BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Straw Man, Ad Hominem, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 10.1% saturation with 147 hits. Analysis detected 874 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,461 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 40.3% and a BS Rank of 30% (14,402 of 20,516 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 70.20% of the article peer group.
Christopher Nolan’s *The Odyssey* is a commercial and artistic triumph, opening to widespread critical acclaim and collecting $264million in global ticket sales during its opening weekend.
Indeed, it is reassuring that Hollywood still has some artistry and ambition left in it.
But alongside the legitimate plaudits, the film’s juggernaut success has produced two other, more philistine reactions.
The liberal left is relieved.
After months of controversy over the supposedly woke casting, the film has received ecstatic reviews and attracted huge audiences, leading progressives to declare victory.
A black Helen of Troy and a trans Greek soldier did not sink the film, after all.
Representation has won, or at least got off on a technicality.
The trad right’s obsessions with ‘accuracy’, ‘history’ and ‘wokery’ can be dismissed as mean, petty and irrelevant.
Much of the right is furious for precisely the same reason.
Having condemned *The Odyssey* before seeing it, the anti-woke warriors cannot forgive it for being magnificent.
So the complaints continue.
Nolan has betrayed Homer, they insist.
The dialogue is too modern.
Odysseus is too traumatised.
The film is secretly progressive after all, etc etc.
Before the film’s release, both sides assumed – and are still arguing furiously – that the politics of the casting are what determine the quality of the film.
It does not.
Nolan’s artistic choices do.
What then has Nolan actually achieved with *The Odyssey*?
Despite his massive successes, Nolan’s previous films have been fairly niche.
They have been elaborate puzzles about men trying to discover who they are – ingenious but also flashy and adolescent.
They are expensive contraptions built for teenage boys who enjoy exploring intricate plot mechanics.
With *Oppenheimer* (2023), Nolan found a subject large enough to contain his obsessions.
The fractured chronology, unstable perspectives and plot machinery were no longer merely clever – they fully belonged to the story.
Nolan had matured into his subject matter.
With *The Odyssey*, he has returned to the story he tells over and again – the man struggling to discover who he is – but with genuine sincerity instead of superficial flashiness.
With this as his theme, Nolan has found what interests him.
Odysseus is the original Nolan hero.
He travels under false names and through competing stories – he survives by becoming different people, while remaining driven by the need to return to the man he once was.
His journey home is also a journey back to himself.
With this as his theme, Nolan has cast his film in the way Hollywood has always done – that is, to show the audience *who the characters are* and *what they mean* with immediate clarity, in order to advance the story as quickly as possible.
Entirely in line with tried and tested Hollywood conventions, Nolan has simply cast for type.
Neither the actors’ personal biographies nor their place in the demographic census matter.
These do not record on film.
The only thing that matters is how the actors *seem* – how they come across on screen – and how this helps tell the story.
Why cast Matt Damon as Odysseus?
Because he has spent his whole career playing men who do not know who they are, from Will Hunting in *Good Will Hunting* to Tom Ripley in *The Talented Mr Ripley* to the role that defines him: Jason Bourne, the man who cannot even remember his own past.
Odysseus is an obvious extension of this type – from ambiguous origins but clever, resourceful, morally compromised and desperate to get home to find out who he is.
Matt Damon’s defining type.
Audiences know this.
The casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy prompted endless complaints about historical authenticity (as well as outright racism).
But watch the film properly and it’s clear the casting was neither colourblind nor a needless woke provocation.
Her visible difference to her fellow cast members is dramatically useful and advances the story.
Helen is a queen, but she is also treated as property: possessed, abducted, reclaimed and made the pretext for a catastrophic war.
Her beauty and bearing give Helen immense status.
Her visible isolation among the Greek kings and soldiers makes her captivity and status as property immediately clear and deeply uncomfortable.
The casting of Nyong’o shows this in seconds, without words.
It also helps that she is cast opposite Jon Bernthal as her husband and conqueror, Menelaus.
Bernthal is Hollywood’s great bruiser.
He reads on screen as a thug, a boxer – a mean, dirty fighter.
The two actors together create an instantly recognisable relationship.
She is regal, controlled and trapped.
He is physical possession in human form.
The film does not need to explain their marriage – the casting tells the story.
The much-mocked casting of Elliot Page works following the same cast-iron law of how actors are read by audiences.
Page does not play the famous warrior Achilles, as months of online outrage claimed, but Sinon, a Greek soldier caught up in Odysseus’s terrible deception.
But the role only makes sense if we acknowledge the uncomfortable reality of the casting.
Page is famously a trans man, formerly Ellen.
It is inevitable that viewers will see and register a woman attempting to occupy a male military role.
Nolan surely understands this.
Page’s slight, vulnerable presence looks profoundly wrong among hardened warriors.
Sinon is someone who should never have been sent to war.
The choice of Page, then, is not a failure of casting – it shows what good casting can do.
The culture warriors complain that Page is an implausible warrior, but this is exactly as Nolan intended.
There have also been complaints about the demographics of Odysseus’s crew.
These men, we are told, do not look sufficiently Greek.
But Nolan’s task is not to represent a best guess of ancient demographics.
It is to explain to the audience who these men are to each other and to Odysseus.
He needs us to recognise a *crew* – men who have fought, travelled, eaten and suffered together for years.
Their modern speech, casual antagonism and mixture of familiar faces make them feel like a group of mates you might know from the pub.
The ‘anachronistic’ dialogue serves this same purpose.
Nolan has no interest in the clunky conventions of BBC sword-and-sandals dramas, in which everyone sounds as though they studied Classics at Balliol.
Nolan’s characters speak plainly because he wants to abolish any kind of alienating distance between their world and ours.
None of this makes *The Odyssey* small or overly contemporary.
It is epic.
Shot entirely with IMAX cameras, it places tiny human bodies inside landscapes and seas indifferent to their survival.
Its overwhelming sound, enormous close-ups and fractured chronology do not merely describe Odysseus’s disorientation.
They make us experience it, too.
Against Nolan’s colossal achievement, the argument over whether the cast is sufficiently traditional or progressive looks painfully small.
But it is still important to understand why these arguments come about and why they are so heated.
There is a political context that makes them logical and inevitable.
There is no question that Hollywood institutions have been captured by diversity mandates, inclusion standards and the belief that representation is a measurable moral good.
In this context, artistic decisions have been displaced by political ones.
As a result, no one can trust unusual artistic choices to be made in good faith anymore.
This is why it is equally important and necessary to make the simple point that diverse casts do not necessarily produce bad art.
Political prescriptions do.
A quota and an artistic decision might produce the same cast list, but only the finished film reveals the difference between living art and dead propaganda.
Nolan’s cast is diverse, but it is not woke.
He has not used actors as symbols or celebrations of approved identities, or in an attempt to undermine Western civilisation, as some still seem to imagine.
He has cast faces, bodies, voices and personas for the meanings they create on screen.
He knows that audiences have eyes, memories and cultural associations, and that he can rely on these to build his story.
More broadly, Nolan has neither illustrated the Homer that traditionalists demand, nor has he ‘corrected’ Homer to meet progressive standards.
He has interpreted him.
The demand for the ‘real Homer’ is philistinism dressed up as reverence – it does not want an artist, it wants an illustrator.
The progressive demand is no better.
It wants the past rearranged until it resembles an approved version of the present.
Christopher Nolan refuses both.
He subjects Homer to his own imagination, obsessions and cinematic language.
This is not the culture war’s *Odyssey*.
It is unmistakably Nolan’s, and this is why it succeeds.
**Maren Thom** is co-host of the *Performance Anxiety* podcast.
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