Nolan is desecrating the greatest story in Western literature by turning Homer’s Odyssey into yet another pile of woke slop. The epic film features a black Helen of Troy, a black Clytemnestra, a black Athena, a brown Eurylochus, a brown Cepheus, a brown Agamemnon in
You’ll be happy to know, by the way, that the film isn’t woke. It’s actually incredibly based. Yes, given the advance signals—a black Helen, a black Phemius, a trans Sinon, a gigachad Agamemnon, the Wilson translation as source text—it was reasonable to expect that some degree of progressive cultural influence had seeped into Nolan’s film. Nolan himself doesn’t have to be woke for this to be true, and you only needed a child’s understanding of psychology to make the assumption, because no artist has ever been immune from such influences. Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in opposition to European imperialism in Africa, yet even his work included stereotypes of Africans. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn was written in opposition to racism, yet it too contained offensive depictions of blacks. Even Shakespeare and Dante were not immune to the social currents of their day, because no one is, so it’s rather foolish for people to now pretend that such concerns were baseless and absurd. But also, these are often the same ones who think wokeness is not much of a thing. That said, the critics did get this one wrong. The film does have some of those influences, yes, but it’s overwhelmingly pushing in the opposite direction.
Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen is not the beauty-as-trophy image inherited from decades of casting choices that were never questioned on grounds of authenticity in the first place. Her Helen is beauty as wreckage: a woman who has been taken, marked, scarred, and is largely absent from the screen. Elliot Page’s Sinon drew the most contempt in advance, but Sinon is a shepherd’s boy who stays behind on the beach to be taken. As such, his armor is supposed to be comically oversized when he runs on the beach, a clip that went viral as evidence that the film would not be good. But also, I read Sinon as Nolan’s stand-in for the specific bravery Page has shown in a genuinely hostile public conversation about trans identity, even if that bravery is misplaced.
Nolan likes to make films about films, and if we imagine him as the metaphorical Odysseus, then ask yourself, who would be his Sinon? What young kid in his life stepped forward and showed bravery in the face of attack, all while trying to play a part he was not born to play, if not Page? Even the Wilson translation works. Wilson doesn’t share the classical assumption of what a hero is, and her Odysseus is more troubled than the one I found in the cinematic Fagles or literal Lattimore translations. But a broken protagonist makes for a better film, and Nolan has all but said as much, noting that he took his entry point from Wilson’s opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” as opposed to the cunning man, or man of many turns, as it is traditionally translated.
But I also think that a man who cannot watch an actor act, who cannot sit in the dark for three hours and let a performance be a performance, has not defended his civilization. He has only made himself unable to receive it. This film is a cultural touchstone. The “woke” casting decisions all work, and are absent any agenda of the kind. I had my reservations going into it, but I decline to be so brittle that a piece of casting can take a masterpiece away from me.
One of the great things about this film is that, in its obvious commentary on our current moment, it doesn’t take sides. The film finds room to expose the debased morality of the suitors, who seem to stand in for the far-left, and the Greek armies, who stand in for the far-right. The Trojan Horse ultimately becomes more than the ingenious trick that allowed the Greeks into the city of Troy. It becomes the trick that allowed evil into the hearts of the Greeks. But Nolan uses the horror as a lens through which to remind us all why both sides in the culture war have their eternal value. A healthy civilization requires both a hard edge and a gentle heart. The film also powerfully underscores that, in fighting our enemies, we must not lose that part of ourselves that makes defending what we have worth saving. We must not surrender our liberal values, for that is what makes defending the West, and defeating its enemies, a noble crusade in the first place.
The analogy I like to make is that a nation is like a house, and we would like to cultivate compassion and tolerance within the home, but the foundation and its walls are not things to be negotiated. This ends up being the heart of the film—the need for compassion as well as respect for the structure that makes it possible. As Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, says in one scene, “The structure’s nothing. Without people’s respect for its meaning.”
Civilizations rarely collapse only through excessive severity. They also dissolve through the gradual abandonment of the norms that once sustained them. This was Nietzsche’s prediction, that after the West convinced itself God was no longer of any use, an erosion of values and a permissive culture would soon spread in the vacuum left behind, as they clearly have done. The Odyssey has been asking, for nearly three thousand years, how you find your way home after moral disorder. Not just a place to return to, but the shared understanding that makes a place worth returning to. Nolan’s film doesn’t resolve that question so much as stage it honestly, which is a harder and better thing for a blockbuster to attempt than most people expected going in. I might actually have to reach back to my childhood for a moviegoing experience of this caliber.
That’s why Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t just a good film. It’s good therapy for an ailing civilization. And, in an age searching desperately for meaning, Homer still offers the oldest answer of all: Find your way home.
I don’t find the argument that Nolan’s Odyssey is fundamentally anti-woke persuasive. The film may retain the external architecture of Homer—homecoming, order, obligation and the restoration of Ithaca—but at almost every decisive interpretive point it filters that architecture through a modern progressive moral framework. Calling the result “based” because the suitors are decadent confuses the survival of Homer’s plot with the preservation of his moral world.
Sinon is perhaps the clearest example. Page is not playing a “shepherd’s boy” from the Odyssey, because Homer never names or dramatises Sinon. In the wider Trojan tradition, Sinon is a Greek warrior who knowingly participates in the Horse stratagem; Quintus Smyrnaeus has him volunteer to remain behind and persuade the Trojans to bring it into Troy. In Virgil, his story that Odysseus persecuted and intended to sacrifice him is itself a calculated lie designed to win Trojan sympathy.
Nolan turns that lie into the truth. His Sinon apparently does not know that Greek soldiers are concealed inside the Horse, is genuinely deceived by Odysseus and dies because he trusted him. The traditional deceiver becomes the deceived; the willing agent becomes an exploited victim; and the moral culpability that once belonged partly to Sinon is transferred almost entirely to Odysseus and the Greek war machine. That is not merely humanising an old character. It is a direct ideological inversion of him.
Page’s presence therefore functions almost as stunt casting, irrespective of whether Nolan consciously intended it that way. Page’s public identity makes it almost inevitable that critics will interpret Sinon as a contemporary symbol of marginalisation, victimhood and courage—as this essay itself does—rather than ask why the character’s original agency has been removed. The casting “works” precisely because the ancient Sinon has been reconstructed as the film’s conspicuously innocent outsider, betrayed by the masculine violence surrounding him.
Nor can Emily Wilson’s influence be waved away as though it were an incidental choice of wording. Nolan explicitly cited Wilson’s opening—“Tell me about a complicated man”—when explaining his point of entry into Odysseus, describing the character’s cunning, ingenuity and resourcefulness as central to his interest. Wilson’s translation is famous precisely because it does not present itself as an ideologically transparent conduit to Homer: its modern language and treatment of marginalised characters deliberately encourage a more critical reading of the poem’s patriarchal order. One can admire the translation while still recognising that choosing it has interpretive consequences.
The film’s “complicated man” is not simply the traditional polytropos Odysseus rendered in accessible English. He is reconstructed through a modern suspicion of heroic masculinity, conquest and civilisational violence. The Trojan Horse ceases to be primarily the consummation of Greek cunning and becomes the moment when moral evil enters the Greeks themselves. Sinon’s transformation then personalises that indictment: Odysseus does not merely deceive an enemy but sacrifices an innocent subordinate who trusted him.
For the same reason, I do not think the film genuinely “doesn’t take sides.” Its supposed balance is superficial. The suitors may represent progressive decadence, but the film’s deeper moral scrutiny is directed at hierarchy, martial heroism and the violent men who claim to defend civilisation. Sinon is injured by both camps but morally implicated in neither, while Odysseus inherits the guilt from which the adaptation has absolved him.
None of this means Page gives a bad performance, that Wilson is an illegitimate translator or that Nolan has made a bad film. It means the adaptation’s ideological choices should be acknowledged rather than dissolved into the reassuring claim that its casting is “absent any agenda.” This is a recognisably progressive reinterpretation of The Odyssey: traditional agency becomes victimhood, heroic cunning becomes betrayal, victory becomes moral contamination, and the restoration of order is made conditional upon a modern liberal critique of the very masculine authority that restores it. The film may be aesthetically accomplished, but aesthetically accomplished ideological inversion is still ideological inversion.
Wilson has openly shown contempt for Odysseus though, and is unable to switch off her ideological brainwashing to see the character more objectively. She allegedly even wrote a 90 page thesis on why she made the choices she did, while berating others for not thinking like her. She's a misandrist and woke.