Did Christopher Nolan make a woke Odyssey?

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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 gigachad armor, rumors of a trans Achilles, a Latinx Eumaeus, a gender-critical postmodern feminist critique of Odysseus, and Travis Scott as the Homeric narrator, except he’s black and he raps.

I love Nolan as much as the next guy, but that sure as hell doesn’t sound like the Homer I read as a boy. Worse, every one of those changes falls cleanly within the well-worn pattern of woke film propaganda that only the performatively ignorant or the truly stupid continue to say they cannot see. I swear to God I still meet people who, if you talk about an upcoming movie being woke, will roll their eyes as if woke movies don’t exist. It’s like these people quantum-suicided their way into our dimension from one where Kathleen Kennedy was never born.

The two biggest winners at the Oscars this year were One Battle After Another, which is based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland about how the Nixon administration was fascist and radical leftists are the good guys — I wonder what the director was trying to say by making a movie like this in 2025 — and Sinners, about white vampires who prey upon innocent black folks in a Mississippi town in 1932. And yes, white people did prey upon blacks in the Jim Crow era, but imagine making a movie about how Muslims prey on British girls today, or one where black vampires prey upon innocent people of all races because the director wants to say something about how outrageously violent black Americans are compared to everyone else. Even if it was beautifully shot on 65 mm film using IMAX 15-perf and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras, and even if the white actor who is number one on the call sheet played two roles, no one would give a shit because the movie would be instantly labeled white supremacist.

So when a movie like The Odyssey comes out and people recite the argument we’ve all heard a hundred times before about how the film is fiction, so it doesn’t really matter if they make everyone black, people recoil because we’ve all learned by now that this doesn’t actually work the other way, and so this isn’t actually a believable reason anymore. In fact, we’ve also noticed that even when it’s non-fiction, it makes no difference because then you get the argument about artistic license, so it doesn’t really matter if they make everyone black. Again, the principle never operates in the other direction. It’s a systemic issue, not the personal bias of any one director. But if you noticed it at all, you’re probably racist.

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Though to be fair, no one seems upset about Matt Damon, a kid from Massachusetts with British and Nordic ancestry, playing the king of Ithaca. Or Anne Hathaway, a Brooklyn girl, playing his Spartan wife. I haven’t seen anyone on social media complain about Charlize Theron, an Afrikaner, being cast in the role of Calypso. Or Jon Bernthal, a Jew from rural Maryland, as Menelaus. Not to mention Tom Holland as Telemachus, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, or Mia Goth as Melantho. I guess we’re supposed to accept these casting decisions because they involve white actors instead of woke race-swapping. Except the ancient Greeks weren’t white. Not only that, they also didn’t look white. They had black hair and olive skin, so if you only cared about phenotypic accuracy, you’d want Oscar Isaac as Odysseus and you’d be just as upset about Matt Damon taking the role as you’d be about Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.

But that’s not what seems to be getting under everybody’s skin. In January, comedian Chrissie Mayr wrote on X, “Casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy is absolutely disgusting and goes directly against what was written thousands of years ago.” Mayr has a point in that this is definitely not historically accurate casting, as I will explain below, but “disgusting” is an interesting choice of words that gets my racist Spider-Sense tingling. Musk replied, “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity.”

How dare they cast a black Athena! But an Afrikaner as Calypso? Seems fine. What bothers me about this is that conservatives already know it’s bullshit because when pro-Palestinian protesters tried to shoehorn the Gaza War into a Marxist framework by talking about Israelis as if they’re all white colonizers, conservatives quickly pointed out that Mediterranean people are not white and that it’s stupid and wrong to say that they are. But suddenly, none of them can remember that the ancient Greeks didn’t look like Edward goddam Cullen from Twilight.

Still, these people do have a point. The casting itself does warrant scrutiny. Helen of Troy is meant to be the most beautiful woman in the world. On one level, I can accept Nolan’s decision to cast the ebony Nyong’o because it’s true in spirit, in the sense that she is one of the most celebrated beauties of our time. Other women celebrated as the most beautiful include Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, and Margot Robbie. But in 2017, Esquire UK ran an article, “The Most Beautiful Women of All Time,” with Nyong’o at the top of the list, followed by Blake Lively, Zoë Kravitz, Emma Watson, Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, and Natalie Portman. You may not agree, but the fact that she made the list means that she is at least seen that way by many, and that’s enough for her to play the role in the symbolic sense. As Alec Baldwin recently wrote, “Dear Elon… but she IS the most beautiful woman in the world.”

The counter-argument to this is that Helen was quite famously not black. In fragment 23, Sappho describes her as “golden-haired.” The exact term used is ξάνθαι, or xanthai, which means yellow, golden, or blond. In the Iliad, Homer describes her as “white-armed.” In other words, she was probably a blonde white chick. That aside, we also know both her mortal parents were Spartans. She was a Greek princess, not a Kenyan like Nyong’o. In other words, casting Nyong’o as Helen of Troy is like casting Emma Stone to play the Queen of Sheba. Both are semi-historical, almost mythic figures, which is the very justification being used for Nyong’o in this role. But we all know it wouldn’t work the other way. Again, the problem is systemic and the rules only apply in one direction. Another example of this is cultural appropriation, which is very bad, but only if you’re white. If you’re black, you can appropriate anything you want, even entire cultures. As Sunny Hostin, co-host of The View, recently said:

This idea was also explored in a book called Black Athena — I think people should read it — which argues that classical Greek culture is heavily indebted to Afro-Asiatic and Near Eastern roots. I actually taught Greek mythology to eight-graders, so I covered this. So people that are saying that Helen of Troy cannot possibly be played by a black woman don’t know history.

I’m so glad we have the historical expertise of a former eighth-grade instructor to help us understand that ancient Greeks owe it all to black people. As Kangmin Lee commented, “We wuz Greeks and shiiiii.” By the way, the hotep history book she’s talking about was written in 2006 by the British professor Martin Bernal, a scholar of Chinese politics (so slightly outside his wheelhouse here), who no one takes seriously.

But for all this, as one friend recently said, arguing over casting decisions in a film based on a Homeric epic is a bit like arguing about the historical accuracy of an event we only know from the concept album. Sure, American Idiot captures the alienation of post-9/11 American life. But it also looks at those events through the cartoonish lens of teenage punk rebellion. Green Day is not David McCullough, and Homer was no Thucydides. Rather, like Nolan, he was the epic storyteller and cultural voice of his day, and as such, he took liberties with the truth when it made artistic sense to do so.

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But even so, you can’t blame moviegoers for the backlash unless you’re being very intellectually dishonest about the influence of woke ideology on Hollywood. After being force-fed this slop for over a decade, Americans moviegoers have become allergic to the stuff. These people treated our mythic heroes with contempt and humiliated them for cheap subversion, if not a Marxist endgame. In The Last Jedi, for example, Luke Skywalker is portrayed as a bitter hermit who rejects the Jedi legacy, turns a sacred symbol into a gag by chucking his lightsaber over his shoulder, and flushes his dignity by chugging gross alien milk. In the Marvel movies, the tragic Shakespearean figure of Thor is gradually reduced to a buffoonish punchline who other characters repeatedly and openly mock. Haha, get it?

This is not the creative subversion of tired old tropes. Cormac McCarthy subverted the Western with Blood Meridian. George R.R. Martin subverted the fantasy in A Song of Ice and Fire. Chinatown subverted the detective film noir, Watchmen subverted the superhero story, Dune subverts the messianic sci-fi adventure because the chosen one becomes a warning about charismatic power. John le Carré subverts James Bond-style spy thrillers by depicting tradecraft as drab, bureaucratic, and futile. The Wire subverted the police procedural by arguing that no brilliant detective can defeat institutional decay. The Sopranos subverted the mafia story by depicting the crime boss as a vulnerable, insecure man who struggles with depression, panic attacks, and sometimes pisses himself.

All these are examples of subverting beloved tropes, yet the very people who complain about what they did to characters such as Luke, Thor, and Indie are the very people who adore every work I just listed above. So it’s not that people dislike seeing their narratives troubled or their heroes failing. They adore it. Indeed, mythic heroes have always failed. Consider Achilles, Arthur, even Odysseus. What people dislike is when the work itself is sneering at the character, the legacy, or the fans’ attachment to them, rather than exploring tragedy with seriousness. Or when a beloved franchise is turned into a vehicle for one group’s political grievances.

Other features of woke film include replacing character growth with identity shorthand. So, for example, characters are presented as admirable because of what they represent, not because they struggle, change, sacrifice, or earn anything. One example of this is girlboss invincibility. Think of the heroine who is instantly great at everything, never seriously wrong, and surrounded by weak or foolish men. Remember Captain Marvel as played by the insufferable Brie Larson? Why, after all, is Superman admirable? It’s because of his ethic of self-sacrifice and his Kansas farmboy good-heartedness, that’s why. But why is Captain Marvel admirable? Apparently, it’s because she has a vagina between her legs. If you think that’s vulgar, I agree!

Part of this pattern also involves mocking straight white men. Instead of writing a complex antagonist, the movie gives you a smug caricature of “the bad people” the filmmaker dislikes. And if you haven’t spotted the pattern yet, that generally means turning straight white male heroes into losers and failures. Black men can still be heroes, gay men are accepted because they’re not threatening to women, and women are the new alpha warriors, but when stories are retold that feature straight white men as the hero, woke filmmakers only have a few options: make the hero evil or make the hero black, female, or gay.

And again, no one really minds blind casting of this sort. What they generally tend to mind is being called racist if they happen to enjoy Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, meanwhile if a black person is cast as a fictional character we are told it’s racist to object because the character is fictional. And while holding that incongruity in your head, you also have to be okay with Jodie Turner-Smith playing Anne Boleyn, Adele James playing Cleopatra, Gold Rosheuvel playing Queen Charlotte, or Hamilton giving us a racially reimagined George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Aaron Burr.

The reason is supposed to be something about how the message of those men applies to people of color today. But imagine making a movie with Ryan Gosling playing Malcolm X in order to send the message that his crusade against racism is relevant to whites facing racism today. It wouldn’t fly. David Oyelowo played King Henry VI, Sophie Okonedo played Queen Margaret, but Tom Hanks ain’t playing Shak Zulu and the reason isn’t any of the ones they give when you ask them. It’s not that fictional roles are up for grabs. Nor is the rule that historical roles should be historically accurate. The rule is that if you’re not a straight white male then you can play any part you like, and if you are a straight white male then you should only play straight white males. But going back the Nolan, it’s not as if I’m going to boycott the film or anything as absurd as that. Nonlinear intellectual blockbusters are fun, and I’m willing to grant Nolan a bit of elbow room in the faith that he’s going to deliver something monumental in return.

And while we’re on the subject of casting and masculinity, let’s talk about rumors of the trans Achilles. People are saying Elliott Page has been cast as Achilles, and this seems untrue, but even if so, we can learn something from the way people are reacting to the rumor. What jumps out at me, as with the outrage over blackwashed casting, is that conservatives are over their skiis here. Everyone keeps posting images of Page in scenes from the film Troy, except in the AI-edited version the puny little Page gets easily killed off. It’s funny, I admit, but the problem with these jokes is that the entire premise is the stupidity of having someone built like Page play someone as badass as Achilles. Because how could such a scrawny twerp ever convincingly fill the role of one of history’s greatest warriors?

Except, while you can reasonably object to a biological female playing the role of a famous male warrior, if instead your argument is that Page doesn’t look the part of Achilles, I’m afraid you’re wrong. Achilles wasn’t built like a bodybuilder. He didn’t look like Brad Pitt in Troy. He wasn’t doing multiple weekly sets of lateral raises. And he sure as hell couldn’t bench more than his bodyweight, if that. For that kind of fighter, you want Ajax. He’s your brick shithouse. But Achilles? More than anything else, he was commonly described as “fleet-footed.” That’s the most common adjective used for him by Homer because he was fast rather than strong. Think of a ninja. Think of a fighter like Bruce Lee as opposed to Mike Tyson. We’re talking speed, skill with the slender ash spear, agility with the bronze blade in close combat, and bottomless endurance. Everyone thinks Page is a silly political play, but Page is far closer to what Achilles probably actually looked like, whereas the brawny Pitt is just Hollywood stupidly believing that every hero in every movie has to be muscular or the audience just won’t buy it. I wish I could say they were laughably wrong, but the freakout over Page suggests otherwise.

As you can see, this is a fun topic to discuss because any honest rendering is going to be packed with nuance. As such, you can imagine the media has been handling all this as well as you might guess. Writing for The Rolling Stone, Nikki McCann Ramirez makes the argument that if you think Helen of Troy should maybe not be black, well, you’re racist. The Daily Beast is calling it a “MAGA meltdown,” as if the people complaining are just a bunch of racist crybabies having a bigoted tantrum. Or consider this criticism by Sonny Bunch over at The Dispatch, whose essay frames the backlash as a “weird right-wing freakout”:

I was a little surprised by the source of the inevitable caterwauling about The Odyssey … as Christopher Nolan is broadly appreciated by conservative filmgoers and The Odyssey is the sort of classic that the right has long championed adapting for the masses. Sadly, the Very Online Right, spearheaded by its grand leader, Elon Musk, has decided that The Odyssey is bad now. It has too many black people, you see, and there are rumors that a trans individual might be playing Achilles.

This is annoyingly bad faith. Yes, conservative filmgoers like Nolan. Yes, The Odyssey is the kind of classic that conservatives have been pining to see for some time. But no, the reason for the backlash is not because Musk is a racist transphobe with an army of terminally online right-winger fanboys who would follow him off a cliff. Honestly, why are people like this seemingly incapable of grasping the very simple concept that people dislike propaganda? You may not agree that this particular film is woke, but if you literally cannot grok the fact that people are mad because they think yet another film is preaching the same ideology, or you cannot see how this film maps onto that ideology, and instead all you can come up with is that it must be because the critics are racist transphobes, then maybe you’re just too stupid for life.

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Besides, despite all the drama, the movie is going to do just fine. One reason is simply because Nolan is a great filmmaker so people will like his movies regardless of their politics. But also, some people are convinced that Nolan is a conservative filmmaker. I don’t think we have enough information to make claims about Nolan’s politics, but the theories are interesting.

After The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, the author of Invented Organs argues, “It became common wisdom across the political spectrum that Christopher Nolan is a conservative filmmaker.” The author cites as evidence the film’s “pro-police, maybe even pro-torture message,” with Batman dressed in SWAT tactical gear instead of spandex, as well as “the clear inspiration the revolutionary Bane drew from the Occupy Wall Street movement.” There were also clear allusions to the Bush administration and the War on Terror, such as when Batman uses “advanced interrogation techniques” to get information out of a mob boss and, later, the Joker. Batman also hacks every cell phone in Gotham, a nod to the Patriot Act, which lets the FBI wiretap Americans without probable cause, despite the Fourth Amendment.

But Nolan also worries the moral landscape every step of the way, so it’s never exactly clear where he stands on the issue. Rather, it seems to me he’s simply tying his movie to some of the big issues of the day. The author of Invented Organs adds that “although there is an undercurrent of conservatism … in Nolan’s body of work, there is a more consistent and prominent through-line: he makes movies about men of ambiguous character who suffer for their obsessions.”

That, I think, is probably a better explanation for why Odysseus is not going to be portrayed as an unmistakably noble hero. It’s not because Nolan has gone woke. It’s because Nolan enjoys playing in the muck and mud of human complexity. What sets Shakespeare apart is that he doesn’t let you pick a side. Macbeth is a murderer but you understand his ambition. Shylock demands his pound of flesh and you see both the justice and the cruelty in it. Even villains like Iago have complexity that make them fascinating rather than cartoonish. Not to mention, the Bard gives Iago some of the best lines in his entire body of work. Nolan is really good at doing this too, though Shakespeare distributes moral complexity universally — everyone gets interiority — whereas Nolan does this, but only with the protagonists. His movies might feel like symphonies, but they’re actually concertos. Batman’s crisis of conscience, Cobb’s guilt in Inception, Oppenheimer’s moral reckoning, Cooper’s personal sacrifice in Interstellar. “Fundamentally,” the author adds, “Nolan makes character studies of men — not women — who sacrifice endlessly for and work tirelessly towards some sort of monumental accomplishment, whether it is to rid Gotham City of crime, split the atom, or — in the case of 2006’s the Prestige, create the ultimate magic trick.”

This is also why I think Nolan chose the controversial Emily Wilson translation of the Greek text. Not because he wants to make a woke Odyssey, but because her version is more complicated. She presents a morally confused, worried, exhausted, and broken man rather than a two-dimensional hero. I think Nolan looked at her Odysseus and saw a more complex, Shakespearean slab of clay that he could do more interesting things with. As the author of Invented Organs said, Nolan “makes movies about men of ambiguous character who suffer for their obsessions.” And Wilson’s hero is closer to this than other versions, the only problem is the reason she presents him this way is because she has opinions about masculinity.

So yes, her translation has received a lot of backlash. Wilson is the first female translator of Homer’s work, and she’s a radical feminist who approaches the story through that lens, viewing Greek male heroism as generally a really bad thing and wondering why the ancient Greeks didn’t spend more time talking about women and slaves. The answer, of course, is because they were ancient Greeks and not modern-day undergrads majoring in gender studies. But for Wilson, that isn’t enough. The text has to be queered into shape. In her translator’s note to the text, she described the Odyssey as “a poem that is deeply invested in … male dominance.”

She even refers to the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope, the beating heart of the story, the reason he longs for home, her 20-year wait being one of the ancient world’s most powerful symbols of true love, as nothing but “a heteronormative patriarchal marriage,” adding, “those were things that turned me off.” So then why bother translating the greatest work in Western literature if it’s not really your thing? Because you can bend it to your will. You can make it less about masculine heroism and heteronormative love and more about women, slaves, and the importance of diversity. As Wilson explains about theme of heroism and love in the story, “I realize now more deeply than I used to that it has so much more in it than that.” Oh, such as what? Well, she explains, a “wide range of different kinds of relationships” as well as a “wide range of different kinds of people.” And she explains that this is what drew her into the story. Interesting.

And before you shrug this off as if these minor translational decisions make no serious dent in our cultural imagination, consider this analysis by Johanna Staples-Ager, who is far from being some mindless woke barista nitwit, but is instead a brilliant doctoral student in genetics at Yale who has done some impressive work:

Odysseus is a dick.

I’m going to say that again, because I find it so satisfying: Odysseus is a dick. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with this man, and can confirm that Homer’s many-minded hero, his complicated protagonist, is a narcissist, an adulterer, a thief, and bad at his job to boot. The fact remains, though, that he is a really good liar. It was Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation that first alerted me to this glorious, satisfying contrast — not to mention the true heroism of his wife Penelope. My life among the classics has never been the same.

I grew up in a household saturated by the classics. My father read Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf to me as a bedtime story, and by kindergarten I knew the witches’ incantation from Macbeth by heart. A high school drama nerd, I watched and read every story involving the Greek pantheon I could get my hands on, down to the Odyssey’s to-the-letter but rather hammy 1997 miniseries adaptation. As much as I loved these stories, however — as much as they were part of me — there was often something missing, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It had something to do with Penelope’s tears: the implied weight of them, brimming just beyond the confines of the page and screen. It flickered in the fearful corners of Helen’s eyes. You don’t belong here. My junior year of high school, I decided to put my money where my mouth was and actually read the classics — the classic classics. I swiped Richard Lattimore’s 1967 translation of the Odyssey from my father’s shelf, safe in Wikipedia’s assertion that it has long been considered one of the most faithful translations. Fond of such awkward literalisms as “he slept with the exhaustion of sleep,” it left me cold as wave-worn Ithaca, bowed beneath Poseidon’s furious wrath. Even Athena, my favorite goddess, fell flat, suffocating under an assortment of “wilts” and “thous.” To look at the source of my love for the classics, and find it so wanting? It felt like I had no home to return to.

A year later, when Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey came out, I reserved it from the public library and scooped it into my backpack like something precious. The library edition was satisfyingly hefty, its cover packed with quotes lauding Wilson’s prowess: the sure, sharp drive of her iambic pentameter, the glass-pane clarity of her interpretation, and all of these things eminently rapid, clear and direct. I first opened it at breakfast, careful not to spill oatmeal on the pristine pages. Here was the first major translation of Homer’s epic by a woman, and it was in my hands.

You get the idea. The translator had a vagina, the reader had a vagina, and having a vagina was really important to how they both thought about heroism and longing for one’s family. But of course, the themes of this Greek epic poem transcend such sexist thinking. Not to mention, the chronological snobbery that pollutes every line of Wilson’s work. Still, I find Staples-Ager’s writing beautiful and emotionally persuasive. But I also find it sad to read about a young girl who grew up immersed in the classics, as I did, which is rare enough these days, yet who ended up turning her back on them because the classics weren’t feminist enough. This is little different than listening to a black scholar say he fell out of love with Shakespeare because it lacked black characters. You get it, but you also understand that their worldview is not deep so much as blinkered.

Yet credit where credit is due, Wilson is right that Odysseus would not be seen as a hero in the modern sense. To the Greeks, a “hero” was simply a man who accomplished some great deed. Today, we expect our heroes to also be men of good heart. But Greek heroes were rarely decent men. Achilles was a sociopath, for instance. But although Odysseus did slaughter the suitors of his wife when he finally got home, and although he did sleep with Calypso and Circe while he away, it’s more complicated than that. Calypso held him against his will, so it’s not entirely consensual, and if the tables were turned and this was a woman, people would be saying she was raped because of the power imbalance. But Odysseus is a mortal confronting a literal god, so there’s a slight power imbalance here too.

And with Circe, she’s a sorceress who turns his men into pigs and uses magic to seduce Odysseus. So again, it’s not as if he just got horny and cheated on his wife. But that is how many of Wilson’s fans defend her characterization of the man. She also takes all sorts of tiny, but meaningful stabs along the way. Translation is nothing if not a litany of tiny decisions, and those decisions can add up to quite a lot. Many of Wilson’s decisions are hilariously bad, and extremely woke. One of the lesser offenders is actually the most infamous one. Instead of opening with the famously grand line, “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways,” she instead begins with the flat, “Tell me about a complicated man.” Because in her version, he’s not grand. He’s just complicated, and not all that special. But the slaves…

Of course, the minor issues I have as a former teachers of Classics with each individual translation choice that Wilson makes does not, in itself, seem like much, but the onslaught is relentless. At a certain point, the Sorites paradox seems like a relevant reference. When Homer calls Odysseus polymetis, meaning “cunning,” Wilson translates this as “Lord of Lies.” When Calypso gives Odysseus the choice between immortality or returning home, and Odysseus chooses to return home to be with his family rather than to live forever, a decision that has long been regarded as proof of the goodness in his heart, Wilson instead claims he does this because he doesn’t want to give up his “patriarchal male power in the house.”

So yes, even though the Wilson and Nolan defenders have a good point, the Wilson and Nolan critics have several good points of their own. They also get a lot of things wrong, of course, because among them you’ve got genuine racists who just don’t want to see Nyong’o in anything as well as Musk fanboys who see nothing wrong when, for instance, one user writes, “Christopher Nolan is racist against the Greek people and their cultural heritage,” and Musk responds, “True.” Or when another user writes, “The destruction of the Odyssey by Nolan and the Left isn’t just about a movie. It’s about Western Civilization. The Greeks were its foundation. From Democracy to Art to Philosophy to Culture. The Left wants to destroy Western Civilization and everything that helped create it.” And Musk replies, “True.”

Even to the extent that woke ideology is corrosive to Western values, this corner of the Discourse is just embarrassing. Musk went on to attack Nolan directly, saying, “Shame on Chris Nolan for desecrating Homer! He will never live it down.” Matt Walsh claimed Nolan only cast Nyong’o as Helen of Troy because he knew “he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman” — and Musk responded, “True.”

Did Nolan make a woke Odysseus? I don’t have any reason to think Nolan is woke, but whether a film is woke is a matter of genre, somewhat regardless of editorial intent. If you are With an estimated budget of $250 million, the film is believed to be the most expensive of Nolan’s career. Variety predicts this will be the highest-grossing film of the year, while TheWrap predicted it could surpass The Dark Knight to become Nolan’s highest-grossing film ever. So I’m pretty sure that, even if it does prove to be a heartbreaking work of staggering wokery, Nolan is going to live it down just fine.