But, Homer would have _mentioned_ that Odysseus's right hand man was from India, that one of his sailors was from an unknown land called Korea, that Penelope's blind servant, played by Latinx casting activist John Leguizamo, was from the far side of the Atlantic, and that Helen of Troy was from Kenya.
Why? Because that would add to the epic adventuresomeness of the tales, the way that the 1991 "Robin Hood" explains in detail that Morgan Freeman's Azeem met Kevin Costner in an evil sultan's dungeon in the Holy Land during the Crusades. In 1991 you weren't expected to believe that Azeem was just another indigenous native of Sherwood Forest.
But, Nolan portrays the Korean crewman as just another ho-hum member of the Korean-Ithacan community. Don't expect an epic tale of how he walked across 10,000 miles of Eurasia from Korea to get to Ithaca and of all his adventures along the way. That would be too much fun.
I agree this is true about Nolan's execution. And tbh I didn't think you were implying this, but the way many complaints turned out in public including imo Elon's is that you have to cast ancient movies "Race Correct" based on current-day X for-you-page polemics or else it's woke, etc.; I still don't think Nolan was doing it for classic "woke" reasons also, I think he's lazy and cowardly
I’m pretty sure that’s what BAP was saying in his critique. Nolan provided diversity for diversity’s sake instead of being more like Herzog in Cobra Verde.
Sure. But Himesh Patel isn't playing a world-spanning Gujarati trader, he's playing, evidently, a run-of-the-mill member of the Indian-Ithacan community who has risen to Odysseus's second in command. Nobody in the movie notices he isn't Greek. Nobody asks him where he's from. That would be insensitive!
Obviously, a lot of ticket-buyers are as clueless as the characters in the movie.
I think that is just normal now. In Villeneuve's Dune the small Fremen community Paul winds up with on Arrakis is racially diverse, but no effort is made to explain why or how that came about. It just is. I thought the real genius of Bridgerton was to take a costume drama set in 18th century Britain and add black people, so you could get your the fancy clothes and castles and "elevated" dialogue and romantic folderol together with a diverse cast. Iin that case, since the show is theoretically set in a real place and time, they had to provide an explanation for the diversity, but they didn't exactly knock themselves out making it plausible.
I take your point that a "diverse" group of people in Bronze Age Greece would be a lot less racially diverse than a random group of New Yorkers. But part of translation is making an old text understandable and relatable to a modern audience. People expect a decent-sized group to be multi-ethnic, whether or not that would make sense.
Having finally seen the movie, some thoughts follow:
1. For me the chief cultural significance of the movie was not so much DEI but —Passing on of the baton of Anglo high culture from RP British English to every day Americanism.
For most fantasy or period films, it used to be a sort of given that the characters would speak in British accents. You can look at Game of Thrones or Rome etc
Nolan subverts that.
It was an interesting creative choice.
2. But the choice didn’t really work for me. Telemachus saying “dad” or some of the black characters speaking in mild AAVE broke my suspension of disbelief.
Anne Hathaway could very well have been in Devil Wears Prada or Bride Wars.
3. The dialogues, as always with Nolan, were quite stilted. There were probably only two scenes where any emotions were invoked in me.
4. He also tried to bring in too much realism in a story that is supposed to be hyperbolic and grand. But this is probably more personal taste.
5. Having said that the realism was a bit inconsistent. These characters were supposed to have been starving but were still so swole.
6. Nolan typically excels in playing with time and creating puzzles. But the odyssey itself is quite non-linear and convoluted. So I don’t think he got a chance to be creative on that front.
7. The casting choices were interesting, particularly having Lyupita Nyongo play Helen. But I think he should not have cast other black actors at all in that case. Lyupita should have been a singular and unique beauty as Helen is supposed to have been. I agree with BAP on this.
Himesh Patel’s character, to be honest, didn’t seem to me to be Indian but a generic swarthoid that you do find along the rim of the Mediterranean and certainly deeper inland, like an Egyptian or a Mesopotamian. But you see these in Greece as well. The actor Jason Mantzoukas, for example, looks like a hippie graphic designer from Bangalore. Perhaps Himesh Patel was slightly too dark but someone like Hasan Minhaj wouldn’t have looked all that off the Greek melanin distribution curve.
Overall it was an entertaining movie but not something that I’ll remember.
PS - I did find it amusing that Himesh Patel’s character was essentially killed for eating beef. So may be he was an Indian after all.
During the Roman Empire, up to 120 Greek merchant ships per year sailed from the Red Sea to India on the newly discovered monsoon wind that made the eastbound voyage an easy six week trip straight downwind. Getting back to the Red Sea from India took about a year, for a two-year roundtrip.
But in the time of either Odysseus or Homer, trade was far less, although not unknown.
Ancient DNA data has so far been published on approaching 200 skeletons from pre-Hellenistic Empire Greece (before 323 BC). Every single set of human remains so far discovered has been racially a Caucasian (using Blumenbach's term for whites from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa) from the general vicinity of Greece.
No doubt there was an occasional Nubian from far up the Nile or Afghan metal merchant, but no doubt, the residents of Greece didn't look much like the racially random casting in Nolan's movie.
Exactly so: sure there might have been 'strange looking pipol' as bronze age courtiers or in mercenary armies but of course there were no koreans or indians. There may have been a stray nubian or two but surely they wouldn't have been regarded just as greeks with accompanying expectation that chroniclers like homer notice-while-not-noticing they were there.
Considering 'ethnic diversity' of the times (not racial diversity, which is not at all the same thing) there could certainly have been present caucasians, protocelts, nords, spaniards, balts etc.
BAP pretending that 'strange looking folk' = 'there could well have been all kinds of mystery meat milling about in agamemnon's/odyssesus's retinue' is unserious and only meant to irritate.
I do kinda like when white peepol just naively portray themselves as the hero in a foreign land like Last Samurai, Last of the Mohicans, White Jesus etc…, or just white wash the entire cast in their own image. I think it’s cute and self serving fun.
“‘I was full of dreams,’ (Napoleon) explained long afterwards. ‘I saw myself founding a new religion, marching into Asia riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hands the new Koran I would have written to suit my needs.’”
Napoleon left France smaller than before the French Revolution and sacrificed millions in wars for no tangible benefit except satisfying his own ego. One could say that the spread of Cambacérès' Civil Code was an improvement, but that was not Napoleon and could have happened without the random killing of millions of young Europeans. The extremely horrible French Revolution luckily ended with him.
The unconfortable truth to say around here is that this 19th century preference for great men is out-dated. History shows the only way the human species has truly progressed (space, internet, AI, nuclear weapons) was not by submitting to the whims of ego-driven psychopaths and adventurers, but by sustained capacity of increased personal freedom and mass cooperation. Although great men have their place, there are divine and cosmic purposes that rise above any one individual.
The last 125 years has especially been the lesser types trying to create the same thing; I don’t think any of them have ever realized their “one-world government” is just that, an Empire… I know I’ve read that quote before but for some reason, the import of his religious idea got by me
I think I've got this Lord Kenneth Clarke quote right,
"To the end, he maintained that Europe would have been better off if it had been united under his rule. It may be true. But it could never happen, because the realistic ruler was dominated by the Romantic conqueror"
Something you are your readers might be interested in:
In Aristotle’s Ethics, concerning the Great Man (H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks):
p. 246 – “The man who overrates himself is conceited. The man who underrates himself is mean-minded. The man who is worthy only of small things and rates himself accordingly is sensible, but not high-minded.” . . .
[Honor, the highest thing, is offered to the gods.]
“But, he will not overestimate even the value of honour, still less of wealth and political power. These are inferior to honour, for men desire them for the sake of honour, and if a thing is desired for the sake of something else, it is necessarily inferior to that something else.
“He will not run risks for small ends, nor exert himself in small things, because he despises them: but he will run a great risk, and at a time of great danger will be reckless of his life, thinking that life is not worth living without honour. He will not be given to admiration, as there is nothing that strikes him as great. He will not bear a grudge: he will prefer to overlook injuries. He will not care either to be praised or to praise. He will, of course, not talk about other men in a personal way, nor speak evil of others, not even of his enemies, except for the express purpose of insulting them.”
Odysseus and his adventurers are fun and he doesn’t feel guilty about war or sacking cities. He’s proud of when he lies to get what he needs. The magic dames who bang him don’t seem to have it in for him or hate men. When he gets to the lotus eaters he’s the one that tells his men not to waste their lives away being potheads, not some trauma queen that wants to go on an lsd trip all day to “heal”.
His only real vice is that he gets high on his supply enough to anger the gods from time to time and he gets smacked down because of it and learns to respect them more.
I think Nolan has a more cowardly agenda: he implies that the openness-invites-abuse-which-eventually-leads-to-collapse cycle is natural and therefore the bleeding-heart pro-immigration liberals were still "right" as they fulfilled their part in this cycle, by being the torch-bearers of enlightened principles. "They were right but the world just wasn't ready for them", essentially, so they have to depart and then come back around later.
Nowhere does he show any understanding that masculine principles have inherent virtue.
Very thoughtful review. A tangent but, “Napoleon as a man out of time who stands not even opposed to, but far beyond and above, the petty concerns and small-souled struggle between the bourgeois and the socialist, the traditionalist reactionary and the other reactionary going by the name of the leftist.” is the perfect articulation of how I feel about him and why he has become a favorite historical subject in the last few years.
Revisiting just to add that this very idea of rising above and beyond petty concerns is what I want to chase more and more of. I need something to galvanize me more than just the endless issues of the day which I’ve wasted too much of my life’s energy on.
"Ellen “Elliott Rodgers” Page’s casting as a literal male ghost devoid of life-force without the sipping of sacrificial blood is appropriate; when Odysseus speaks to her in the underworld she actually does come off as uncanny ghostlike wraith male shade, mouth smeared with blood and a raspy delivery that would have been too frightening on a biological male. I don’t understand what the complaint is here, and maybe I’d expect the complaint to come from the trannie-world instead, as typecasting them."
Absolutely perfect insight.
Also Nolan cast her because he's loyal to his actors & she was excellent in Inception.
Very good essay, This was my exact thoughts and twitter review also, it’s bad for film reasons and not political ones, and Bronze Age diversity isn’t a problem, but the lazy and uninspired approach this film takes toward it.
Favorite scene for me was hunting deer in swaying tall grass, and it transforms into naked dead man; this was height of magical Mediterranean feel, as imagined in dreams and neoclassical painting, and cyclops scene was excellent as well.
But much of the film is flat or outright poor and jumbled quality, and I laugh that the supposed trauma of Troy is simply killing enemy soldiers and a shrine maiden - nothing really - even the lamentable Troy showed baby being thrown off walls - to Nolan the height of man’s fury is running past a burning building.
In Flaubert’s “Salammbo”, which I suspect most conservatives have never heard of, the mercenaries of Carthage are a mix of Gauls, Libyans, Bantus, Iberians, Greeks, etc… united as enemies of Rome. Flaubert meticulously researched the book; decades of study. Maybe he was 2020 woke and ahead of his time. Diverse groups did meet and were in service to Empires. Not just Carthage but Greece and Rome and the Ottomans. You don’t have to pick up a 19th century book to learn this either. Just not be so parochial. A bridge too far for most.
Excellent article - upon receiving the email I misread that it was from Bryan Caplan rather than BAP and became progressively more confused at how unusually insightful it was compared to his usual foggy misunderstandings. Soon all made sense.
there was recently published paper on a high status Andronovan woman from a kurgan in Kazakhstan. She was 6' 6" by US measure.
In Azerbaijan a 6' 7" man was found. These are obvious elite, duh in kurgans.
But most Andronovo are 5'7" to 5'10" much larger than baseline humans at the time.
While not a 1:1 pure descent, these are the Dorians. I buy the basic Drew's thesis. Find the metals, take them and make as many children as possible. Goes up to China.
Nolan is a different matter, but my impression with Ridley Scott is that he just really wants to film spectacular set pieces - often inspired by a piece of art he has seen (he famously agreed to make gladiator after being presented with the painting Pollice Verso for example).
He doesn’t seem to be bound to any sort of ideology, might be a bit senile now, and has no eye for a good script (as evidenced by some of his film choices in the second half of his career). The end result is that he gets used by progressive Hollywood types to make absurdly woke adaptations.
I still maintain that the battle scenes in napoleon are exhilarating, and even in the last duel he has a way of depicting a sense of kinetic combat that no other director can match.
Unrelated to your broader review, which was excellent, but nevertheless a point I thought worth raising
I really don't understand a lot of this criticism. Hamlet (the Dane) has been portrayed by white men, black men, woman. Yet no one seems to hyperventilate over it. There are classical productions, modernized productions. A lot of this seems to be the argument that in The Merchant of Venice only Jews should be allowed to portray Shylock and only Danes should be allowed to portray Hamlet. In Marvel Comics Fury is a white guy. In the movies he's a black guy. Does anyone really care? I don't think so. Most productions of Hamlet are heavily edited due to the length. I think the only movie that used the entire play is Branagh's. No one seems to mind very much one way or the other. Personally I think a lot of this carping, which it is more than criticism, is people are upset that Nolan made the movie that he wanted to make and not the movie that they thought he should make or wanted him to make or to see. The movie should be judged by itself. You can reference the original material and carp but the movie is what it is and should be judged by that. Not trying to justify his casting of certain actors or actresses. You can judge whether you think they succeeded in their performance. You judge a James Bond movie by the movie not by was Sean Connery better than Timothy Dalton. You may prefer one to the other but they were different movies made at different times. Most, if not all, stories from the long ago far away deal with people who had different mores, beliefs, ways of looking at the universe and trying to understand it in reference to the times they lived in. Judge the movie that you see, not the one you wanted to see or wanted him to make. It should stand and fall on its' own merits.
And??? So the argument is that a black woman cannot or can play the part? No one can even decide if there were or were not black people there at the time. Under that standard no move should be made of Hamlet where Hamlet isn't a Dane, or McBeth not Scottish? Maybe only Greeks should have been in the movie. I think it's' been raised that the movie had no Greeks in it. Seems kind of an argument for ethnic cleansing in the movie industry.
Matt Damon and Tom Holland were not particularly good in "The Odyssey" and could have been replaced at no cost to the quality of the film, ideally with actors more ethnically suited for their roles. Damon was a lot of fun as a fat bureaucrat in "Oppenheimer," so his boring performance as the all time great character Odysseus was likely the fault of Nolan, not of Damon.
More broadly, casting Damon and Holland is symptomatic of why "The Odyssey" wasn't in Nolan's strong suit: Nolan is a man of the North Atlantic and doesn't have much of a liking for the scenery, colors, peoples, cultures, and hand gestures of the Mediterranean.
On the other hand, Nolan _is_ wildly popular. So it's unlikely any director, no matter how personally better suited for making "The Odyssey" he might be, would get a billion dollars worth of people to show up at the movies to see his "Odyssey." He's not the best-suited auteur to film Homer, but nobody else would sell half as many tickets, so he's at least twice as successful as anybody else would be to getting 21st Century people to watch a Homer movie.
It is a business and the purpose of a business is to make money. There is an old joke that the East European Jews who founded Hollywood made a lot of money by selling movies to Midwestern Protestants starring and about Urban Roman Catholics. Whatever works.
There has been a lot of ethnic cleansing of whites from nonwhite roles over the last 50 or so years. John Wayne would never get cast as Genghis Khan in 2026 like he did in 1956.
Two arguments are advanced for the increasing ban on white actors playing non-white characters:
One is greater realism of casting.
The other is that whites are bad and should suffer for the sins of their ancestors.
The arguments appear to be contradictory, but lots of people don't notice these days.
There is also another reason that I saw mentioned only in one place. Haven't had the time to look into it very much. According to what I read in order to have a movie eligible for an Oscar it has to meet certain criteria. That includes a defined minimum percentage of how many POC are in lead roles as well as secondary roles. If the number is not enough then the movie doesn't make the cut and is not eligible for an Oscar. Don't know if that applies to the entire movie or only that category. If true that may have and probably did influence the casting though I doubt anyone would admit it. Also no idea if (true) that also covers Emmy's Golden Globes, etc. But it does cast a different light on the casting, so to speak.
Nolan's "Oppenheimer" swept the Oscars with virtually no Diversity Casting.
Nolan met the American race quotas by hiring more BIPoC interns to get his coffee. (British race quotas might be harder to evade.)
I advised my readers on May 22, 2026 not to assume that the apparent Diversity Casting would be bad for the movie. After all, Nolan, an incredibly successful man, has pulled a lot of rabbits out of his hat before.
But watching it on opening day, I realized that "The Odyssey," a movie in large part how difficult travel was just within the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, was absolutely the wrong one to drop Koreans and others from distant continents randomly into the cast with zero explanation.
Oppenheimer was made in 2023. The Academy had standards but they didn't take effect (or full effect) until 2024. Oppenheimer more or less squeaked by. It's one of these things where the main cast only needs one POC but as you go to the smaller roles you need higher percentages. Ditto the percentages in the crews. I see the problem for a minority actor is the question becomes were they hired to check a box or because of their talent? No one is going to hire Samual Jackson or Denzel Washington to check a box. But the lower you go??? I think it's insulting to the actor and rather demeaning. Find me a POC. Don't care if they can act or not. Man or woman? Don't care, just need to check a box. I can think of a movie that could be made with a Black person in the lead because it would be based on a real person who was black, a woman and had an interesting life. Ditto a move about Black man that would be based on a real person. I can also think of a movie that would be based on a real historical adventure where no one would be a POC. You'd have to shoehorn one in. I agree with you about your analysis. The story of Odysseus is well known and you know how it ends. James Bond defeats the bad guys in the end. But the how? With Odysseus you know both. The way it is presented has to be the interesting part. You can make tweaks. See Nolan's Batman trilogy as an example. Some stories are interesting because you want to see how they end. Some are interesting for the journey. Sometimes both. Unfortunately sometimes neither.
But, Homer would have _mentioned_ that Odysseus's right hand man was from India, that one of his sailors was from an unknown land called Korea, that Penelope's blind servant, played by Latinx casting activist John Leguizamo, was from the far side of the Atlantic, and that Helen of Troy was from Kenya.
Why? Because that would add to the epic adventuresomeness of the tales, the way that the 1991 "Robin Hood" explains in detail that Morgan Freeman's Azeem met Kevin Costner in an evil sultan's dungeon in the Holy Land during the Crusades. In 1991 you weren't expected to believe that Azeem was just another indigenous native of Sherwood Forest.
But, Nolan portrays the Korean crewman as just another ho-hum member of the Korean-Ithacan community. Don't expect an epic tale of how he walked across 10,000 miles of Eurasia from Korea to get to Ithaca and of all his adventures along the way. That would be too much fun.
I agree this is true about Nolan's execution. And tbh I didn't think you were implying this, but the way many complaints turned out in public including imo Elon's is that you have to cast ancient movies "Race Correct" based on current-day X for-you-page polemics or else it's woke, etc.; I still don't think Nolan was doing it for classic "woke" reasons also, I think he's lazy and cowardly
I’m pretty sure that’s what BAP was saying in his critique. Nolan provided diversity for diversity’s sake instead of being more like Herzog in Cobra Verde.
There’s ample evidence of Gujarati traders in the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age. Koreans, not.
Sure. But Himesh Patel isn't playing a world-spanning Gujarati trader, he's playing, evidently, a run-of-the-mill member of the Indian-Ithacan community who has risen to Odysseus's second in command. Nobody in the movie notices he isn't Greek. Nobody asks him where he's from. That would be insensitive!
Obviously, a lot of ticket-buyers are as clueless as the characters in the movie.
But not all.
I think that is just normal now. In Villeneuve's Dune the small Fremen community Paul winds up with on Arrakis is racially diverse, but no effort is made to explain why or how that came about. It just is. I thought the real genius of Bridgerton was to take a costume drama set in 18th century Britain and add black people, so you could get your the fancy clothes and castles and "elevated" dialogue and romantic folderol together with a diverse cast. Iin that case, since the show is theoretically set in a real place and time, they had to provide an explanation for the diversity, but they didn't exactly knock themselves out making it plausible.
I take your point that a "diverse" group of people in Bronze Age Greece would be a lot less racially diverse than a random group of New Yorkers. But part of translation is making an old text understandable and relatable to a modern audience. People expect a decent-sized group to be multi-ethnic, whether or not that would make sense.
Having finally seen the movie, some thoughts follow:
1. For me the chief cultural significance of the movie was not so much DEI but —Passing on of the baton of Anglo high culture from RP British English to every day Americanism.
For most fantasy or period films, it used to be a sort of given that the characters would speak in British accents. You can look at Game of Thrones or Rome etc
Nolan subverts that.
It was an interesting creative choice.
2. But the choice didn’t really work for me. Telemachus saying “dad” or some of the black characters speaking in mild AAVE broke my suspension of disbelief.
Anne Hathaway could very well have been in Devil Wears Prada or Bride Wars.
3. The dialogues, as always with Nolan, were quite stilted. There were probably only two scenes where any emotions were invoked in me.
4. He also tried to bring in too much realism in a story that is supposed to be hyperbolic and grand. But this is probably more personal taste.
5. Having said that the realism was a bit inconsistent. These characters were supposed to have been starving but were still so swole.
6. Nolan typically excels in playing with time and creating puzzles. But the odyssey itself is quite non-linear and convoluted. So I don’t think he got a chance to be creative on that front.
7. The casting choices were interesting, particularly having Lyupita Nyongo play Helen. But I think he should not have cast other black actors at all in that case. Lyupita should have been a singular and unique beauty as Helen is supposed to have been. I agree with BAP on this.
Himesh Patel’s character, to be honest, didn’t seem to me to be Indian but a generic swarthoid that you do find along the rim of the Mediterranean and certainly deeper inland, like an Egyptian or a Mesopotamian. But you see these in Greece as well. The actor Jason Mantzoukas, for example, looks like a hippie graphic designer from Bangalore. Perhaps Himesh Patel was slightly too dark but someone like Hasan Minhaj wouldn’t have looked all that off the Greek melanin distribution curve.
Overall it was an entertaining movie but not something that I’ll remember.
PS - I did find it amusing that Himesh Patel’s character was essentially killed for eating beef. So may be he was an Indian after all.
The Eternal Gujarati (trader, not sacker of cities)
Just out of interest, assuming you mean they were seafaring traders: how did their ships enter the Med? Hauled overland were they?
During the Roman Empire, up to 120 Greek merchant ships per year sailed from the Red Sea to India on the newly discovered monsoon wind that made the eastbound voyage an easy six week trip straight downwind. Getting back to the Red Sea from India took about a year, for a two-year roundtrip.
But in the time of either Odysseus or Homer, trade was far less, although not unknown.
Ancient DNA data has so far been published on approaching 200 skeletons from pre-Hellenistic Empire Greece (before 323 BC). Every single set of human remains so far discovered has been racially a Caucasian (using Blumenbach's term for whites from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa) from the general vicinity of Greece.
No doubt there was an occasional Nubian from far up the Nile or Afghan metal merchant, but no doubt, the residents of Greece didn't look much like the racially random casting in Nolan's movie.
Exactly so: sure there might have been 'strange looking pipol' as bronze age courtiers or in mercenary armies but of course there were no koreans or indians. There may have been a stray nubian or two but surely they wouldn't have been regarded just as greeks with accompanying expectation that chroniclers like homer notice-while-not-noticing they were there.
Considering 'ethnic diversity' of the times (not racial diversity, which is not at all the same thing) there could certainly have been present caucasians, protocelts, nords, spaniards, balts etc.
BAP pretending that 'strange looking folk' = 'there could well have been all kinds of mystery meat milling about in agamemnon's/odyssesus's retinue' is unserious and only meant to irritate.
Why are you using ‘Latinx’? Weirdo.
I used "Latinx" because Latinx Casting Activist John Leguizamo frequently uses it:
From "Vibe:"
"John Leguizamo Embraces “Contentious” Term “Latinx”: “I Feel It’s Progressive”
"I feel like it sounds like a superhero, like X-Men. I just love the sound of it."
"By Jessica Bennett
"April 17, 2023 9:55am"
https://www.vibe.com/news/entertainment/john-leguizamo-embraces-latinx-term-1234749331/
I feel like I feel like
I do kinda like when white peepol just naively portray themselves as the hero in a foreign land like Last Samurai, Last of the Mohicans, White Jesus etc…, or just white wash the entire cast in their own image. I think it’s cute and self serving fun.
One of the best pieces of criticism I've ever read on this wonderful site. Thoroughly enjoyable and insightful in a way only Mr. BAP can. Thank you.
heheh thank; Castille? You like the sweet eggs they make in Avila and such
“‘I was full of dreams,’ (Napoleon) explained long afterwards. ‘I saw myself founding a new religion, marching into Asia riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hands the new Koran I would have written to suit my needs.’”
Europe and the world's future was robbed in 1815-on and since then abortive attempts and distortions....
Napoleon left France smaller than before the French Revolution and sacrificed millions in wars for no tangible benefit except satisfying his own ego. One could say that the spread of Cambacérès' Civil Code was an improvement, but that was not Napoleon and could have happened without the random killing of millions of young Europeans. The extremely horrible French Revolution luckily ended with him.
The unconfortable truth to say around here is that this 19th century preference for great men is out-dated. History shows the only way the human species has truly progressed (space, internet, AI, nuclear weapons) was not by submitting to the whims of ego-driven psychopaths and adventurers, but by sustained capacity of increased personal freedom and mass cooperation. Although great men have their place, there are divine and cosmic purposes that rise above any one individual.
The last 125 years has especially been the lesser types trying to create the same thing; I don’t think any of them have ever realized their “one-world government” is just that, an Empire… I know I’ve read that quote before but for some reason, the import of his religious idea got by me
I think I've got this Lord Kenneth Clarke quote right,
"To the end, he maintained that Europe would have been better off if it had been united under his rule. It may be true. But it could never happen, because the realistic ruler was dominated by the Romantic conqueror"
Something you are your readers might be interested in:
In Aristotle’s Ethics, concerning the Great Man (H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks):
p. 246 – “The man who overrates himself is conceited. The man who underrates himself is mean-minded. The man who is worthy only of small things and rates himself accordingly is sensible, but not high-minded.” . . .
[Honor, the highest thing, is offered to the gods.]
“But, he will not overestimate even the value of honour, still less of wealth and political power. These are inferior to honour, for men desire them for the sake of honour, and if a thing is desired for the sake of something else, it is necessarily inferior to that something else.
“He will not run risks for small ends, nor exert himself in small things, because he despises them: but he will run a great risk, and at a time of great danger will be reckless of his life, thinking that life is not worth living without honour. He will not be given to admiration, as there is nothing that strikes him as great. He will not bear a grudge: he will prefer to overlook injuries. He will not care either to be praised or to praise. He will, of course, not talk about other men in a personal way, nor speak evil of others, not even of his enemies, except for the express purpose of insulting them.”
The hero, since Aristotle, the pebble in the shoe of ethical philosophers.
Odysseus and his adventurers are fun and he doesn’t feel guilty about war or sacking cities. He’s proud of when he lies to get what he needs. The magic dames who bang him don’t seem to have it in for him or hate men. When he gets to the lotus eaters he’s the one that tells his men not to waste their lives away being potheads, not some trauma queen that wants to go on an lsd trip all day to “heal”.
His only real vice is that he gets high on his supply enough to anger the gods from time to time and he gets smacked down because of it and learns to respect them more.
And eventually 3 women: Calypso, Nausicaa & Athen, get him back home in time to reunite with Penelope. That's the romantic arc.
Also Matt Damon lacks sex appeal which doesn't help.
Both him and his friend Ben Affleck never had any secks appeal
Agree! But he was funny in Shakespeare in Love
I think Nolan has a more cowardly agenda: he implies that the openness-invites-abuse-which-eventually-leads-to-collapse cycle is natural and therefore the bleeding-heart pro-immigration liberals were still "right" as they fulfilled their part in this cycle, by being the torch-bearers of enlightened principles. "They were right but the world just wasn't ready for them", essentially, so they have to depart and then come back around later.
Nowhere does he show any understanding that masculine principles have inherent virtue.
Very thoughtful review. A tangent but, “Napoleon as a man out of time who stands not even opposed to, but far beyond and above, the petty concerns and small-souled struggle between the bourgeois and the socialist, the traditionalist reactionary and the other reactionary going by the name of the leftist.” is the perfect articulation of how I feel about him and why he has become a favorite historical subject in the last few years.
Revisiting just to add that this very idea of rising above and beyond petty concerns is what I want to chase more and more of. I need something to galvanize me more than just the endless issues of the day which I’ve wasted too much of my life’s energy on.
"Ellen “Elliott Rodgers” Page’s casting as a literal male ghost devoid of life-force without the sipping of sacrificial blood is appropriate; when Odysseus speaks to her in the underworld she actually does come off as uncanny ghostlike wraith male shade, mouth smeared with blood and a raspy delivery that would have been too frightening on a biological male. I don’t understand what the complaint is here, and maybe I’d expect the complaint to come from the trannie-world instead, as typecasting them."
Absolutely perfect insight.
Also Nolan cast her because he's loyal to his actors & she was excellent in Inception.
Wonderful review, and as a layman, I learned as I read. This is why I subscribe, and I think I can't quite get this anywhere else.
Heheh
Very good essay, This was my exact thoughts and twitter review also, it’s bad for film reasons and not political ones, and Bronze Age diversity isn’t a problem, but the lazy and uninspired approach this film takes toward it.
Favorite scene for me was hunting deer in swaying tall grass, and it transforms into naked dead man; this was height of magical Mediterranean feel, as imagined in dreams and neoclassical painting, and cyclops scene was excellent as well.
But much of the film is flat or outright poor and jumbled quality, and I laugh that the supposed trauma of Troy is simply killing enemy soldiers and a shrine maiden - nothing really - even the lamentable Troy showed baby being thrown off walls - to Nolan the height of man’s fury is running past a burning building.
"Modern reactionary religious conservatism isn’t only compatible with feminism but largely dependent on a female-led world."
I would like to hear or read this being elaborated on please Mr Bap
In Flaubert’s “Salammbo”, which I suspect most conservatives have never heard of, the mercenaries of Carthage are a mix of Gauls, Libyans, Bantus, Iberians, Greeks, etc… united as enemies of Rome. Flaubert meticulously researched the book; decades of study. Maybe he was 2020 woke and ahead of his time. Diverse groups did meet and were in service to Empires. Not just Carthage but Greece and Rome and the Ottomans. You don’t have to pick up a 19th century book to learn this either. Just not be so parochial. A bridge too far for most.
Excellent article - upon receiving the email I misread that it was from Bryan Caplan rather than BAP and became progressively more confused at how unusually insightful it was compared to his usual foggy misunderstandings. Soon all made sense.
there was recently published paper on a high status Andronovan woman from a kurgan in Kazakhstan. She was 6' 6" by US measure.
In Azerbaijan a 6' 7" man was found. These are obvious elite, duh in kurgans.
But most Andronovo are 5'7" to 5'10" much larger than baseline humans at the time.
While not a 1:1 pure descent, these are the Dorians. I buy the basic Drew's thesis. Find the metals, take them and make as many children as possible. Goes up to China.
Nolan is a different matter, but my impression with Ridley Scott is that he just really wants to film spectacular set pieces - often inspired by a piece of art he has seen (he famously agreed to make gladiator after being presented with the painting Pollice Verso for example).
He doesn’t seem to be bound to any sort of ideology, might be a bit senile now, and has no eye for a good script (as evidenced by some of his film choices in the second half of his career). The end result is that he gets used by progressive Hollywood types to make absurdly woke adaptations.
I still maintain that the battle scenes in napoleon are exhilarating, and even in the last duel he has a way of depicting a sense of kinetic combat that no other director can match.
Unrelated to your broader review, which was excellent, but nevertheless a point I thought worth raising
I really don't understand a lot of this criticism. Hamlet (the Dane) has been portrayed by white men, black men, woman. Yet no one seems to hyperventilate over it. There are classical productions, modernized productions. A lot of this seems to be the argument that in The Merchant of Venice only Jews should be allowed to portray Shylock and only Danes should be allowed to portray Hamlet. In Marvel Comics Fury is a white guy. In the movies he's a black guy. Does anyone really care? I don't think so. Most productions of Hamlet are heavily edited due to the length. I think the only movie that used the entire play is Branagh's. No one seems to mind very much one way or the other. Personally I think a lot of this carping, which it is more than criticism, is people are upset that Nolan made the movie that he wanted to make and not the movie that they thought he should make or wanted him to make or to see. The movie should be judged by itself. You can reference the original material and carp but the movie is what it is and should be judged by that. Not trying to justify his casting of certain actors or actresses. You can judge whether you think they succeeded in their performance. You judge a James Bond movie by the movie not by was Sean Connery better than Timothy Dalton. You may prefer one to the other but they were different movies made at different times. Most, if not all, stories from the long ago far away deal with people who had different mores, beliefs, ways of looking at the universe and trying to understand it in reference to the times they lived in. Judge the movie that you see, not the one you wanted to see or wanted him to make. It should stand and fall on its' own merits.
Movies have higher standards of visual verisimilitude than plays or operas.
And??? So the argument is that a black woman cannot or can play the part? No one can even decide if there were or were not black people there at the time. Under that standard no move should be made of Hamlet where Hamlet isn't a Dane, or McBeth not Scottish? Maybe only Greeks should have been in the movie. I think it's' been raised that the movie had no Greeks in it. Seems kind of an argument for ethnic cleansing in the movie industry.
Matt Damon and Tom Holland were not particularly good in "The Odyssey" and could have been replaced at no cost to the quality of the film, ideally with actors more ethnically suited for their roles. Damon was a lot of fun as a fat bureaucrat in "Oppenheimer," so his boring performance as the all time great character Odysseus was likely the fault of Nolan, not of Damon.
More broadly, casting Damon and Holland is symptomatic of why "The Odyssey" wasn't in Nolan's strong suit: Nolan is a man of the North Atlantic and doesn't have much of a liking for the scenery, colors, peoples, cultures, and hand gestures of the Mediterranean.
On the other hand, Nolan _is_ wildly popular. So it's unlikely any director, no matter how personally better suited for making "The Odyssey" he might be, would get a billion dollars worth of people to show up at the movies to see his "Odyssey." He's not the best-suited auteur to film Homer, but nobody else would sell half as many tickets, so he's at least twice as successful as anybody else would be to getting 21st Century people to watch a Homer movie.
It is a business and the purpose of a business is to make money. There is an old joke that the East European Jews who founded Hollywood made a lot of money by selling movies to Midwestern Protestants starring and about Urban Roman Catholics. Whatever works.
There has been a lot of ethnic cleansing of whites from nonwhite roles over the last 50 or so years. John Wayne would never get cast as Genghis Khan in 2026 like he did in 1956.
Two arguments are advanced for the increasing ban on white actors playing non-white characters:
One is greater realism of casting.
The other is that whites are bad and should suffer for the sins of their ancestors.
The arguments appear to be contradictory, but lots of people don't notice these days.
There is also another reason that I saw mentioned only in one place. Haven't had the time to look into it very much. According to what I read in order to have a movie eligible for an Oscar it has to meet certain criteria. That includes a defined minimum percentage of how many POC are in lead roles as well as secondary roles. If the number is not enough then the movie doesn't make the cut and is not eligible for an Oscar. Don't know if that applies to the entire movie or only that category. If true that may have and probably did influence the casting though I doubt anyone would admit it. Also no idea if (true) that also covers Emmy's Golden Globes, etc. But it does cast a different light on the casting, so to speak.
Nolan's "Oppenheimer" swept the Oscars with virtually no Diversity Casting.
Nolan met the American race quotas by hiring more BIPoC interns to get his coffee. (British race quotas might be harder to evade.)
I advised my readers on May 22, 2026 not to assume that the apparent Diversity Casting would be bad for the movie. After all, Nolan, an incredibly successful man, has pulled a lot of rabbits out of his hat before.
But watching it on opening day, I realized that "The Odyssey," a movie in large part how difficult travel was just within the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, was absolutely the wrong one to drop Koreans and others from distant continents randomly into the cast with zero explanation.
Oppenheimer was made in 2023. The Academy had standards but they didn't take effect (or full effect) until 2024. Oppenheimer more or less squeaked by. It's one of these things where the main cast only needs one POC but as you go to the smaller roles you need higher percentages. Ditto the percentages in the crews. I see the problem for a minority actor is the question becomes were they hired to check a box or because of their talent? No one is going to hire Samual Jackson or Denzel Washington to check a box. But the lower you go??? I think it's insulting to the actor and rather demeaning. Find me a POC. Don't care if they can act or not. Man or woman? Don't care, just need to check a box. I can think of a movie that could be made with a Black person in the lead because it would be based on a real person who was black, a woman and had an interesting life. Ditto a move about Black man that would be based on a real person. I can also think of a movie that would be based on a real historical adventure where no one would be a POC. You'd have to shoehorn one in. I agree with you about your analysis. The story of Odysseus is well known and you know how it ends. James Bond defeats the bad guys in the end. But the how? With Odysseus you know both. The way it is presented has to be the interesting part. You can make tweaks. See Nolan's Batman trilogy as an example. Some stories are interesting because you want to see how they end. Some are interesting for the journey. Sometimes both. Unfortunately sometimes neither.
They are not the same Greeks. Note that this does not mean that matt damon was the right actor to play odysseus.
I have decided: there were no black people there at the time.
ok?