The Ben Shapiro Show - July 21, 2026


The Right Said This Movie Would Bomb. It Made $264 Million.


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

198.75

Word count

2,120

Sentence count

141

Harmful content

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

15

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey blew up at the box office this weekend, but critics are upset about the casting of Elliot Page as Helen of Troy. Is this a good or bad thing? And why is the right so upset about it?

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Folks, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is not really about Homer's Odyssey.
00:00:03.000 Yeah, I'll explain in a second.
00:00:04.000 In fact, Nolan actually takes Christian morality and injects it into a poem that describes a litany of savagery in a pagan civilization.
00:00:12.000 But in the meantime, critics of the film from the right are upset about woke casting and literary inaccuracies.
00:00:17.000 And I think they are committing a gigantic self-own in the process.
00:00:21.000 I don't know what Christopher Nolan's politics are.
00:00:23.000 I do know that The Odyssey had a blowout weekend at the box office, which was predictable because it's a good movie and Christopher Nolan's an amazing filmmaker.
00:00:31.000 And here is the thing.
00:00:32.000 If you actually watch the movie, If you watch the movie, it has an inherently biblical message.
00:00:38.000 It does.
00:00:38.000 And people are missing that for the trees.
00:00:40.000 Spoilers ahead.
00:00:42.000 There is a lot of speculation on the right that over the weekend, the Odyssey was going to bomb, that the Odyssey was going to underperform.
00:00:50.000 The Odyssey was never going to underperform.
00:00:53.000 It was never going to underperform.
00:00:54.000 It is a star studded epic directed by Christopher Nolan, who took the story of developing the nuclear bomb and also a Senate hearing and turned that into a box office hit.
00:01:08.000 Christopher Nolan can open a movie, period. 0.99
00:01:11.000 If you thought people were not going to go see the Odyssey because, like you, they were very, very mad that Lapita Nyongo was cast for three minutes total screen time as Helen of Troy, or that people were just going to not go sit through one of the great filmmaking epics of all time because of the idiotic, and it is idiotic, casting of Elliot Page. 0.99
00:01:32.000 And I call her Elliot Page because you can legally change her name, you can't legally change your sex. 1.00
00:01:37.000 And it's idiotic casting. 1.00
00:01:38.000 I mean, I talked about this. 1.00
00:01:39.000 Go watch my review on YouTube.
00:01:41.000 Okay, but if you thought people weren't going to go watch the movie because of your upset over casting decisions, wrong.
00:01:48.000 There are times when politics affects a movie so badly that you don't want to see it, where it overcomes the presumption of wanting to see a film.
00:01:48.000 Wrong.
00:01:58.000 So, for example, when Disney made Snow White, the remake, and they decided to put in a bunch of kind of woke silliness, people didn't go see it.
00:02:05.000 Number one, because I'm not going to see that for my own enjoyment.
00:02:07.000 I'm going to take my kids to the movies.
00:02:09.000 Do I want my kids to see those values?
00:02:10.000 No.
00:02:11.000 It's a different thing when it's a movie for adults.
00:02:13.000 Second of all, It's Christopher Nolan, okay?
00:02:15.000 It's not the same thing as a bad James Gunn film.
00:02:18.000 James Gunn has to make a bona fide good film for people to go see it.
00:02:23.000 Christopher Nolan is good at making films.
00:02:25.000 In fact, he is great at making films.
00:02:27.000 In fact, he's probably a top three to top five all time filmmaker.
00:02:32.000 If you are talking about top all time filmmakers, you are talking right now about people like John Ford, Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, William Wyler.
00:02:44.000 This bizarre idea that no one was going to go see The Odyssey. 0.88
00:02:46.000 Because you're pissed off at the multiracial casting is really, really silly. 0.97
00:02:52.000 But a lot of the right bought into this. 0.88
00:02:54.000 And not only that, a lot of the right, I think, is reveling in the idea that this sort of cultural blackpilling of it.
00:03:01.000 Now, again, I've talked at length about the thematic of the movie.
00:03:05.000 And I'll get into more of it in a second.
00:03:07.000 But some of the people who are most into this sort of blackpilling, the people are like, what has conservatism ever conserved?
00:03:11.000 These same people putting out tweets about how terrible the Odyssey is.
00:03:15.000 Quote, I don't know all the issues with No One's Odyssey.
00:03:17.000 Because I saw a black Helen of Troy and a tiny troon playing a war hero, that'd be Elliot Page. 0.99
00:03:21.000 And I didn't give him my money because the movie was obviously made to destroy my civilization. 1.00
00:03:26.000 Is that so hard?
00:03:28.000 Yes, Nolan was sitting there thinking, how do I destroy Western civilization when he made the Odyssey?
00:03:33.000 Okay, there's some great irony to this.
00:03:36.000 Like, truly great irony to this.
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00:04:43.000 Let me talk about the thematic of the Odyssey for a second.
00:04:46.000 If there is a thematic flaw to the Odyssey, it's that it's not really the Odyssey.
00:04:51.000 The reason I say this, Rob Henderson points this out at Daily Wire.
00:04:54.000 It's got a very good review and it's accurate.
00:04:56.000 It's already a little secret about the Odyssey.
00:04:59.000 The Odyssey is not, in Christopher Nolan's vision, a Greek tragedy.
00:05:04.000 It is not.
00:05:05.000 Because it turns out that the way of Greece was physical domination, mistreatment of women, destruction of your enemies, and glory in battle.
00:05:15.000 That is the way that the Odyssey reads.
00:05:15.000 Right?
00:05:17.000 If you go back and you read Homer's epic, it is not, in fact, Odysseus sitting there upset over his life.
00:05:24.000 It is Odysseus going on a series of adventures, going home and killing everybody.
00:05:27.000 That is what the Odyssey is.
00:05:28.000 It is incredibly episodic.
00:05:30.000 There's no character development.
00:05:32.000 Hard to make a movie like that.
00:05:34.000 Hey, so what does Christopher Nolan do? 0.58
00:05:36.000 What Christopher Nolan actually does is he delivers, I kid you not, a Christian panegyric poured into a Greek vase. 0.52
00:05:45.000 That is what Christopher Nolan is doing on a moral level.
00:05:49.000 Okay, spoiler alerts to come for those who missed the review.
00:05:52.000 Here is what the Odyssey is actually about the movie, not the actual original poem, the movie.
00:05:57.000 What the movie is about is the idea that if you violate the golden rule, Treat others as you would be treated.
00:06:04.000 That if you violate the golden rule, you shatter something fundamental in the universe and it unleashes dark forces on the universe, which sometimes can only be rebottled and hemmed in by an act that continues to violate morality.
00:06:22.000 But then you have to accept the punishment.
00:06:23.000 That is the theme of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.
00:06:26.000 The entire basic idea. 0.99
00:06:28.000 And again, this is not Greek.
00:06:29.000 It doesn't come from Homer, right?
00:06:31.000 Leo Leibowitz also points this out over Italian.
00:06:32.000 It's perfectly obvious. 0.80
00:06:34.000 Hey, this is actually a Christian allegory.
00:06:37.000 How do you miss this?
00:06:38.000 Honestly, it is a Christian allegory because the whole thing is a biblical take.
00:06:44.000 Hey, Christopher Nolan establishes at the beginning of the film something that he calls Zeus' rule.
00:06:49.000 What is Zeus' rule?
00:06:51.000 Zeus' rule is treat others as you would be treated because you don't know who is a god in disguise.
00:06:58.000 Now, you may notice that treat others as you would be treated is the golden rule.
00:07:01.000 The silver rule appears in the Old Testament.
00:07:03.000 That's don't treat others as you would not want to be treated.
00:07:05.000 The golden rule comes from the New Testament.
00:07:09.000 Okay, and usually it finishes because God made man in his image.
00:07:14.000 Nolan takes that and flips it and says, because any person could be a god.
00:07:17.000 Okay, this is not something that the Greeks cared about.
00:07:19.000 Okay, he's taking a Christian rule, a Judaic rule, a biblical rule, and he is putting it into the story.
00:07:26.000 And then the idea is that by Odysseus violating that rule through the Trojan horse, through subterfuge and corruption, and unleashing hell on Troy, he has committed a grave sin.
00:07:36.000 And that grave sin has now unleashed on the world. 0.92
00:07:40.000 A norm of violating the Golden Rule, in which sea peoples are now violating that rule at their whim. 0.99
00:07:47.000 And in order to stop that entire thing, Odysseus has to come home. 0.99
00:07:51.000 He has to slaughter the suitors who are taking advantage of the Golden Rule because you can't allow people to take advantage of the Golden Rule.
00:07:58.000 You can't allow people to cynically cite the Golden Rule while they eat you out of house and home, which is what the suitors are doing. 0.98
00:08:03.000 You have to slaughter them in violation of the Golden Rule.
00:08:06.000 And then you have to go into exile and accept the penalty for your sin. 0.70
00:08:09.000 Okay, that's the actual moral arc of the movie.
00:08:13.000 Does that sound radically anti Western civilization to you?
00:08:17.000 See, Western civilization is not just Greek.
00:08:19.000 Western civilization is Greek.
00:08:22.000 And Jerusalem.
00:08:23.000 Some people might even have written books about Athens and Jerusalem.
00:08:27.000 It's called The Right Side of History, available wherever fine books are sold, talking about what we got from Greece, what we got from Jerusalem.
00:08:34.000 Now, Nolan is obviously not doing an openly Christian film here because it's the Odyssey. 0.51
00:08:39.000 And I don't know what Christopher Nolan's religious precepts are, but it is impossible to live in the West without drinking from the well that is that set of biblical values.
00:08:49.000 And that's what's in the Odyssey.
00:08:50.000 Now, again, I think there are a bunch of weird oddities about the movie, ranging from the casting of Elliot Page to the use of dad and mom.
00:08:56.000 I've said before, I don't think the Lapita Nyongo thing is anything. 0.82
00:08:59.000 I think it's incredibly stupid to get all upset about the Lapita Nyongo thing because guess what? 0.96
00:09:04.000 Diane Kruger's German. 0.98
00:09:06.000 And everybody's like, you know, Achilles probably looked like Brad Pitt.
00:09:09.000 Well, actually, he probably looked like a Greek guy.
00:09:10.000 Brad Pitt is not Greek.
00:09:13.000 I see that none of you are very upset about Tom Holland being Cassius Telemachus.
00:09:17.000 You think Tom Holland looks like a Greek kid?
00:09:20.000 Like from 700 or 1200 BCE?
00:09:25.000 I have doubts.
00:09:27.000 Okay, so I don't care about any of that because when it comes to mythology, you can play with it.
00:09:31.000 And again, the movie goes out of its way to say that the reason that the war was launched is not because Helen was the most beautiful woman ever, but because that was a pretext for the actual war.
00:09:40.000 In the same way, the casting of Zendaya is not a problem.
00:09:42.000 The reason that Zendaya is Athena is because, in a very clever bit of filmmaking, what Christopher Nolan does is he shows Matt Damon's Odysseus view, a civilian being murdered in front of him, who is Zendaya, simultaneous with the beheading of an Athena statue.
00:09:57.000 And he now identifies the beheaded civilian with Athena.
00:10:00.000 Okay, that's what he's doing.
00:10:02.000 Okay, but again, the broader point here is that if conservatives form their own little bubble, and if they don't realize that reality continues to exist, that the Odyssey will make a bunch of money, which it did over the weekend, that it did worldwide, $264 million, that if you keep boxing yourself into this idea that everyone thinks in your peculiar way, you are going to run yourself into a political box canyon, and the results are not going to be beneficial.
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