The last dying gasp from Hollywood...

Editor's note: ...and the cultural Marxist woke psychotics who have demonstrated they are brain diseased and insanely envious of white culture. As has been correctly stated elsewhere, when Americans go through this expected economic and financial collapse that is being anticipated related to energy and the Straight of Hormuz, are they really going to give a damn about Hollywood movies and woke culture? Another interpretation of this movie Odyssey can be looked at as a "defining cultural moment", where future observers will divide history into the periods before and after its release. The ensuing intense debates surrounding this movie, including questions of casting, fidelity to Homer, and artistic interpretation, are going to become a rallying point that will force Americans to clarify their positions and prepare for subsequent cultural conflicts. The US Army motto "This we'll defend," frames the film and the broader defense of classical Western stories as something worth protecting in an ongoing culture war.

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Matt Damon as Odysseus? You cannot be serious!

by Miles Mathis

July 19, 2026

Not that I think it matters much, but I remind you going in I know quite a bit about this subject. I was the best student in the nation for two years in highschool in classics, having the high score on the Nation Junior Classical League pentathlon test, which includes questions of both Latin and Greek history and literature. I first read the Iliad and Odyssey at age 16, along with the Theogony, Aeneid, and the major Greek plays. I scored fifth in the nation in classic literature. I then double majored in Philosophy and Classics (mostly Latin) at the University of Texas, graduating in 1984 at the age of 20 Phi Beta Kappa and Summa cum Laude. I have kept up my studies since then and still read my Horace. So for those already saying "what the eff do I know about it?" that's what. Unlike all the people on Youtube, I actually know how to pronounce all these names.

I have already seen a lot of negative commentary on the casting of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, but even the worst of it isn't strong enough to suit me. To start with, Matt Damon is mostly given a pass, getting hit for being too gloomy and uncharismatic at worst. Odysseus is supposed to be brilliant and cunning and heroic, and Damon is just . . . Matt Damon, with his usual one-note hangdog-flat delivery. He is still basically Will Hunting, now with a graying beard. But it is so much worse than that, because even in the case Damon could act and had been given a script that wasn't dogmeat, he still would have been hugely miscast just for his looks. Odysseus was a huge strapping fellow, tall and muscular, more in the mould of Jason Momoa, except double his IQ. No, Odysseus wasn't as tall as the very tall Agamemnon, but Homer says he was stronger and more imposing, with a very broad chest and long curly locks. He was the best wrestler of the Greeks, taking the much younger and taller Ajax to an unexpected draw.

Are you with me yet? Miscast of the century, making even a black Helen of Troy look like a good choice by comparison. Wikipedia lists Damon as 5'10", but that is the usual Hollywood joke. He isn't within three inches of that barefoot. He is small and unimposing, with almost zero charisma, and although we see he went on a PED binge for this part, that didn't help other than stripping fat off his torso and giving him some biceps. He still has no presence onscreen, which isn't a great way to play Odysseus. This is a problem for many many reasons, but the first of them in the movie may be that we have no explanation why all these goddesses and nymphs would keep falling in love with Odysseus and kidnapping him and giving him help. Had he been played by Jason Momoa we might begin to understand it, but with Damon we haven't a clue. Damon is only marginally better as Odysseus than Rob Schneider would have been. Nolan tries to hide this as usual by shooting the whole movie in the dark, with the microphones all under a hay bale, but it doesn't really work.

The other casting choice not being roasted hot enough to suit me is the 50-year-old Charlize Theron as the 16-year-old Calypso. No, Homer did not give Calypso's age, but she was a nymph and this is what nymphs look like:

That is Waterhouse's Hylas and Nymphs, which was removed from the walls of the Manchester Art Gallery in 2018, along with all postcards in the giftshop, after some women complained it depicted pedophilia. Which it doesn't: those slippery little nymphs are kidnapping the beautiful Hylas, not the reverse. And they aren't children, as you can tell by their bodies as well as their desires. But that story tells you why Calypso couldn't be played by an age-appropriate girl in 2026: pairing her with a 55-year-old Matt Damon would have set Hollywood and the woke media on fire, from both sides, red and blue. So instead we have the icy, post-menopausal, dyed and plastic Theron allegedly kidnapping Odysseus as her sex toy. Does it work? NO. She and Damon have all the chemistry of tunafish and maple syrup. Theron needs to be taking over the Cruella De Vil role from Glenn Close, not trying to play Calypso.

We find the opposite problem with Zendaya as Athena, since she is 29 and can play younger. She is admittedly beautiful: that's how she got where she is, of course. But she isn't Athena. Maybe Cassandra or Laodice, but never Athena. She, too, is listed as 178cm or 5'10”, which is the same joke again. She may be near that in 4-inch pumps, but she looks small and plays smaller onscreen. She is the opposite of statuesque. Athena was a bit manly, being the goddess of war always depicted with her helmet, shield, and spear, so she could have been played by some tall crypto-lesbian Hollywood actress in her 30s. [Think Geena Davis 30 or 40 years ago. Or Gal Gadot, who is Israeli but looks Greek. You have to wonder how that woman failed to be cast in this movie in some role. Must have had something to do with Snow White, don't you think? Or maybe she was offered the part and wisely refused it.] Instead, Nolan decides to invert that as well, though I have no idea why. He just had to go obscenely against type with every choice, I guess, as the best way to mess with your head.

The ultimate proof of that is Lupita Nyong'o, who some white guys are calling ugly, which certainly isn't helping. She is very beautiful and wouldn't have gotten where she is otherwise. But at 43 she is too old to play Helen, and it goes without saying Helen wasn't black. Neither was Clytemnestra, whom Nolan sells as her twin sister. But they were half-sisters and not twins, so this doesn't work no matter what color she is. Helen's father was Zeus while Clytemnestra's was Tyndareus, King of Sparta, so obviously you would expect Helen to be much more spectacular.

It is really bothersome to many that Nolan thought he was qualified to change so many things here, rewriting one of the greatest adventure stories of all time to suit a "modern audience", especially when the original story would have worked much better. We can see why he didn't have men tied to the undersides of rams in the Cyclops scene—that wouldn't be possible since rams are too small—but for the rest of this it is a mystery. Why not have Odysseus say he was "no man", the most clever and memorable part of the entire tale? Why exchange Achilles for Sinon in Hades? Why not show us the pretty Sirens? Why create the Laestrygonians and Charybdis with CGI but then pretend you couldn't do the same with Scylla, out of some nod to purity? And why insert many minutes of Odysseus preachifying at the end about the fall of the Bronze Age, when he couldn't have had that kind of hindsight since he was inside it? That was clunky, unnecessary, and added another 20 minutes to the run-time, which could have been used earlier for the Lotus Eaters, Nausicaa, Hermes, Aphrodite, and a hundred other things. But it was vintage Nolan pretension and heavy-handedness, trying to give the whole thing a weight it didn't have by filming Damon grimacing in the dark to mood music, with cuts to slaughter in Troy.

Please go to Updates to read the entire essay and to view images embedded in the essay.
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If this ridiculous movie is $400 million in the hole why not we help make it an even $500 million in the hole?

BREAKING: The Odyssey is FAKING ticket sales by buying up theaters/seats (Fraud) to make the movie look like a success (already $400 million in the hole) moviegoers are reporting having to take terrible seats (because full) but when they show up the theaters are mostly empty. pic.twitter.com/UR8Q78LYv2

— MR. OBVIOUS (@ObviousRises) July 20, 2026

No insult to Black Americans but it has been observed that it is because of white (basically European and English) culture and civilization, what's left of it anyway, that many Black Americans have been able to thrive as well as they have where now the attitude is the destructive idea of entitlement:

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is the worst movie that Hollywood gave us in the last decade. Black people in ancient Greece, transgenders, American accents, ridiculous armors, feminism and Spider Man make this woke movie awful. It is time to end wokeism in Hollywood once and for… pic.twitter.com/EKln2qLPVq

— ×͜× (@RuggedRyan_) July 18, 2026

The first major Hollywood-associated feature film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey was the 1954 Italian-French-US co-production Ulysses (released in the US in 1955 by Paramount), starring Kirk Douglas as the title character. The irony is, Kirk Douglas was Jewish and was born Issur Danielovitch to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and was raised in the Jewish faith, later reconnecting more deeply with his heritage later in life. Well Matt Damon, you have some big sandals to fill:

In this ongoing culture war there is always more:

The following quote is relevant...