“You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know.”
“My dad is coming home.”
Of all the lines in the new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, those two generated the fiercest criticism. Other aspects looked more promising: The brief glimpses of the movie’s visuals showed that it had all the brooding grandeur of past Nolan favorites like Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises. This in itself is a welcome change from the last major Odyssey movie, Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024)—a mopey, demythologized retelling of the poem’s closing scenes. But Nolan’s trailer still fell catastrophically flat for many viewers. There are devotees of ancient epics who already seem convinced Nolan will turn this 2,700-year-old legend into shallow pablum with all the idiocies of modern Hollywood.
After all, besides the appearance of words like “dad” and “daddy” in the script, the cast includes such names as rap star Travis Scott and transgender actor Elliot Page. It seems Nolan wants his version to feel contemporary, as he thinks Homer’s original did for the Greeks: He told Time magazine that Scott was cast because the Odyssey was “oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.” Page probably isn’t playing the mighty hero Achilles, as the online rumors had it, but seeing a biological female play any male hero feels like yet another insertion of identity politics into a beloved part of the Western canon.
This is also what has made some people—including Elon Musk—upset to see the black actress Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, a ravishing Greek beauty described in the poem as “white-armed’” (leukōlenos). Some of these criticisms seem overwrought to me; a few have been outright racist. But at the same time, it’s true that Hollywood has recently been in the grips of a nasty obsession with race and gender, which often takes the form of subverting classic tales. It’s still too soon to say for sure, but there are worrisome signs that Nolan may dumb down Homer’s language and smear his story into the muck of contemporary political obsessions.
