GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: OK fine… Let’s Argue About The Odyssey.
Perhaps you’ve heard that director Christopher Nolan has a new movie coming out in July based on Homer’s manly epic “The Odyssey.” Until a few months ago there was nearly universal excitement over this prospect. The anticipation was riding so high that when advance tickets went on sale, a furious arbitrage market sprang up, one in which lucky ticket holders were selling the best seats on the best days for many multiples of face value.
But all that changed almost overnight after anonymous trolls looking to farm social media engagement scanned the cast list on IMDB and found Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page’s names listed there without any indication of which characters they were playing. These same trolls then decided (without evidence, as the liberal media might say) that Page and Nyong’o must be playing Achilles and Helen of Troy, for no other reason than those were among the only high-profile Homeric characters not spoken for on the cast list.
And so, just as Helen of Troy’s face once launched a thousand ships, this unsubstantiated casting rumor launched a million online hot takes, most beginning with a word which, here in the social media era, has come to symbolize pure unadulterated bullshit…
“BREAKING”
In the waves of outrage that followed, hardly anyone stopped to wonder if A) the rumors were true or B) whether or not it matters who might be cast in two minor roles which have almost no part to play in the story.
Within hours of the first “BREAKING” post, Nolan’s new movie found itself labeled “woke” by much of the online right and a long list of additional outrages, most of them every bit as unsubstantiated as those first rumors about Page and Nyong’o sprang up like weeds in an unsupervised lawn. Online critics even seized on one line from a 2025 interview Nolan gave in which he spoke positively about a controversial feminist translation of Homer’s epic, and decided this must mean Nolan based his entire film on that translation. Once again, as with the casting rumors, this conclusion was reached without any real supporting evidence.
I’m tentatively waiting for the reviews to roll in before deciding to go see the film; in the meantime, read the whole thing.
