TRIGGERnometry - July 23, 2026


The Odyssey Movie and How the Culture War Broke Everybody's Brain - Konstantin Kisin


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

174.22

Word count

1,170

Sentence count

62

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Christopher Nolan's new film adaptation of the Greek epic The Odyssey is getting mixed reviews. Some are praising the casting of a Black actress as the titular hero, and others are criticizing it as a travesty. But what do they have in common?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:01:00.000 The Odyssey and How the Culture War Broke Everyone's Brain
00:01:03.320 For the last few days, I've been watching an unfolding debate about Christopher Nolan's
00:01:11.920 movie adaptation of The Odyssey on social media. I say debate, but in reality, it's mainly people
00:01:18.880 delivering fairly predictable takes based on their pre-existing views and cultural affiliations,
00:01:24.540 rather than engaging with each other's arguments. Those who opposed DEI were outraged
00:01:29.860 by the woke casting decisions whereby Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Page, was chosen to play
00:01:36.440 Sinon, an Ithacan warrior, while the roles of Helen and her sister Clytemnestra are both played
00:01:42.220 by Lupita Nyong'o, who is black. In response to this news, Elon Musk declared that Nolan had
00:01:47.580 desecrated the epic long before the movie was even released. Others who think representation
00:01:53.100 in entertainment is the most important thing since Gaza, about which most of them are now 0.84
00:01:57.400 conveniently forgotten, obviously thought the casting was a triumph. It is pride season after
00:02:02.660 all, and as we all know, the ancient Greeks did have an affinity for at least some sections of
00:02:07.020 the LGBTQ community. Much of the response to the movie has been expressed in explicitly political
00:02:12.740 terms, which seems to me to say a lot more about the times we live in than the movie itself. Sure,
00:02:18.200 having a small friend-looking trans man play the role of a warrior doesn't look credible on paper, 0.63
00:02:22.920 But this is negated by both the role in the story and the fact that we are mercifully spared a violation of our voluntary suspension of disbelief
00:02:31.920 by the fact that Page's character does not go around destroying Trojan warriors by the dozen with the viciousness only artificial testosterone can deliver.
00:02:42.400 Nor are we taken out of the story to be educated about how the ancient Greeks really were that dogmatic about the idea that trans men are men.
00:02:50.560 Page just plays a minor male part well.
00:02:53.700 That's it. 0.99
00:02:54.640 The same is not quite true of Nyong'o 0.99
00:02:56.500 because rather than playing the roles
00:02:58.500 with respect to the source material,
00:03:00.540 the casting of a black actress as Helen
00:03:02.400 is undeniably evidence of the modern fashion 0.76
00:03:05.060 for sacrificing historic immersion
00:03:07.400 for the sake of diversity.
00:03:09.240 Pointing this out is widely regarded
00:03:10.880 as evidence of some sort of prejudice,
00:03:13.120 whereas in my humble opinion,
00:03:14.800 if you're remotely historically educated
00:03:16.760 about the periods of time and civilizations in question,
00:03:20.000 it's impossible not to be distracted by it.
00:03:22.560 I can well remember going to see the Limpica musical in New York,
00:03:25.340 which I loved and wrote about,
00:03:27.480 and finding it difficult to immerse myself in scenes about the Russian revolution
00:03:31.180 through which my ancestors lived,
00:03:33.620 performed by what looked like the cast of NWA.
00:03:36.320 I shouldn't complain, really.
00:03:37.840 As my local friend pointed out, 0.99
00:03:39.940 you should be grateful that Lenin's murdering, raping, and pillaging communist goons 0.94
00:03:43.920 weren't portrayed as the good guys.
00:03:45.840 But while the characters of Helen and Clytemnestra are important,
00:03:48.880 they're also minor and they stand out precisely because the rest of the film looks like ancient
00:03:54.340 Greece. It feels more like a creative quirk than yet another example of diversity being
00:03:59.340 rammed down your throat. It helps that, as with Paige, Nyong'o's performance is solid and
00:04:03.980 convincing. The one criticism that can be made here is that Clytemnestra is for some reason
00:04:08.280 portrayed as Helen's twin, as big a travesty as Peter Jackson's inexcusable decision to ruin the
00:04:14.260 character of Faramir in the Lord of the Rings movie adaptation. The entire premise of the
00:04:18.700 Trojan War is that it was fought because of Helen, who was the most beautiful woman in the world.
00:04:23.700 Giving her a twin is an odd decision, but since the underlying motivations of the Trojan War
00:04:28.500 are tangential to the story, this change is not significantly detrimental. Overall, the idea that
00:04:34.920 this movie should be seen through the political lens seems rather absurd to me. Nolan's reimagination
00:04:40.360 of the Odyssey is about many things, but the online culture war is not one of them. Instead,
00:04:45.300 he delivers a solid 7 out of 10, which explores the great themes of the human condition. Love,
00:04:51.740 leadership, war, loss, revenge, and regret. The Odyssey benefits from the fact that,
00:04:57.560 as with Oppenheimer before it, Nolan successfully resists his natural inclination to overcomplicate
00:05:03.400 things, but does so without sacrificing the style that has made him one of the greatest directors
00:05:09.200 in Hollywood history. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway are excellent in their lead roles,
00:05:13.640 as is the supporting cast.
00:05:15.820 The movie is entertaining and the story powerful.
00:05:19.040 If that sounds like your cup of tea,
00:05:20.780 go and enjoy it without worrying about what it says
00:05:23.220 about Britain and America in 2026.
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