There's a lot of news coming down the pike about Christopher Nolan's upcoming film that recreates "The Odyssey," the classic Greek story of the journey of Odysseus post-Troy.
And none of it is good.
As is the nature of every major woke retelling, Christopher Nolan didn't just stop at race swapping. He also has the poet who tells the story being rapper Travis Scott, who literally is going to rap the story.
Nolan: I didn't use orchestral music because the orchestra didn't exist in ancient Greece.
— CinemaCopa (@CopaExMachina) May 12, 2026
Also Nolan: I cast Travis Scott because ancient poetry is just like shit-tier rap music. pic.twitter.com/Xw8QxYNAwi
He has Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra.
Lupita Nyong’o will play both Helen of Troy and her sister, Clytemnestra, in Christopher Nolan’s ‘THE ODYSSEY.’
— Pop Base (@PopBase) May 12, 2026
(https://t.co/wG33R7UAQs) pic.twitter.com/Mn8e5sG1RA
There are also rumors that transgender actress Elliot Page will play Achilles, though I've also seen it rumored that she's playing Hermes. Whichever one is true, it's the wrong casting.
To be clear, these are just the things getting the most attention. There are even more bizarre choices, such as steel-plated troops during the Bronze Age, no orchestral soundtrack, and American accents.
Pretty much everything coming out about this movie just makes people even angrier, and I think it's justified.
Retelling old tales is a common practice throughout history, and sometimes that comes with big changes to the retelling. "Romeo + Juliet" is a great example of this, as it takes the classic Shakespearean tale and transforms it into a 90s drama in an LA-style environment. The brilliance of the movie was that it took source material and transformed it to such a degree that various changes to characters, weapons, and behaviors made sense for the setting.
But what Nolan is doing is taking the same story, the same setting, the same time period, and he's just tossing out everything that would make sense in order to inject something that is, frankly, decision-making based on socio-political modernity. That has never been, and never will be, something that the vast majority of audiences will appreciate. This is only going to please a small section of our populace, and as per the pattern, many of them won't even show up to watch it.
If Nolan truly wanted to do something as epic as "The Odyssey," he could've created his own story that took beats from the tale and made it into his own story. In this way, he can make sense of things that wouldn't have made sense otherwise, such as these bizarre race swaps and technological advancements during times when these advancements clearly weren't around.
Even the act of subverting expectations can be done well, thus giving the Greek epic genre a slight twist that makes it fresh. The film "300" did this well, as it took the classic story of the 300 Spartans and turned it into a dynamic action movie that prioritized style over storytelling, but stuck to its guns enough that even the silliness of it worked for it, not against it.
But Nolan isn't stylizing it. He's not going for a fresh take. He's literally telling the story as it was originally told, and then injecting things into it that have no business being there. It destroys the immersion, breaks believability, and makes the story about the decisions, not the story itself.
And what makes it worse is that "The Odyssey" is a story that would absolutely astonish with modern cinema if told well. A faithful adaptation would've been so well received in this day and age because we're thirsting for a well-told epic that harkens back to ancient times, especially this particular tale.
But we're not going to get that. We're going to get another Hollywood retelling that upchucks modernity onto something beloved by the entirety of the Western world and then tells you to be grateful about it, or you're a racist, sexist, transphobe, or whatever else they want to throw at audiences to try to make them shut up and fall in line.
I think the spite against this film is such that if "Troy" were rereleased at the same time, people would show up in droves to watch that film instead of Nolan's just to make it clear that we've had it.
