Christopher Nolan’s Double-Edged Trojan Horse
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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has become the film that launched a thousand reviews. Even before it was released, the culture wars sea was churning with complaints about DEI casting, from the race-swapped Lupito Nyong’o as Helen of Troy (the fair-armed most beautiful woman in the world) to the gender-swapped Elliot Page as Sinon (a male Greek warrior who appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, not Homer’s Odyssey). In fact, just as with the Snow White fiasco in 2024, when the final Odyssey trailer dropped in July on YouTube, the video was pummeled, ultimately racking up half a million dislikes and causing Universal Pictures to lock social media content.
However, whereas the Snow White remake remains one of Disney’s biggest failures, grossing only about $200 million against a $300+ million budget, responses to The Odyssey have been much more mixed. Slate published a piece crowing that Nolan went woke and didn’t go broke, but The Daily Wire personalities clashed, with Ben Shapiro providing a mostly favorable take, and Matt Walsh strongly disagreeing, insisting that the movie “transports you into the mind of a liberal woman in 2017.”
Michael Knowles wondered if Nolan is playing the Odyssean trickster, offering the world a story of restoration under the guise of DEI casting to remain eligible to win Academy Awards (which is what Elon Musk believes). Knowles adds, however, that the movie’s focus on “Zeus’s law”—treating strangers as you would be treated—seems like a dig at Donald Trump and anyone else pushing for strict immigration reform. An article at The Guardian agreed that what should really offend conservatives is the film’s focus on xenia, or hospitality between hosts and guests, because allegedly, caring about borders and national security precludes someone from caring about outsiders, and the film presses hard on this issue.
Predictably, some Christian outlets swooned over the film’s supposed affirmation of the beatitude “Blessed are the peacemakers” and claimed that Nolan “deconstructs Western culture’s glorification of aggression” (a strange claim since the film is rated R for violence, and the IMDb Parents guide labels the violence and gore of the film as “severe”). Less cringey is the suggestion that the film invites not only a Christian morality into a pagan context but also the possibility that whatever higher power is out there might be worthy of trust and capable of grace.
Other reviews were less forgiving. One video review, riffing on the Elliot Page situation, quipped that it’s okay that Odysseus’s ship looks like a Viking ship because, see, it identifies as a Greek ship. More serious is the film’s demythologizing, as seen initially in the title card that reads, “A time of apparent magic . . . .” It is entirely plausible that Odysseus’s memories of anything supernatural are merely the hallucinations brought about by eating the lotus flowers, and Calypso seems to serve as a therapist who helps him not to be so controlling. Furthermore, just as in the film Troy (2004), Nolan’s The Odyssey contains no gods, for the goddess Athena—who looks exactly like a priestess who is beheaded at Troy late in the film—is probably no more than a trauma-induced manifestation of his haunted conscience.
Clearly, everyone has a take, and it even may have been the marketers’ intention to dish out rage-bait for the sake of publicity. Not to beat a Trojan Horse to death, but two reviewers—Jonathan Pageau and Emily Wilson—bear special consideration because of their usage of a similar, central metaphor: the Trojan Horse itself.
Like Knowles, Jonathan Pageau has argued that Nolan acts as a kind of Odysseus, presenting us with a film whose postmodern veneer is a Trojan Horse that smuggles in an important story about family, the return of a king and father, and the rebuilding of a civilization. According to Pageau, the character Sinon—a figure of deceit in Virgil’s epic, and placed toward the bottom of Dante’s Hell for fraud—shows us the disastrous consequences of trading places with a man and playing a role that was never meant for him. Pageau is persuaded that Nolan intentionally uses DEI casting to perform a judo move on the audience, and that Christians should be the ones who see through the deception. Pageau even uses one of the opening scenes, in which Telemachus learns not to be too quick to defend himself, to argue that viewers should likewise not be taken in by the initial controversy.
Surprisingly, the author of the Odyssey translation that inspired Nolan, Emily Wilson, was not impressed by the movie. Wilson’s notorious first line reads, “Tell me about a complicated man,” and her London Review of Books essay about the movie is titled “An Uncomplicated Man.” Devastatingly, she writes, “It’s a[n] . . . audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display—and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.”
She continues to go hard in a doubling-down essay in an Atlantic piece titled “A Trojan Horse Is Supposed to Have Humans Inside It.” In the essay, she argues that the film “gestures at a critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his victims.” Additionally, “the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.” In sum, “Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse [in that] the script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values.”
Nolan’s film certainly is a spectacle and, in my opinion, probably worth seeing once. The Greeks’ perspective inside the horse, Agamemnon’s entrance into Troy, and Circe’s horrific transformation of Odysseus’s sailors all provide memorable moments of a kind of magnificence. Furthermore, although Nolan’s reunion scene with his dog Argos is different from Homer’s (in which the disguised Odysseus is surrounded by enemies and cannot blow his cover by showing any recognition of his faithful dog), it does provide a touching moment, heightened by Telemachus’s recognition of his father.
But ultimately, the DEI casting (among other reasons) prevents this film from being a categorical success. It is more than an irritating pebble in the shoe, as Shapiro says. I don’t necessarily recommend an outright boycott, as at least one YouTuber has done, but criticism of the film is not performative hate by an over-exercised conservative right, bent on fighting a culture war. No matter how good anyone thinks the movie is, the reality remains that the noise preceding the movie’s release was significant enough to render Page’s presence unignorable.
I can’t get on board with the above-the-fray nonchalance regarding Page’s casting. Some critics apparently think that it’s a sign of maturity not to care about the casting decisions, as if mental health doesn’t matter. But it does matter, and it is a mistake either to valorize or trivialize a reality-defying psychological disorder. When the WNBA has commissioned its brightest academic allies to determine what the W stands for, we know that despite any legitimate vibe shift, the progressive issues haven’t disappeared, and they still matter.
The movie may be a Trojan Horse, as Pageau says, but if it is, it has a double edge that cuts in the opposite direction: cloaking trans confusion in a classical story. Being dismissive of the film’s casting decisions is to say, “I see it, but I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
My friend, that is exactly how a Trojan Horse works.
