The Anti-Odyssey Crusade Has Lost the Plot

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Who would have thought that it could be so sinful to enjoy a cinematic epic? This weekend, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, The Odyssey, opened to a flurry of ticket sales, to a storm of acclamatory notices, and to the enmity of a bunch of rattled conservative “influencers” who seem to have had Odyssea delenda est tattooed in wine-dark ink across their foreheads. Merely to signal one’s intention to see the film has caused one to be chased around Twitter by a cadre of digital Furies, flouncing, denouncing, and renouncing as they go. Among the charges that they have thrown at would-be audience members is that they are “enemies of Western civilization.” Gosh!

 

This, suffice it to say, is Weird Behavior — and it is no less so because it comes from people who maintain that their ends are pure. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with criticizing a popular  movie, but, in its tone, its substance, and its aims, the present anti-Odyssey crusade no more constitutes “movie criticism” than last summer’s freakout over Sydney Sweeney’s denim commercial constituted “commercial criticism.” Criticism of art — which, naturally, is only possible after the critic has actually experienced that art — involves analysis, judgment, and thought. The suggestion that a person who attends a given film is, ipso facto, an accomplice to the destruction of the United States — or, in my particular case, ought to be “deported”! — reflects none of those things. Instead, it reflects  politics — and a stunted, aggressive, illiberal politics at that.

 

This weekend, I saw it argued in various places that those who claim to have enjoyed Nolan’s movie are, in fact, motivated by the desire to construct a “narrative,” or to change America’s immigration laws, or to reshape the Republican Party. This is a monomaniacal, totalitarian, Stasi-like non sequitur. It is projection, on an IMAX scale. It represents everything that I have always hated about the insistence that “everything is political” — an insistence that, for most of my life, has been the preserve of the idiopathic left but has recently started to derange the right as well. As a free person, living in a free country, I reserve the right to watch things, or listen to things, or eat things without being expected to don armor and go 18 rounds for the privilege. You didn’t like the movie? That’s great. I don’t like a lot of movies — including one of Christopher Nolan’s recent offerings that I am simply not intelligent enough to understand (Tenet). You are so upset that someone would go to the movie that you elect to send them emails telling them that they should be denaturalized? Well, now we have a problem. This is not East Germany.

 

Unlike with music, I do not have especially refined or useful thoughts about movies. But if I were to offer a criticism of Nolan’s production of The Odyssey, it would be that, for a Greek text that predated the New Testament, the treatment is altogether too Christian. Xenia — which is referred to exclusively as “Zeus’s law” in the film — is a real concept of that era. But the nature of the guilt that Odysseus feels about its violation, together with the implication that all the lives of Troy were individually valuable, is anachronistic. Add in that Odysseus’s resistance to the sirens is transmuted into an ersatz crucifixion scene, and that none of his infidelity is depicted or openly acknowledged, and one is left with a moral framework that, in some respects, would have been alien to the authors of the original text.

 

Still, one ought not to jump from there to the supposition that this is an attack on the Western canon. Odysseus’s in-film conviction that his deployment of the horse at Troy constituted an unforgivable violation of xenia was probably not intended by Homer. But it was what Dante thought. In the Inferno, Dante condemns Odysseus — appearing under his Latin name, Ulysses — not as the cunning hero of Greek epic but as a fraudulent counselor, and he explicitly cites the use of the Trojan Horse among the sins for which Ulysses is damned. In so doing, Dante is not attempting to recover Homer’s moral universe; he is deliberately reinterpreting it through the lens of medieval Christianity. Thus is Dante’s Odysseus judged not by the standards of Bronze Age Greece, but by those of 14th-century Catholic Europe. (In the 17th century, this same impulse led Milton to perform a similar feat in reverse, appropriating the Homeric and Virgilian epic tradition to tell the story of Genesis.) Seven hundred years later, Christopher Nolan has made the same move. If one’s sole concern is accuracy, one may dislike this, but one cannot in good faith propose that it serves as a repudiation of our culture.

 

But, of course, the loudest voices against The Odyssey — the people who have become so committed to the conclusion with which they began that they have talked themselves into the position that the only authentically socially conservative approach toward the  movie is to steal it — are not concerned about the adaptation’s accuracy. They are not upset that the story has been Christianized, any more than they were upset with Virgil for Romanizing it, or with Chaucer and Shakespeare for Englishing it, or with James Joyce for translating it into his interminable modern prose. Rather, they are upset with other things — transient, prosaic things — and they are hoping that they can fashion their censoriousness into a weapon fit for those battles. They cannot. Kick as they may, their attempts will have the same ultimate effect as those made by their peers on the other side of contemporary Wokery: If they are heard at all, they will be received without alacrity, roundly ignored, and then woven into contempt for the very  political agenda that their architects had hoped to advance.

 

Again, Dante shows the way home:

 

O ye who are in little bark, desirous

To listen, following after my own ship,

That singing voyaged on,

Turn back to see again your shores. . . .