The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1809 - The Odyssey Was EVEN WORSE Than I Expected. Here’s Everything Wrong With It

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00:00:57.240 Now that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been released to near-unanimous critical acclaim and significant box office success,

00:01:05.440 we've been told that all the criticisms made against the film prior to its release, mostly by conservatives, have been proven baseless, even embarrassing.

00:01:14.120 Those who raised concerns about the movie should now hang their heads in shame and crawl before Christopher Nolan on hands and knees,

00:01:20.640 begging for forgiveness, offering gifts of supplication like an ancient Greek standing before the shrine of Apollo.

00:01:26.660 This has been the basic inclusion of commentators on the left and even a fair number of commentators on the right.

00:01:32.020 The wokeness allegations, they say, have been refuted.

00:01:34.980 The movie is an artistic triumph, a masterpiece.

00:01:37.920 And now it is our job to show that we are culturally in tuned by joining in with the applause or at least ceasing our criticisms.

00:01:44.720 That is the general consensus, as you've probably heard.

00:01:48.460 And the general consensus is, as the general consensus so often tends to be, wrong.

00:01:53.800 Now that I've actually seen the movie, I can definitively say that every single criticism

00:02:00.000 from conservatives was entirely correct on every point. We were not only correct in our

00:02:06.580 prejudgment, but much more correct than we ever knew. You can judge a book by its cover most of

00:02:13.540 the time, and the cover of this one had a gender-confused woman in a man costume and a race-swapped

00:02:19.180 Helen of Troy. We judged those to be massive red flags, and turns out we were right. The Odyssey 0.99

00:02:26.520 is indeed a three-hour-long middle finger to its source material, to Western civilization,

00:02:31.860 to white people, to Greeks, to literature, and to moviemaking in general. It contradicts itself

00:02:36.120 to the point that every important aspect of the story, from the plot to the theme to the

00:02:39.860 characterization, is reduced to incoherence. The dialogue in the rare moments where it's

00:02:44.380 even intelligible, is often clunky and heavy-handed and wildly out of place, most of all, the film

00:02:49.880 does not feel like a story set in the ancient world. Which is a fatal problem for a film

00:02:56.320 set in the ancient world. It barely feels like a film at all, in fact. It has more the feel of a

00:03:01.760 rough draft, a V1 that Nolan was contractually obligated to produce, which probably isn't far

00:03:07.620 from the truth. Everybody understands that with the rise of streaming services and the glut of

00:03:12.440 content all over the internet, movie theater attendance has plummeted. Profit margins in the

00:03:17.320 entertainment industry are lower than they've ever been. And at this point, now that Marvel has

00:03:21.860 died, at least for now, there are only two reliable ways to fill theaters and generate

00:03:27.480 significant profit, at least from the perspective of movie studios. And the first approach is to

00:03:31.540 fund an existing IP to include very recently viral meme IPs like Back Rooms. And the second

00:03:37.720 approach is to produce an event film by somebody like Christopher Nolan, an epic that has enough

00:03:43.200 set pieces and feels big enough that people will be compelled to get off their sofa and pay 20

00:03:48.900 bucks to see it. And that's what we have here. Nolan is done making original risky stories that

00:03:54.240 might not go over well. The days when he made Memento are over for the simple reason that you

00:03:58.660 don't need an IMAX theater to enjoy a film like Memento. You can watch it on your phone and get

00:04:02.840 basically the same experience because it's a high concept dialogue driven film with no reliance on

00:04:08.380 giant monsters or 20 different A-list actors filling out the cast. Not that there's anything

00:04:13.160 wrong with giant monsters, by the way. That's actually one of the only good points of Nolan's

00:04:16.740 Odyssey, as we'll discuss. But in any case, with very few exceptions, films like Memento are no

00:04:22.000 longer interesting to the big studios or to directors like Nolan. They're only interested

00:04:25.980 in green lighting films like this one. So whether you like it or not, that's the economic reality

00:04:30.980 of the industry right now, and there's nothing wrong with a film like this one either, by the

00:04:35.660 way, at least conceptually. An event film, an epic film based on an ancient foundational story of

00:04:41.580 Western civilization, could be, should be, a wonderful thing, which makes the failure of this

00:04:48.080 film all the more tragic. Now, to be sure, if any director could withstand those pressures,

00:04:53.720 you'd think it would be Nolan. He's about as bankable as a director can possibly be,

00:04:57.600 but you have to wonder, especially after the flop that was Tenet, if he's lost his will to do

00:05:03.140 anything particularly novel or outside the box. Tenet lost something like $100 million for the

00:05:07.820 studio, which was only partially because of COVID. People didn't like the movie for the

00:05:11.840 understandable reason that it made no sense. So now after that catastrophe, maybe Nolan is more

00:05:18.420 concerned with protecting his image, which is why he's increasingly relying on established stories

00:05:22.540 and massive ensemble cast.

00:05:25.100 Whatever the case,

00:05:26.040 The Odyssey is a striking example

00:05:27.540 of a director who,

00:05:28.640 whether he's aware of it or not,

00:05:29.820 is terrified of failing

00:05:31.000 to meet expectations.

00:05:32.240 He wants to give everybody,

00:05:33.620 from audiences to the suits

00:05:34.880 and universal pictures,

00:05:36.120 exactly what they expect.

00:05:38.540 And that means he must adhere

00:05:39.460 to every norm in Hollywood,

00:05:41.100 from DEI casting

00:05:42.160 to one-dimensional characters

00:05:43.540 and lots of sentimental nonsense.

00:05:45.300 It also means that Nolan

00:05:46.100 has to participate

00:05:47.420 in Hollywood's larger objective,

00:05:49.140 which is to subvert American culture

00:05:50.840 by making everything gayer, 0.93

00:05:52.160 more feminine, less patriotic, more depressing, and of course, less white. Now, I've seen people 0.74

00:05:57.260 desperately trying to describe this film as path-breaking, awe-inspiring, even transgressive,

00:06:03.140 almost as if they're trying to make it true by saying so, but infusing modern liberal values

00:06:08.380 into an ancient story is pretty much the least transgressive thing a Hollywood director can do.

00:06:13.080 It's utterly cliched and expected, not the slightest bit challenging or interesting or bold.

00:06:18.680 Nolan's not interested in telling transgressive stories. He's too afraid. And that's at least

00:06:22.560 that's one theory. I mean, you can make up your own, uh, explanations for Nolan's motives,

00:06:27.680 whatever the motives are, the end result speaks for itself. And to begin with, yes, this movie was

00:06:33.240 just as woke as we thought it would be. The DEI casting in particular is far worse than we knew

00:06:40.120 far worse. Nolan's version of ancient Greece is a kind of multiracial utopia. Well, perhaps not 0.99

00:06:46.920 utopia. Actually, Nolan's ancient Greece is relentlessly drab and dreary and depressing

00:06:51.320 and colorless. All the buildings look like ancient ruins, which yes, it makes sense for those 0.61

00:06:56.240 buildings to look like ancient ruins today, but they would not have all been ancient ruins in

00:07:01.120 ancient times. So this is not a utopia, but in Nolan's vision, it is nonetheless absurdly diverse

00:07:06.400 and multiracial. Blacks and Asians, Hispanics, somehow all coexisting in the Mediterranean 1.00

00:07:12.280 in 3,000 years ago. Now, Nolan does not softly coax the audience into the DEI net, easing us

00:07:21.380 into it slowly but surely. No, he cranks the diversity meter up to 1,000 from the very first

00:07:27.420 frame. The first character we see is the rapper Travis Scott, who somehow manages to turn in a

00:07:33.100 bad performance despite appearing on screen for 12 seconds. He got 12 seconds and he completely

00:07:37.860 botched it somehow. And then we see Ellen Page portraying a Greek warrior waddling around the

00:07:44.620 desert like a child with a soiled diaper, straining under her rubber armor, looking like she's about

00:07:49.560 to die even before she gets shot through with arrows. The defenders of this film, especially

00:07:54.080 on the right, have tried to claim that Page's appearance is not a huge problem because she only

00:08:00.060 has a small role. You've probably heard that. It's a very small role. Now, I don't want to ascribe

00:08:05.180 sinister motives to anybody or accuse them of lying. So I will generously assume that the

00:08:11.200 conservative commentators making that claim must have fallen asleep 10 seconds into the movie,

00:08:17.900 which would be totally understandable, frankly. If they actually watched the entire thing in a

00:08:22.880 state of full consciousness or at least half consciousness, then they would know that Ellen

00:08:27.300 Page is not a minor character in this film at all. She is utterly pivotal to the plot.

00:08:33.600 She's one of the most important characters in the entire film.

00:08:37.580 She is more than that, and as Steve Deese has pointed out, the moral conscience of the story.

00:08:42.020 Her inclusion in this film, in that role, is without question one of the wokest, most radically left-wing things we have ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster film.

00:08:54.920 There is no doubt about that.

00:08:56.480 if any director but Christopher Nolan had done this, he would have no conservative defenders at

00:09:02.840 all. To claim that a movie is not woke when there's a trans-identified female actress pretending

00:09:09.100 to be a male Greek warrior who serves as the linchpin of the plot and the film's moral conscience 0.98

00:09:14.800 is just ridiculous. I mean, if we're going to rightly claim that it's woke to have a brown-skinned 0.99

00:09:21.760 Hispanic Snow White, then how can we possibly argue that there's nothing woke about a trans

00:09:26.960 female portraying an ancient Greek warrior? Now, the argument from Nolan's conservative

00:09:31.580 defenders seems to be, rather explicitly, that it's okay when Nolan does it. I find that argument

00:09:37.380 to be unpersuasive, if not pathetic. Indeed, if you believe that Nolan is one of the greatest

00:09:42.900 filmmakers of all time, then the logical conclusion is that it's worse when he does it, not better.

00:09:50.780 DEI casting in a crappy Snow White remake directed by random Disney director number 1242 is far less

00:09:57.200 significant and culturally corrosive than DEI casting by one of the most influential and

00:10:01.920 marketable filmmakers of all time, obviously. And that's not where the diversity casting ends,

00:10:07.160 not by a long shot. Odysseus's crew consists of many people of different races, multiple Asians,

00:10:12.880 including his second in command. Now, this character, the second in command played by

00:10:17.560 the actor Himesh Patel, has a heavy presence in the film. He has a ton of screen time, and every

00:10:22.860 minute he's visible on screen is another minute where total immersion in the story is impossible.

00:10:29.360 I mean, at one point, this character says the line, we're Greeks from Ithaca, and it's one of

00:10:35.200 the most unintentionally hilarious moments in the movie. Now, there are no intentionally hilarious

00:10:40.400 moments, as the movie, unlike Homer's original epic, is totally humorless, utterly devoid of

00:10:46.080 charm or wit, but there are several moments where you can't help but laugh, and this is

00:10:50.460 one of them. I mean, imagine a movie set in the 12th century China, where a white actor 0.90

00:10:55.820 with a slight southern accent looks at the camera and says, we're Chinese from the Chengdu

00:11:00.520 province. And you'll get an idea of how totally ludicrous this spectacle is. All that to 0.88

00:11:05.560 say, this is one of the most out-of-place characters I've seen in a major film in memory.

00:11:10.380 And on top of that, his performance itself was flat and bland and uninspired. He brought

00:11:14.860 nothing to the role. I mean, if you're not going to look the part, at least act the part, but he

00:11:19.360 doesn't even do that. So why is he there? Okay. Anyone trying to rescue Nolan from wokeness

00:11:24.580 allegations, answer me this. Why was that guy in that role? It was a bland, pointless performance.

00:11:33.500 He wasn't there because of his acting chops. So what was it? I wonder. Now, as a side note,

00:11:41.520 I'll mention that Patel was actually born in the UK. He has a British accent. Yet in this movie,

00:11:47.480 he affects an American accent. All the actors, even the British ones, use a contemporary American

00:11:51.740 accent. This was a creative choice by Nolan, but it doesn't work. You know, I'm not saying that

00:11:57.600 Nolan had to go full Mel Gibson and have the characters all speak in the original language

00:12:01.940 of the source material, although I personally would have appreciated that. But I'm not saying

00:12:06.400 you have to do that. I'm saying that if you're going to make a movie set in the ancient world,

00:12:10.720 the characters should speak in a way that sounds and feels ancient. Having them speak in a modern

00:12:18.600 accent using modern slang and modern colloquialisms interferes with the immersion into the film,

00:12:24.260 which is a theme we'll return to frequently. So put another way, in a story set 3,000 years in

00:12:29.880 the past, none of the characters should look or sound or act like someone who's ever been to a

00:12:36.840 McDonald's, and yet they all look and sound and act exactly like that. But back to the DEI elements.

00:12:43.280 Now, even if you pretend that Himesh Patel is a good actor, the casting doesn't work. I mean,

00:12:47.800 keep in mind, this is a movie about how difficult it was for Odysseus and his crew to travel just

00:12:52.380 560 nautical miles from Troy to Ithaca. This is a point that Steve Saylor made on his substack.

00:12:57.960 In ideal circumstances, with no interruptions, ancient boats could have made that trip in about

00:13:02.000 a week. But the journey takes Odysseus many years, with considerable interruptions along the way,

00:13:06.920 of course. And that gives you an idea of how fraught it was to travel even short distances

00:13:11.620 at that time. And yet, in defiance of all common sense and logistics, a bunch of South Asians 1.00

00:13:17.600 apparently managed to travel thousands of miles to Greece, where they joined Odysseus' crew. In fact,

00:13:22.860 in this version of the ancient world, people from all over the globe apparently travel and

00:13:26.700 intermingle with each other with ease. And the problem here, one of the problems anyway, is that

00:13:31.880 But the casting by itself contradicts the internal logic of the story that Nolan is supposedly telling. When African rappers have landed in Ithaca and Koreans and Indians and Hispanics have somehow made the trek there as well, and they all live there not as exotic foreigners, but as regular inhabitants of the region, then you're sending the message that travel isn't that difficult.

00:13:56.480 In fact, you seem to be saying, I don't know, that air travel exists. It makes you wonder, somewhere during this three-hour runtime of the film, why exactly Matt Damon didn't just log into his Expedia account and book a first-class ticket on Delta. I mean, that would have been a lot easier. Although, in fairness, if the only tickets available were on Southwest, he probably was better off on the ship.

00:14:17.320 Now, Nolan was obviously aware of all these issues. We have to give him credit. He's a talented, competent director. Even I will admit that. So that means the choice was deliberate. Nolan went out of his way to make the crew as diverse as possible, even when his casting decisions undermine not just the audience's immersion, but the foundational logic of the plot itself.

00:14:39.660 It's the worst-case scenario for DEI hiring in a film because you can't ignore it without also ignoring the setting, the plot, the characters, and everything else.

00:14:47.560 And yet you'll hear some conservatives defending Nolan on this point.

00:14:51.220 Their main argument, as best I can tell, is that the DEI casting is relatively minimal and doesn't take up much screen time.

00:14:56.880 But even if that were true, and it's not, not even close, it's extraordinary to watch how quickly conservatives are willing to cave in scenarios where their opponents would never dream of doing so.

00:15:07.740 I mean, it's the kind of thing that only happens in one direction. If somebody made a movie set in Africa and based on ancient African folklore and then populated the cast with white people and other random races and ethnicities that have nothing to do with Africa, everybody would say the casting is ridiculous and distracting at best. 0.78

00:15:30.300 and they would be correct. If the movie was set in sub-Saharan Africa in the year 1100 and Chris 1.00

00:15:36.200 Pratt showed up in tribal garb and said, howdy there, folks. I'm an African tribal chieftain.

00:15:41.260 How do you do? There wouldn't be a single soul on the planet who would defend that obviously

00:15:48.580 preposterous casting choice. Yet the same thing is done in the reverse to a foundational text

00:15:54.620 of Western civilization, and even conservatives line up to defend it. Again, the word that comes

00:16:01.140 to mind is pathetic. Now, if you're a conservative and you're unwilling to tell the truth about 0.99

00:16:05.840 what's happening here for fear of being labeled a culture warrior or something, God forbid.

00:16:11.100 We don't want to be culture. You wouldn't want to fight for the culture. Well, who would want

00:16:15.140 to do that? That's silly. That's ridiculous. But if you have those reservations, you should know 0.97

00:16:21.240 the left has no such reservations. They explicitly want future generations to see Western culture as

00:16:26.780 a universal product, as the outgrowth of modern-day diversity with no distinct contribution from 0.79

00:16:33.520 whites. There's no better way to undermine the future of Western civilization than to pretend 0.98

00:16:36.820 Western civilization was invented by everybody as some kind of multiracial democratic group effort,

00:16:43.040 and that's why they're doing this. That's what they're going for, whether you want to pay 0.63

00:16:47.600 attention or not. Now, when I made this point on X, I was informed that actually white people are 0.83

00:16:53.760 doing the exact same thing. I was told that there are plenty of films, recent films, where white 0.63

00:16:58.380 actors are taking roles where they don't belong as an effort to stamp out other cultures. And as 0.89

00:17:02.820 evidence of this proposition, I was informed about the existence of precisely one movie called Gods

00:17:08.440 of Egypt. And this came into my feet a bunch of times because I made this point about if this

00:17:13.900 happened in the reverse, everybody would be upset. This is the only movie anyone, all of a sudden,

00:17:18.380 everybody was a gods of Egypt. Like no one's ever heard of that movie. Well, as you can see from the

00:17:22.040 poster there, the film features Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Rush, who don't appear to be Egyptian.

00:17:27.360 And yet they're starring in a film called gods of Egypt. So, so there you have it. White people are,

00:17:31.080 are trying to erase non-whites from Hollywood. I have to admit it's amusing. If nothing else, 1.00

00:17:35.540 people are desperately searching for an example of a modern movie that's been race swapped like

00:17:40.300 the Odyssey, but in the opposite direction. And the best they can do is some obscure film nobody's

00:17:45.600 heard about from 10 years ago that nobody watched and has a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes

00:17:50.160 that was in fact panned by everybody. So if your intention was to prove my point, you succeeded.

00:17:58.020 Like I said, these race swaps only go in one direction and everybody knows it. Now, if I had 0.89

00:18:03.340 to play devil's advocate, I'd say that the conservatives, you know, are giving Nolan a

00:18:07.880 on the casting because they think the overall message of the film is conservative. But that's

00:18:13.420 not true either. Not even close. Okay, during the film, you'll get multiple lectures from women

00:18:18.480 about how they're oppressed by the patriarchy. Late in the film, we're treated to a cartoonishly 0.54

00:18:22.700 anachronistic speech from Odysseus's wife, Penelope, about how unfair it is that the suitors

00:18:27.380 won't let her become king in Odysseus's absence. She has all this knowledge and wisdom, but the

00:18:33.320 patriarchy is keeping her down. And it's played completely straight, even though it's clearly a

00:18:37.140 clumsy attempt to airdrop contemporary feminist attitudes into a story where it doesn't belong

00:18:41.980 and into a time period where such attitudes did not exist. And certainly at no point in Homer's 0.95

00:18:47.360 Odyssey did Penelope whine about how she could take over as king, because it would have been

00:18:51.780 totally absurd. But in this film, with a supposedly conservative message, we're supposed to be okay

00:18:57.100 with the idea that Penelope has the exact same attitude you expect from a newly minted women's 1.00

00:19:01.200 studies major in the Bronx. Then there's the fact that the film goes out of its way to strip the 1.00

00:19:05.940 story of divinity as much as possible. Nolan suggests that Odysseus' problems amount to bad

00:19:11.880 luck rather than divine intervention. No gods show up at all. Zeus and Poseidon don't appear

00:19:17.580 as characters. Only goddesses appear in the film, and then only as PTSD hallucinations, basically.

00:19:24.520 Zendaya as Athena pops up incessantly and, again, just does nothing with the role.

00:19:30.800 that's a theme here you have these actors the movie is chock full of A-list actors a lot of

00:19:37.900 them doing nothing with the roles they're given it's amazing it's kind of amazing to watch

00:19:42.320 she's in this she does nothing she just kind of somberly somberly stares at Odysseus that's all

00:19:47.860 that happens but the point is that she isn't real within the context of the story she's a kind of

00:19:53.280 therapeutic coping mechanism for a man struggling with trauma. Nolan's Odyssey, unlike Homer's,

00:20:01.060 is a story completely disenchanted, devoid of the supernatural, aside from like the odd witch or two

00:20:06.000 that shows up. And now Nolan's apologists will say that, well, he did this because he was going

00:20:10.420 for a more grounded film, right? That's what we keep hearing. Well, it's a grounded, it's a grounded

00:20:15.440 film. Oh, okay then. So, um, oh, ground, grounded is what we're doing. So, so then why does ancient

00:20:21.920 Greece have the demographic makeup of Los Angeles circa 2026? Why is there a tiny little woman 1.00

00:20:29.140 running around pretending to be a dude? Why is there an Asian guy delivering the line, 1.00

00:20:32.580 we're Greeks from Ithaca? Grounded? Really? Grounded in what? So the apologists are letting 0.99

00:20:39.520 Nolan have his cake and eat it too, like always. I mean, you cannot argue that Nolan had to take

00:20:44.620 the gods out of a story of Greek mythology in order to ground it and then also argue

00:20:48.700 that Ellen Page's appearance isn't a major problem.

00:20:52.920 In fact, Nolan himself has said that he expelled the gods from this film

00:20:56.960 because he preferred to handle the supernatural in a, quote, real-world way.

00:21:02.220 Well, again, if he's worried about the real world of ancient Greece,

00:21:07.100 then why does ancient Greece look absolutely nothing like ancient Greece?

00:21:12.400 Now, to the extent that Zeus does play a role in Nolan's film,

00:21:15.120 it's because he's mentioned about 500 times in the context of Zeus's law, quote unquote. Again,

00:21:20.580 this is a concept that doesn't exist, at least in the way Nolan portrays it in Homer's Odyssey.

00:21:24.780 The idea of Zeus's law, as the characters tell you to your face, and one of the many examples

00:21:29.660 of on-the-nose exposition that treats the audience like it has a collective IQ of 45, 0.84

00:21:34.620 is that Greeks should treat strangers as they'd like to be treated. Now, more broadly,

00:21:38.220 Zeus's law is Nolan's spin on the Greeks' concept of xenia or hospitality, which does play an

00:21:44.060 important role in Homer's poem. But contrary to what Nolan seems to think, his idea of Zeus's law

00:21:49.040 is very different from the Greek concept of hospitality as outlined in Homer. And you don't

00:21:54.400 have to squint very hard to see how Nolan is trying to twist this concept into a not very

00:21:58.940 subtle sermon about modern day immigration policy. And in Nolan's film, Odysseus spends a significant

00:22:05.160 amount of time moping around sullen and depressed after enabling the destruction of Troy by using

00:22:11.240 the Trojan horse. And for those who somehow aren't familiar, the Greeks presented the horse as a

00:22:14.820 gift, but they had filled it with soldiers. And at night, the soldiers opened the gates of Troy,

00:22:18.980 enabled the Greek army to invade. So this was a massive and unlikely victory, which was brought

00:22:24.540 about because of the Greeks' trickery and cunning. And in Homer, it was a heroic maneuver. Odysseus 0.96

00:22:29.440 had outsmarted his enemies. It was a virtue. It was not portrayed in Homer as a violation of

00:22:35.260 xenia or hospitality or anything like that. There was no sense that Odysseus had committed some

00:22:40.040 grave crime. Odysseus was very confident, but he was also effective in crushing his enemies. In

00:22:46.120 Homer, Xenia didn't mean that you would never trick your enemy in a war. It was about hospitality,

00:22:51.620 a very different concept that applied to your dealings with strangers. And on the other hand,

00:22:55.420 in Nolan's film, Zeus's law works very differently. Zeus's law, as Odysseus explains it,

00:22:59.940 means that you're not supposed to use gifts, like the Trojan horse, as a trick in order to enable a

00:23:04.440 ground invasion. So in other words, whether Nolan realizes it or not, he's completely bastardized

00:23:09.080 a central concept in the poem. And in the name of this bastardization, Nolan transforms Odysseus

00:23:14.380 into a whiny, solemn shell of a man plagued by trauma and guilt because he violated some fake

00:23:20.360 idea of Zeus's law by destroying Troy. And of course, the idea of an ancient warrior feeling

00:23:26.040 really bad about a glorious victory is absurd on its face. And the more you think about it,

00:23:32.880 the worse it gets. I mean, if you have any familiarity at all with the source material,

00:23:36.460 It's actually kind of incredible that Nolan would even try this. First, the Trojan horse wasn't the

00:23:41.680 start of the conflict. You know, it's not as though Odysseus started the war by defying some

00:23:45.880 sacred norm. The film suggests the war actually started over trade routes and Helen was basically

00:23:50.320 a pretext and was not, in fact, the most beautiful woman in the world. So it's not clear why it's

00:23:56.160 some grave sin to end a war that's been going on for 10 years with all the brutality that war

00:24:00.200 entails. I mean, is the implication that it would also be unethical to execute a clever flanking

00:24:05.040 maneuver that tricked an enemy general? Would the Battle of Chancellorsville be a violation of

00:24:10.160 Zeus's law? Who knows? The other problem is that in the film, Odysseus is so weepy and sad about

00:24:16.180 his violation of Zeus's law that he decides to go into exile. But first he has to kill a bunch

00:24:21.140 of suitors who are trying to marry his wife. Specifically, he has to pretend to be a beggar 1.00

00:24:25.260 in order to infiltrate the palace, at which point he'll launch a surprise attack where he brutally 0.65

00:24:29.260 murders the suitors. So in other words, in order to rectify his violation of Zeus's law during the

00:24:34.700 Trojan War that he feels really bad about in the movie, Odysseus violates Zeus's law again by

00:24:42.440 killing the suitors using trickery, you know, to get into the palace. But he thinks it's partially

00:24:49.000 okay, I guess, because the suitors themselves were taking advantage of Penelope's hospitality by

00:24:53.100 getting drunk in the palace and hitting on Penelope while Odysseus was away. And then after this

00:24:57.420 massacre, Odysseus decides that he's tired of violating Zeus's law and sails away with Penelope.

00:25:02.980 So, spoiler alert, a little late.

00:25:06.300 So he does not, in this movie, he does not reclaim the throne in glory.

00:25:11.500 He also doesn't die for his sins.

00:25:14.800 Both of those would have been decisive choices that clarified the themes and concluded the story.

00:25:20.800 But Nolan chooses the third and most indecisive route, having Odysseus leave and hand the throne to his son,

00:25:27.480 who, portrayed by Tom Holland, will presumably bore all of his subjects to death, as he'd done

00:25:32.100 to the audience for three hours with his insipid, dull performance. So part of the problem when you

00:25:38.140 create a new interpretation of this quote-unquote law is that your characters have to interact with

00:25:43.660 that. And in this case, the characters interact with the law in ways that don't make much sense.

00:25:48.600 This is a problem Nolan creates that didn't exist in Homer. He made the central character of the

00:25:53.660 story become depressed over violating some law that doesn't make sense, which derails the entire

00:25:58.520 story and makes everybody's motivations murky and uncertain. And in fact, this is a catastrophic

00:26:03.620 error so severe that even Emily Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania feminist who wrote

00:26:08.820 a woke translation of the Odyssey that Nolan relied on for the film, is now publicly calling

00:26:14.100 out the film's portrayal of Odysseus. This is one of the more amusing developments of this whole

00:26:19.280 saga. I mean, even the woke translator can't take it anymore. She's siding with the crazy right 0.98

00:26:24.300 wingers. Watch. What did you think about the film in terms of this notion of the Odyssey as an 1.00

00:26:33.800 anti-war text? I mean, I thought I do. I want to not spoil anything about the film because I know 0.96

00:26:42.140 the majority of people haven't seen the film. I mean, the film has these flashbacks to the Trojan

00:26:48.300 war I'm not sure if I see it as an entirely anti-war film but it certainly presents us with

00:26:53.940 an Odysseus who feels very bad about certain things that he's done in war and is struggling

00:27:00.300 to process them in a very I would say very modern psychiatrised way and he's struggling to process

00:27:08.200 them and needs drugs to do so for help with his recovery and he seems to feel bad about being a

00:27:16.020 warrior and we never actually get to see him doing much warrioring which I thought in a way was a

00:27:21.060 bit of a shame I mean we do get to see the boat which is lovely but I think in some ways I mean

00:27:26.480 I was realizing having thinking about the film there's a tolerance for ambiguity in the world

00:27:32.720 of the Odyssey which I don't think there exactly is in the world of Hollywood blockbuster action

00:27:37.660 films right and I think that's one of the big challenges for Nolan right that is that he

00:27:41.160 has to make the protagonist a likeable all-American hero,

00:27:46.700 which is a real challenge if you're basing this on a poem

00:27:51.480 where the hero is not necessarily motivated by romantic love

00:27:57.460 or being a nice suburban parent,

00:27:59.700 but actually by he wants glory

00:28:01.420 and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city,

00:28:04.860 which you'll see what no one does with all of that,

00:28:07.680 but it's different things from what Homer does.

00:28:09.840 Right. I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. I think it's a film

00:28:16.460 that has some interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory.

00:28:23.620 Well, she's right. I never thought I'd say that about someone that looks like that. And when she 1.00

00:28:28.560 says that, by the way, that Odysseus uses drugs to deal with his trauma, that is also in the movie.

00:28:33.620 He essentially, he's essentially taking like the ancient equivalent of SSRIs to help deal with his depression.

00:28:42.140 I mean, that's that's what's in this movie. I'm not making this up.

00:28:45.520 And this is the same woman, by the way, that we just saw who suggested that Odysseus was a problematic hero who says he's complicated in her translation.

00:28:53.420 She routinely chose words to make Odysseus seem less heroic and noble.

00:28:56.840 So she clearly is coming at the story from a feminist modern perspective.

00:28:59.740 And even for her, Nolan's film was a little too weepy, you know, a little too morose.

00:29:05.920 Nolan took a story about an epic hero, as she said, that's about glory, and made him peevish

00:29:12.020 and insecure, all because Odysseus violated some fake law Nolan invented, which apparently

00:29:16.140 says you're not supposed to use clever strategies to win wars.

00:29:18.560 It's reminiscent of Oppenheimer, where Nolan made it clear he had a similar attitude, of

00:29:22.320 course, about the atomic bomb.

00:29:23.880 And this is just rehearsing, rehashing, I should say, those exact same themes in this

00:29:27.700 story.

00:29:27.920 Now, some of this stuff, qualms about Zeus's laws and its applications, may seem pedantic, but it's not pedantic to expect internal logic from a film, especially one being hailed as an artistic masterpiece and one of the best movies of the century, if not all time, which is what some critics are saying.

00:29:47.980 and more importantly, it all points to the film's greatest fundamental flaw, which was Nolan's

00:29:52.700 decision to infuse modern psychology and therapy speak into a story about an ancient warrior three

00:30:00.320 millennia ago. In the ancient world, to triumph in battle was the greatest virtue. It would not

00:30:08.540 be a source of shame. That is a modern attitude. It is not an ancient one. Now, if Nolan wanted to

00:30:15.920 make a modernized version of the Odyssey that imposes modern psychology and modern preoccupations,

00:30:22.400 not to mention racial demographics, onto an ancient epic, well, he could have done an

00:30:27.180 interpretation set in the current day. There are many examples of that kind of thing, and some of

00:30:32.240 them are pretty good. Oh, brother, where art thou? Set in 1930s America, comes to mind.

00:30:37.420 But transposing the modern mindset and worldview into the ancient world turns the whole thing into

00:30:43.520 a farce, which is why a number of scenes look and feel kind of like a Mel Brooks movie with

00:30:49.580 better cinematography. I mean, it's totally absurd. What's the point of a story set in

00:30:54.780 ancient times that doesn't even try to actually capture the look and feel and perspective,

00:30:59.780 most importantly, of ancient times? The best films set in the ancient past are able to transport

00:31:06.140 you to that world and crucially show you the world through the eyes of those people. That is

00:31:14.560 the magic of film, at least good films. And Nolan never achieves this. He never comes close to

00:31:20.600 achieving it. He never even tries, it seems. In Apocalypto, Mel Gibson transports you into the

00:31:27.080 mind of a Mayan 500 years ago. In The Northman, Robert Eggers transports you into the mind of a 0.98

00:31:33.700 Viking a thousand years ago. And in the Odyssey, Christopher Nolan transports you into the mind of

00:31:38.860 a liberal woman in 2017. At no point in the story does Nolan ever actually take the audience to the

00:31:46.240 ancient world. You never feel like you're 3,000 years in the past. You feel like you're watching

00:31:51.120 modern liberal Westerners put on a pageant because you are. Nobody would be calling this

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00:35:44.300 Now, hearing all this, maybe you're saying to yourself, well, I don't care about the cultural messaging or the casting or the politics or any of that.

00:35:50.220 I just want to see a well-constructed movie on a technical level.

00:35:52.620 Well, the problem is that it's impossible to overlook all these flaws because the film itself is not very well constructed or all that entertaining.

00:36:00.840 For the most part, it's disjointed, dull, self-serious, convoluted, somehow feeling both verbose and overly rushed at the same time.

00:36:07.880 The dialogue is some of the worst I've ever heard in a critically acclaimed film.

00:36:12.840 On the nose and clunky are descriptions that can't even begin to describe the script.

00:36:17.780 The Odyssey is the kind of movie where a character in the Bronze Age actually says,

00:36:23.020 I'm not making this up, the age of bronze is collapsing.

00:36:27.420 And the dialogue is like that throughout. 0.98

00:36:29.220 I mean, you cannot have genuinely subpar, sometimes bafflingly stupid dialogue in a 0.99

00:36:35.780 masterpiece film. 0.98

00:36:38.500 One can only imagine a character in a Christopher Nolan movie set in the Middle Ages.

00:36:43.180 Jeez, you know, hey guys, the Middle Ages are pretty tough.

00:36:46.840 Hey, how are you guys all feeling in these here middle ages?

00:36:49.660 Pretty tough, huh?

00:36:51.880 Or maybe in 1917, a character might say,

00:36:54.700 well, thank God World War I is coming to an end.

00:36:58.740 On top of the bad writing,

00:37:00.140 the dialogue itself is often difficult to hear.

00:37:02.220 The score routinely drowns out the words,

00:37:04.280 which is a recurring problem for Nolan.

00:37:06.300 And it's kind of an inexcusable problem.

00:37:08.400 I mean, people always say that about Nolan films.

00:37:10.140 Like, oh yeah, you know Nolan films,

00:37:11.260 you can't understand the dialogue.

00:37:12.520 Well, I don't know, that seems like

00:37:14.400 a kind of a serious problem,

00:37:17.000 especially if we're talking

00:37:17.940 that this is one of the greatest

00:37:18.740 director of all time.

00:37:19.880 Like, you should be able

00:37:20.780 to understand the dialogue at least.

00:37:23.760 But as the film passes

00:37:25.080 the two-hour mark,

00:37:25.860 you start to think of the problem

00:37:26.860 as more of a blessing.

00:37:27.780 I mean, if you're missing

00:37:28.320 any lines of dialogue,

00:37:29.460 then you can console yourself

00:37:30.500 with the fact that you

00:37:31.320 really aren't missing much.

00:37:33.240 The film does not capture

00:37:34.760 the grandeur and scope

00:37:36.180 of the original epic.

00:37:37.300 That's why it feels truncated

00:37:38.480 and drawn out simultaneously.

00:37:40.620 None of the scenes

00:37:41.600 are given any time to breathe.

00:37:43.440 you know we check in and check out quickly and of course one of the great challenges of adapting

00:37:48.520 an ancient epic like the odyssey is turning it into a coherent propulsive film that tells a

00:37:55.440 story in three hours preferably two or two and a half actually without feeling like a series of

00:38:00.640 vignettes loosely connected to each other and that means that you need to find the narrative

00:38:06.260 through line you need to find the core of the story so in other words any filmmaker taking on

00:38:12.400 this source material will need to narrow it down, in effect, and streamline it because of the nature

00:38:19.520 of the medium that he's working with. But Nolan never figures out how to do that. He can't narrow

00:38:24.940 it down, or if he does, he narrows it around the wrong things. And so the movie, from a pure

00:38:29.560 storytelling perspective, is a failure. Now, it's an understandable failure, perhaps, in some ways,

00:38:35.620 maybe even an inevitable one, you might argue, but it's a failure nonetheless.

00:38:40.700 From a structural perspective, the story has a lot of inherent problems as well.

00:38:43.940 Homer's poem is modular in many respects.

00:38:46.080 Bards could tell specific tales like the encounter with the Cyclops, and it would work really well.

00:38:50.660 But when you crunch all these tales together in a three-hour-long movie, some cracks begin to emerge.

00:38:57.040 And in the Odyssey, in the first half of the film, all of Odysseus' adventures seem to end the same way.

00:39:01.480 It's kind of like the same thing.

00:39:02.700 He'll land on some shoreline with his men.

00:39:05.400 They'll encounter something promising, like a child who could offer them food or a sheep or whatever.

00:39:09.920 And then they'll be ambushed by some horrible monster.

00:39:12.120 Many of them will die and Odysseus will order a full retreat to the boat.

00:39:15.520 And we just kind of repeat this over and over again.

00:39:16.960 It's like that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, basically playing again and again.

00:39:23.200 Run away! Run away!

00:39:25.120 Run away! 1.00

00:39:30.640 Run away!

00:39:34.680 Yeah, so it's basically that over and over again.

00:39:36.940 And you might argue that, well, it's hard to avoid this kind of episodic thing where we're repeating the same beats over and over again when you're trying to adapt this source material.

00:39:48.840 But avoiding that is part of the challenge if you're supposed to be a great filmmaker, right?

00:39:54.340 That's part of the whole, that's your job is to figure out a way to handle that.

00:39:58.340 um there's one encounter like this in the odyssey where odysseus and his men come across a bunch of

00:40:04.340 giants wearing armor and the giants end up attacking them and damaging their boat and

00:40:08.420 killing a bunch of them as far as i can tell the point of the sequence is to show kind of show off

00:40:12.280 the costume design of the giants so that the giants can be featured on marketing materials 0.94

00:40:16.500 like this one uh as you can see and it looks really cool i mean it does look cool they can

00:40:21.140 put it on posters and blast it all over reddit and that's kind of it the scene doesn't really serve

00:40:24.900 in Nolan's story, any purpose beyond that, it doesn't advance the story that Nolan is telling.

00:40:31.600 They just immediately run from the giants like it's a Monty Python movie.

00:40:35.840 Now that said, I will praise the visuals of the film. And particularly in one respect,

00:40:42.860 they kind of mark a return to Jurassic Park style effects rather than CGI. And you can see how they

00:40:48.840 built the Cyclops here, for example. And in general, throughout the film, the practical

00:40:52.700 effects are impressive. I mean, they're easily the best part of the entire project. Better than

00:40:56.900 the acting, the plot, the dialogue, the score, everything. Nolan absolutely deserves an Oscar

00:41:01.280 for visual effects. Not for any other category, although he surely will win every other category

00:41:07.180 too. But even the Cyclops scene, despite being one of the best sequences in the film,

00:41:12.480 feels abbreviated and ultimately kind of empty in Nolan's telling. It's missing something.

00:41:20.520 even the good scenes in the movie when they come up it's it's there's something missing here and

00:41:26.740 what's missing in the case of the cyclops scene is the wit and humor of the original because

00:41:32.800 Christopher Nolan has an apparent religious objection to including anything witty or humorous

00:41:37.320 in his films everything everything must be approached with this kind of reverent ominous

00:41:44.400 self-seriousness all

00:41:46.540 the time. That's the only

00:41:48.320 tone that he's capable of.

00:41:50.860 Even scenarios that are meant to be

00:41:52.560 absurd. A bunch of guys

00:41:54.700 trapped in a cave with a giant cyclops

00:41:56.840 and a herd of sheep. That's absurd.

00:41:58.840 There's something quite silly about that 0.70

00:42:00.740 and it's meant to be

00:42:01.860 but Nolan isn't capable of juggling

00:42:04.600 two tones at once. In this case, absurdity

00:42:07.160 and tension.

00:42:09.160 That scene should be

00:42:10.180 tense, yes, because you're trapped with a cyclops

00:42:12.440 but also absurd.

00:42:14.400 And he can't do both, so he always just chooses tension. And so the whole movie is one note for

00:42:20.180 this reason. Now compare this to, say, the Coen brothers, just for example, who are able to write

00:42:26.920 scenes in pretty much all their movies that are both hilarious and suspenseful and disturbing

00:42:34.600 at the same time. And much of this movie needed that kind of touch. It needed that kind of tone

00:42:43.280 where we can do two things at once.

00:42:46.520 I would have loved to see what the Coen brothers

00:42:48.440 could have done with the Cyclops sequence, for example.

00:42:50.720 And actually, come to think of it,

00:42:52.240 we did see that with John Goodman's Bible salesman character

00:42:55.100 in Oh Brother, Where Aren't Thou?

00:42:56.960 And this movie and the Cyclops scene in particular

00:43:00.080 called, again, for that kind of artistic touch,

00:43:04.300 for that kind of tonal nuance.

00:43:07.660 But Nolan, at least in this movie,

00:43:10.560 was incapable of that.

00:43:12.860 Now, despite everything I've said, if you feel like you want to watch this movie anyway because you're in the mood for a historical epic of some kind, I'm compelled to remind you that you have far better options.

00:43:21.900 You know, you could watch Master and Commander, Apocalypto, The Northman, Gladiator, just to name some of the best from this century.

00:43:28.760 The Odyssey is well below those films on the list of historical epics.

00:43:32.340 And to clarify for all the nerds who are going to get ready to nitpick, when I say historical epic, here I mean an epic adventure film set in a real and recognizable period of the past.

00:43:41.500 whether based on true events or entirely mythological so i wouldn't include for example

00:43:46.620 like the lord of the rings on that list although those films lord of the rings films are certainly

00:43:51.260 superior to nolan's odyssey in every imaginable way too now truthfully i have to search very hard

00:43:56.260 to give nolan credit for anything beyond the visual effects as it relates to this movie but

00:43:59.980 there was one point where the conservative critics some of them at least were wrong uh the movie is

00:44:07.500 not a flop. And not all conservative critics predicted that it would be, but to any that did,

00:44:14.040 it was not a flop. It's a hit. It's a massive hit. Christopher Nolan is a cultural force,

00:44:19.540 the likes of which does not exist on the right at all. And we have to grapple with that fact.

00:44:26.100 We have to do something about it besides complaining. Otherwise, we're going to watch

00:44:29.200 as guys like Nolan continue to defile and defame the great works of Western civilization

00:44:33.500 in front of an audience of tens of millions of people it's not entirely a lost cause by the way

00:44:38.440 on tuesday somebody named john carter wrote the following post on x i want elom us to give mel

00:44:42.700 gibson 100 million dollars to film an odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically

00:44:46.700 accurate ships armor weapons and casting with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem

00:44:51.960 and delivered in homeric greek and just 24 hours later musk replied i'm down

00:44:57.800 now this is the legacy of nolan's odyssey if it actually leads to the creation of art that

00:45:03.300 honors Western tradition and literature, then and only then can you make the case the film served

00:45:08.060 some useful purpose. Otherwise, the film is precisely what we thought it would be. It's a

00:45:11.620 mockery of the men who built civilization, an incoherent mess, wearing the skin suit of a 1.00

00:45:16.080 foundational text. The film is not the Odyssey at all. In truth, it's an attempt to transform a 1.00

00:45:20.980 distinct literary work into yet another tedious celebration of multiculturalism and leftist guilt

00:45:26.500 tripping. And rather than pretending ridiculously that the film is secretly based or whatever,

00:45:32.620 we have to admit that Nolan succeeded. He accomplished all of the goals he was trying

00:45:39.220 to achieve. And in the process, he has created one of the most successful pieces of propaganda

00:45:45.220 in the entire history of Hollywood. The fact that even conservative critics are strenuously

00:45:50.840 defending a movie featuring a trans-identified female with top surgery in a pivotal role only

00:45:56.360 proves that fact. And that's why we need to get to work. By the time Christopher Nolan is delivering

00:46:02.340 his Oscar acceptance speech about his brave casting of Ellen Page as a Greek warrior or the

00:46:07.700 many nuances of Zeus's law, we should have our own faithful production in the works.

00:46:12.420 The only coherent message of Nolan's film is that conservatives have become far too complacent.

00:46:18.540 And unlike everything else in this film, it's a message we should take seriously before these

00:46:24.100 people destroy any other great works of literature they didn't create, and which they apparently

00:46:29.420 can't possibly understand.

00:46:32.640 I'll do it for the show today.

00:46:33.720 Thanks for watching.

00:46:34.300 Thanks for listening.

00:46:35.180 Talk to you tomorrow.

00:46:36.560 Have a great day.

00:46:37.600 Godspeed.

00:46:45.240 Once upon a time,

00:46:46.580 there was a country.

00:46:48.520 Not just a country,

00:46:49.900 but a big one,

00:46:50.560 an empire.

00:46:51.520 And in that empire,

00:46:52.600 there was an upper middle class family

00:46:54.000 where two boys

00:46:55.240 were raised by their mother,

00:46:57.420 loved books,

00:46:58.480 Uncle Tom's cabin,

00:46:59.420 In the Bible, their father admired the country's leaders.

00:47:03.200 They were patriotic and happy.

00:47:05.240 Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized.

00:47:08.860 One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader.

00:47:12.760 He was hanged.

00:47:14.020 The other brother read the same books, but decided to lead a movement.

00:47:18.440 First, they came for the universities.

00:47:20.400 No one seemed to care.

00:47:21.960 Then they took over the unions.

00:47:23.060 And again, no one seemed to care.

00:47:24.740 Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities.

00:47:27.600 And again, most people just ignored it.

00:47:30.600 Change, after all, was something they could believe in,

00:47:33.600 until it was too late.

00:47:34.600 Sound familiar?

00:47:36.600 This is the real history of communism,

00:47:38.600 the Russian Revolution.

The Matt Walsh Show - July 22, 2026

Ep. 1809 - The Odyssey Was EVEN WORSE Than I Expected. Here’s Everything Wrong With It

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