Why I Am Not Reviewing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Trevor Lynch's Message to his Fans

1,413 words

Recently, a fan told me that he was looking forward to my review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I hate to disappoint my fans, but my answer is that I am not reviewing it. I cannot review Nolan’s Odyssey, because I will not see it.

I won’t watch The Odyssey because it doesn’t meet two basic criteria for seeing a movie. First, I see a movie if it seems like an interesting story. But I already know the story of The Odyssey. So there will be no surprises there. Second, if I already know the story of a movie, I might still watch it if I like the director and/or some of the actors and wish to see how they handle it. But none of Nolan’s cast particularly interests me, and I already know enough about how he is directing The Odyssey to conclude that it won’t be enjoyable or interesting. It will just be a disgusting desecration.

Dominique Venner referred to Homer as “The European Bible” (see my translation: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). This is fitting, as the Iliad and Odyssey were foundational books for the ancient Greeks and those influenced by them, which eventually became all of Europe and by extension the world.

But the Bible is an imperfect analogy, since the Greeks regarded Homer as somewhere between historical truth and pure fiction, as evidenced by their willingness to change the stories in retelling them, usually for edifying purposes.

Thus I have no objection to artists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides using Homer as “source material.” Nor do I object to Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato subjecting Homer’s depictions of gods and heroes to moral critique. Nor do I object to later philosophers offering allegorical readings of passages from Homer.

There’s something exalted about Homer. But it isn’t “holy writ.” Thus fulminating about taking “artistic license” with Homer isn’t particularly Homeric or Greek. It actually seems quite Jewish, Christian, or Islamic. In truth, it is grotesque when avowed “pagans” talk about Homer like Jews and Christians talk about the Bible.

Thus if a new Aeschylus or Sophocles were to take liberties putting The Odyssey on the big screen, I would be eager to see it.

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Bringing The Odyssey to the screen does not just “license” changes. It demands them. It takes around nine hours to read The Odyssey aloud from beginning to end. To dramatize the whole story on screen, it would take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. Many things that are narrated would have to be shown, so most of Homer’s words would be turned into people, places, and things, plus deeds. Obviously, not everything could be dramatized in a 2-hour movie. Cuts would have to be made. The story, of course, would not be cut. But some episodes could not be included.

Then there is the issue of translation, for at least some words of Homer’s dialogue and narration should be included in any screen adaptation.

But there are limits beyond which an adaptation becomes a parody, a desecration, and an insult to the audience. Nolan has crossed that line.

A decade ago, I would have welcomed Christopher Nolan’s vision of The Odyssey. Indeed, when I saw his 2017 movie Dunkirk, I thought Nolan would be a perfect director for The Odyssey, for both stories are about homecoming by means of a dangerous sea voyage in times of war. And Nolan’s homecoming in Dunkirk was emotionally overwhelming. Thus I thought he could do justice to Homer. I’ll let Dunkirk be his Odyssey and skip this one.

Nolan is highly talented. For years, I thought he was our best living director after David Lynch and Martin Scorsese. But Nolan’s decline set in with Tenet, an incoherent movie featuring a talentless Affirmative Action Hero. Oppenheimer was flawed, but a hopeful uptick. The Odyssey now confirms that Nolan has gone “Hollywood,” which is to say, he has gone “woke.”

This means that Nolan isn’t really in charge of his Odyssey. Instead, he’s been possessed by the woke Zeitgeist, which is as evil a spirit as has ever stalked this world.

Wokeness is simply anti-whiteness. It seeks to destroy whites by indicting everything great about white civilization as evil or sick. It seeks to de-center whites from white stories and white societies, replacing whites with non-whites, white men with women, and normal people with homosexuals and transsexuals.

The most common woke trope is blackwashing: depicting white characters with black actors. There are various lame excuses made for such moves: providing blacks with “role models,” puffing up their self-esteem, making stories more accessible to them, etc. But when a historical character like Finland’s leader Marshal Mannerheim is depicted by a black actor, all those excuses fall away. Such casting is not directed toward blacks at all. It is simply directed against whites. It is an act of hate. It is spitting in our faces.

The same is true with The Odyssey, which is a story about white people in Ancient Greece and Troy. The Odyssey should be cast with white actors who looked as much as possible like the characters described by Homer.

Nolan, however, has cast a black actress named Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy was supposedly the most beautiful woman of her time, the “face that launched a thousand ships,” a woman over whom a long and bloody war was fought. Lupita Nyong’o, however, is ugly. If she were Helen of Detroit, nobody would fight a rap battle over her, much less a gang war. Casting her is just an insult to white people, specifically to white women and white standards of female beauty.

Nolan also casts mixed-race goblin girl Zendaya as gray-eyed Athena. This too is simply an insult. Zendaya can’t act. She’s not beautiful. She’s just Hollywood’s go-to girl for displacing white actresses.

Nolan also includes a black named Travis Scott who is apparently a “rapper” as a bard named Demodocus, as if oogaing about bitchez and money is in any way comparable to Homer. This too is an insult, but I can actually get behind it, because it is so stupid that it will be sheer torture for liberals to keep a straight face.

At this point, one might be wondering why the “diversity” in this film is so monochrome. Why no Papuans and Polynesians? Why no Chinese or Indians? The answer would be that this film is obviously quite America-centric, for only in America have blacks protested and pouted their way to such centrality.

This is elegant proof that diversity casting is not about making films more accessible to everyone, else there’d be a Hottentot in every cast. It is simply an exercise in insulting whites by displacing us with the non-whites that are the least plausible and most plentiful in Hollywood. That would be blacks.

There is, however, one more flagrant bit of diversity casting: a female to male transsexual named Ellen now Eliot Page was cast as Sinon, a character that doesn’t actually appear in The Odyssey. Just count your blessings that “Eliot” isn’t playing Achilles. Of course, there’s actually a role for an androgyne in The Odyssey: Tiresias the seer. But Eliot wouldn’t fit the part, because she cut off her dugs.

Why a transsexual? Even mushy Christian conservatives love putting black people in their dramas these days. By including this particular form of insanity, Nolan signals that he is fully on board with the woke crusade against white civilization. It is another gob of spit in our faces.

I am simply not going to piss away a bit of money and three hours of my life to be insulted this way, and neither should you, dear reader. Don’t even hate-watch this film. Just boycott it.

There are better things you can do with your time. Why not actually read The Odyssey? That’s my plan. In the time it would take for you to watch this movie, plus watch all the ads and previews, plus commute to and from it, you can read nearly half of Homer’s original. I recommend the Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles translations. But I am planning to try out A. T. Murray’s revised Loeb Classical Library translation.

Once whites finally come home, scour our lands of interlopers and collaborators, and reprise control of our destinies, we can commission a film adaptation that does justice to The Odyssey. In the meantime, stick with Homer.

That’s what Odysseus would do.