Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hits theaters as a summer blockbuster that refuses to bow to Hollywood’s woke machine — and critics claiming Nolan “went woke” couldn’t be more wrong.
The film preserves Homer’s ancient moral universe intact: a masculine, conservative ethos forged in an age when humans answered to a higher order, choices carried consequences, and family, kingship, and faith imposed obligations.
“Any online notions that Nolan has ‘gone woke’ are misguided or intentionally misleading.”
Matt Damon stars as a grizzled Odysseus, the cunning Greek soldier whose intellect proves inseparable from his hubris. Nolan’s Bronze Age world dispenses with poetic frills — soldiers speak in ordinary American accents and hurl F-bombs. Nobody sounds like they wandered in from a classics seminar.
The director’s most direct treatment of the journey-home theme opens with the Trojan Horse. Nolan depicts the storied horse with intriguing practicality — a crude vessel washed ashore rather than a picturesque wooden statue. Greek soldiers spend days crammed inside under harrowing conditions, explaining why Trojans lower their guard.
Odysseus’s journey becomes a reckoning for arrogance. After sacking Troy, he begins to believe himself above the gods and above reproach. His voyage home punishes that pride through a collection of famous ordeals.
The cyclops Polyphemus sequence delivers spectacle deserving of the biggest screen available. A 60-foot cyclops stalks through darkness, plucking soldiers from the ground for supper, while Ludwig Goransson’s pounding score drives the terror home.
After escaping, Odysseus heedlessly fires an arrow into Polyphemus’s eye, inviting the wrath of the cyclops’s father, Poseidon, and condemning his men to a torturous voyage.
The film’s teasers read “defy the gods.” The phrase turns out to describe Odysseus’s folly rather than heroic aspiration. To sail past the sirens, he orders his men to bind him to the mast so he may hear their forbidden music. It reminded the reviewer of President Donald Trump staring directly into a solar eclipse without protective eyewear.
Sirens, Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s men into pigs, and his encounter with the Laestrygonians — towering, man-eating giants armed with tree-sized cleavers — rank among the most masterfully terrifying sequences in recent memory.
Back in Ithaca, the moral architecture of Homer’s world expresses itself through Zeus’s law — the sacred obligation of hospitality known as xenia. Strangers arriving at one’s doorstep are to be welcomed with food and wine. Penelope’s suitors violate it extravagantly, occupying Odysseus’s home, consuming his stores, threatening his son, and pressuring his wife into marriage.
The performances deliver uniformly. Pre-release anxiety over casting feels silly once immersed in Nolan’s grim, torchlit world where everyone is weary and coated in dirt or oil.
Lupita Nyong’o appears in only two scenes as Helen of Troy, but she is appropriately arresting. Her dark complexion immediately sets her apart, lending Helen the otherworldly presence demanded of the face that launched a thousand ships. Because the contrast serves the film’s visual mythology, it never feels like diversity-focused casting.
Anne Hathaway shines as Penelope, the grieving queen awaiting her husband while scores of suitors vie for her hand. Robert Pattinson stands out as Antinous, the most brazen suitor who carries the ruthless entitlement of a man plotting to murder Penelope’s son, Tom Holland’s Telemachus, while feasting through his inheritance.
Nolan takes creative liberties. Odysseus recounts his ordeals to his captor, Calypso (Charlize Theron), reimagined as a benevolent therapist and desperate romantic. More significantly, Nolan largely removes the gods from the action. Athena (Zendaya) appears sporadically in visions, closer to a manifestation of conscience than a deity intervening in mortal affairs.
Yet The Odyssey endures for reasons deeper than its gods and monsters. Nolan treats the storms, sirens, and shipwrecks as consequences of Odysseus’s pride — external manifestations of a man who believes himself above the mortal plane.
Whether that higher order is personified by Poseidon or understood through monotheistic faith, the moral proposition remains: no man, however clever, is sovereign over creation.
Homer’s great question is whether a man can be stripped of his name and decades of his life yet still return home and reclaim the identity he left behind. Everyone is trying to find a way back — to a home, a love, an identity, or the person they were before life altered them.
Along with its epic scale and cinematic grandeur, this is what Nolan succeeds in capturing.
