The Culture-War Crowd Has Chosen The Odyssey as Its New Target, And They’ve Clearly Never Read Homer

The culture-war crowd has officially chosen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey as its new pet project. And honestly, it is almost funny watching them pretend they suddenly care deeply about ancient Greek literature. Yesterday it was Star Wars. Before that, it was Snow White, The Little Mermaid, The Rings of Power, The Acolyte and every other project where a Black woman dared to exist in costume. Now they are pretending to be guardians of Homer.

The backlash has been very loud. The trailer has racked up over 600,000 dislikes on YouTube. Universal turned off replies on the film’s official X account. Elon Musk called Nolan “a worm.” And all of this before the film has even premiered.

Here is what Cosmic Book News reported:

Update — July 7: The trailer’s dislikes have now blown past 600,000 — 611K and climbing a day after the premiere — and new Quorum tracking offers a first look at whether the backlash is hitting the box office.

Update — July 6: Dislikes passed 500,000 on the day of the world premiere, Elon Musk piled on, calling Nolan “a worm”, and Nyong’o’s Homer comments fueled the backlash further — but by evening, the first reactions out of London were calling the film a triumph.

The Odyssey’s cast assembled in London this weekend for the photocall ahead of Monday’s world premiere, and Universal marked the occasion by posting the photos to the film’s official X account with the replies turned off.

The post, showing Christopher Nolan alongside Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and the rest of the ensemble, carries the label “Only some accounts can reply.”

On the biggest publicity day of the film’s campaign so far, the studio decided the one thing its premiere coverage couldn’t withstand was an open comment section.

The dislikes have now climbed to roughly 510,000 against 60,000 likes on the Universal Pictures YouTube channel, per extensions that restore the hidden counts. That’s approaching 90 percent negative on 5.2 million views.

The trajectory is the story. When we first reported the ratio, it stood at 55,000 dislikes. Two days later it was 350,000, and the rating bombing excuses had already begun.

The comment lockdown isn’t an isolated choice. It’s the third move in the same playbook.

Universal skipped the influencer screening circuit entirely, cutting off the usual pre-release buzz machine rather than risk it going sideways.

When the trailer ratio exploded, the industry response was to attribute it to rating bombing campaigns rather than engage with it.

And with the casting backlash now international news via Le Monde, the official account has stopped taking questions.

This Was Never About Homer

A lot of these people have clearly not read The Odyssey. Some do not even seem to understand what story Christopher Nolan is adapting. They keep screaming about Helen of Troy as though Nolan is making The Iliad, when The Odyssey takes place after the Trojan War. Helen matters to the wider myth, yes, but she is not the centre of The Odyssey. The story is about Odysseus trying to get home. So the way they have turned Lupita Nyong’o into the entire controversy tells you exactly what this is really about.

This is not about historical accuracy, fidelity to Homer, or respect for Greek mythology. It is racism with footnotes. If they truly cared about Greek representation, they would be asking why the film is not filled with Greek actors. They would be asking why Hollywood keeps casting white American, British and Australian actors as ancient Mediterranean figures. But somehow, Matt Damon as Odysseus is acceptable, while Lupita as Helen or Clytemnestra is civilisation-ending. That is not a consistent argument. That is selective and racist outrage.

They keep saying Helen was “the most beautiful woman in the world,” as if beauty standards have not changed across time, place and culture. The ancient Greeks did not worship the same beauty ideals as modern Hollywood or right-wing Twitter. A blonde, blue-eyed Sydney Sweeney type would not automatically represent ancient Greek beauty either. But the point was never Greek beauty. The point was whiteness.

Final Thoughts

The outrage over Elliot Page is just as transparent, especially now that reports say he is playing Sinon, not Achilles. Sinon is the Greek soldier tied to the Trojan Horse deception, so the panic over him supposedly playing “the strongest warrior” was already built on rumour and bad faith. But that is the pattern. They do not wait for facts. They see a trans actor in a major film and immediately turn him into the problem.

And even if Page had been playing Achilles, the meltdown would still be ridiculous. Achilles has long been tied to queer readings because of his relationship with Patroclus, and Greek myth is full of gender disguise, ambiguity and reinterpretation. These people are not defending Homer, Achilles or the text. They are defending their own discomfort with trans people and pretending it is literary criticism.

The funniest part is that Nolan may actually be doing something interesting here. He has always been drawn to structure, time, duty, obsession and men trapped inside impossible missions. The Odyssey is full of that. Odysseus is not just a hero. He is a survivor, a liar, a strategist, a husband, a father and a man trying to return to a home that has changed without him. That is very Nolan, but whether he pulls it off is another question.

Those are actual conversations. But instead, the grifters have reduced everything to “Black Helen” and “trans Achilles,” because that is easier to monetise. They do not want film criticism; they want outrage clips with offensive, dehumanizing thumbnails. They want to say “woke” twenty times and pretend they have made an argument.

And here is the truth they do not want to admit: many of them will still watch the film. They will buy the ticket, sit through the movie, then run back online to tell their audience how offended they were. Because the outrage is the business model. They need the thing they claim to hate.

So if they are really that upset, they should stay home and ask the world’s first trillionaire—Elon Musk—to fund a very white Odyssey for them. That way, the rest of us could be free from their nagging. But we know they will not do that. Grifters need something to monetise. Without Black people, women and queer actors to rage against, what would they even do? It is almost ironic. Without “wokeness,” would these right-wing grifter channels even exist? I think not.

But they really need to stop pretending this is about protecting Greek mythology. It is not. It is about policing who gets to stand inside stories that have always belonged to human imagination. And if a myth has survived gods, monsters, war, shipwrecks, sirens and centuries of reinterpretation, I promise it can survive Lupita Nyong’o.