Socialists Find an Unlikely Political Ally in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

It has been, by any definition of the term, a good year for Sir Christopher Nolan. Not only has his Homer adaptation “The Odyssey” grossed around $1.8 billion at the international box office, making it one of the ten highest-earning films of all time — and, by a considerable margin, the highest-grossing R-rated picture ever made — but it is also tipped to be a frontrunner at next year’s Oscars, partly because of its intrinsic excellence and also partly because many other supposed contenders (step forward, “Digger”) have crashed and burned.

This is all the more impressive because of the concerted hate campaign directed towards Mr. Nolan and his film in the months before release. Spearheaded by Elon Musk on his X platform, naysayers rubbished the picture for its supposedly woke casting, including Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as the doomed Greek soldier Sinon. And yet “The Odyssey” has wound up perhaps 2026’s most conspicuous success story.

That’s not to say that its triumph has been an uncontroversial one. Many viewers have professed themselves disappointed and underwhelmed by the picture, especially if they were not able to view it in Nolan’s preferred format of IMAX 70mm  — a privilege only offered to a relative few, who have been selling out the large-scale formats for months now – and (although this is luxury nitpicking of the most ridiculous kind) it occupies “only” the 64th position of the greatest films ever on the IMDB Top 250, far below the more sainted likes of “The Dark Knight” (number 3),” Inception” (11), and “Interstellar” (17), as well, more surprisingly, as the soon-to-be-re-released “The Prestige”(42).