Nolan’s latest epic seems to be attracting more criticism than usual. We’re breaking down the major complaints — and whether they matter.

Why everyone’s arguing about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Nolan’s latest epic seems to be attracting more criticism than usual. We’re breaking down the major complaints — and whether they matter.

July 14, 2026 4:01 p.m. ET

Matt Damon as Odysseus in ‘The Odyssey’. Credit:

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

- Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, *The Odyssey*, is drawing more backlash than usual.

- Based on Homer’s epic, the film is being criticized for a supposed lack of “historical accuracy,” its costuming, and casting choices.

- Nolan and the cast have responded to the criticisms, some of which are misguided and misinformed.

Christopher Nolan’s *The Odyssey *is *the* event film of the summer, but not everyone is excited for the director’s new blockbuster epic.

The release of a new film from Nolan is always a major event. With his latest effort, the filmmaker behind cerebral blockbusters such as *Oppenheimer* (2023) and *Inception* (2010) is taking a crack at one of the oldest pieces of literature and a literal epic: Homer’s *Odyssey*. Featuring an all-star cast that includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Lupita Nyong’o, *The Odyssey* follows Odysseus on his arduous journey home to Ithaca after a decade in the Trojan War.

As with any adaptation, there are bound to be criticisms about the fidelity (or lack thereof) to the source material and quibbles with changes made in translation from page to screen. And while Nolan has directed many commercially and critically successful films, his detractors can be just as vocal as his admirers. Something unusual is happening with *The Odyssey*, though — it’s attracting more intense scrutiny and bad-faith criticisms than the average Nolan film. With *Oppenheimer*, much of the criticism concerned its depiction of women and the lack of a Japanese perspective with regards to the impact of the atomic bomb. These were reasonable criticisms that fostered interesting conversations (if you avoided certain corners of the internet, of course).

*The Odyssey*’s backlash is different, with certain commentators attempting to use Nolan’s film as their own Trojan Horse to drum up discourse about preexisting cultural grievances. As its July 17 release approaches, you may have heard about the “controversies” surrounding *The Odyssey*. Below, we take a look at the major criticisms about Nolan’s latest film, how the director and cast have responded to them, and whether they actually matter.

Claim: The Odyssey isn’t historically accurate

Matt Damon as Odysseus and Himesh Patel as Eurylochus in ‘The Odyssey’.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

It’s important to get one thing straight: *The Odyssey* is based on an ancient Greek epic written by Homer in the 8th or 7th century BC and set in the 12th century BC — about 3,000 years ago. Homer wasn’t even writing about *his* contemporary time, and had no firsthand knowledge of an era that predated his by 500 years. It is also — and this is equally important — a mythic poem involving gods and creatures, like a 20-foot-tall Cyclops. It is a fantastical work of fiction.

That said, when the first trailer and images for *The Odyssey* were released, some history nerds took issue with the costuming and production design. Odysseus’ more conventional Spartan look with a plumed helmet and red cape were criticized as both inaccurate for the time period and unfaithful to the source material; in the *Iliad*, Homer describes Odysseus’ helmet as being made of leather and rows of boar tusks. Meanwhile, the matte black armor and helmet worn by Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), the king of Mycenae, was compared unfavorably to the bulky Batsuit in Nolan’s *The Dark Knight* trilogy.

Speaking with *TIME*, Nolan noted that our knowledge of the Bronze Age comes from “very fragmentary archaeological records.” He also defended Agamemnon’s black armor. “There are Mycenaean daggers that are blackened bronze,” he explained. “The theory is they probably could have blackened bronze in those days. You take bronze, you add more gold and silver to it and then use sulfur.”

“With Agamemnon,” he continued, “Ellen [Mirojnick], our costume designer, is trying to communicate how elevated he is relative to everyone else. You do that through materials that would be very expensive.”

Also at issue in *The Odyssey* is the large ship Odysseus and his men sail on, with some critics comparing it to a Viking longship. There’s a reason for that: Nolan used an authentic Viking ship his team found in Norway. “We needed something wooden-hulled, built with ancient technology that could be out there in open ocean water, in giant swells, and the Draken has crossed the Atlantic,” Nolan told the *Los Angeles Times*. “We shot like it was a documentary,” he added. “The actors learned how to sail and how to row and the boat’s 26-man crew were dressed as extras and incorporated into the movie.”

It may not be an *authentic* Greek warship, but it sure sounds like Nolan, known for embracing the practical whenever possible, made some pretty thoughtful choices where realism is concerned.

Claim: The language is too informal and modern

Tom Holland as Telemachus in ‘The Odyssey’.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Much of the criticism around the language in *The Odyssey* has to do with one word in the trailer: “dad.” Telemachus’ (Tom Holland) use of “dad” in reference to his father, Odysseus, has been derided as too informal and modern for an adaptation of an ancient Greek epic. When writing the screenplay, Nolan said that he was more concerned with using “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people.”

“I was maybe being naïve,” the filmmaker conceded, “it might bite me on the ass, but I wanted an earthy narrative. To me it was a no-brainer.”

When asked about the film’s use of modern language and the word “dad” in particular, Holland told Channel 4, “I wouldn’t have even said ‘father’ back in the day, would I? It would’ve been Greek.’”

Adam Cooper, director of the linguistics program at Northeastern University, defended Nolan’s use of the more informal term, pointing out that older Greek vocabulary probably had an equivalent. “‘[Dad]’ is meant to approximate something we would have very much expected to have existed in ancient Greek, as in any language, where there are close social bonds between parents and children,” Cooper said in an interview with the university’s Northeastern Global News.

A similar complaint has been lobbed at the use of American accents in *The Odyssey*, with most of the cast — including the Brits — adopting an American accent rather than a British one, which has long been the default for historical epics. But a British accent wouldn’t be “historically accurate” either, given that the story takes place in ancient Greece. Since we don’t know what ancient Greek people actually sounded like, it’s not exactly feasible to recreate it in 2026 — presumably not without *years* of linguistics research.

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Claim: The casting isn’t faithful to the source material

Lupita Nyong’o at the 5th Annual Academy Museum Gala held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Oct. 18, 2025.

Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty

*The Odyssey*’s cast is relatively diverse and includes Zendaya, Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Corey Hawkins, the rapper Travis Scott (appropriately cast as a bard), and most notably, Lupita Nyong’o, who plays both Helen of Troy and her sister, Clytemnestra.

The casting backlash gained traction on social media earlier this year, and while it can’t be attributed to a single source, Elon Musk has (unsurprisingly) been extremely active in promoting racist and transphobic criticisms of Nolan’s casting choices — in particular, his casting of Page as a soldier and of Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, whose abduction sparks the Trojan War. Homer does not offer a detailed description of Helen in the *Odyssey*, which describes her as “beautiful-haired” and “white-armed.” Even these words, translated from ancient Greek by modern writers, are open to interpretation.

Musk has shared multiple posts on X from right-wing blogger Matt Walsh, whose bad-faith criticisms of *The Odyssey *include accusing Nolan of being a “coward” for casting a Black woman. “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” Walsh wrote in May. “But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman.”

“True,” replied Musk, who additionally called Nolan an “anti-white racist” and said that the filmmaker was “pissing on Homer’s grave.” In actuality, Homer’s *Odyssey* never describes Helen as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” That description is paraphrased from Sappho, an ancient Greek poet — who also happened to be a woman.

In a conversation with *The Telegraph*, Nolan dismissed the casting backlash as “irrelevant,” and said that it “comes with the territory.”

“I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman,” the filmmaker continued. “When I came on to *Batman Begins*, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”

Nyong’o similarly dismissed the casting complaints in May, shortly after Musk’s posting spree. “I’m very supportive of [Nolan]’s intention with it and with the version of this story that he is telling,” she told *Elle*. “Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defense. The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not.”

Classicist and author Daniel Mendelsohn, who published his own popular translation of the *Odyssey*, has frequently commented on the casting backlash. Defending Nolan in a recent *New York Times* essay, Mendelsohn said that the filmmaker “is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world.”

To that end, Nolan’s additional comments to *The Telegraph* feel relevant. “All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way,” Nolan said. “It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is.”

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