Some controversies are legitimate and important. Some are sensational and wild. And some are just stupid and fake.
It’s in the last category that MAGA’s uproar about The Odyssey belongs—as ultimately proven by the film itself.
Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning biopic blockbuster Oppenheimer is set to be this weekend’s box-office champion, with estimates suggesting that, thanks in part to rave reviews—including my own—it could be only the third 2026 release to debut with more than $100 million.
Clearly, that means the right-wing attempt to smear the epic ahead of its premiere has flopped. Yet those efforts appear particularly ridiculous to anyone who’s already seen the film—such as yours truly—given that they’re predicated on misguided and/or outright incorrect gripes.
MAGA began getting worked up about The Odyssey in May over two separate casting choices. The first was that Nolan selected Lupita Nyong’o, who is Black and of Kenyan descent, to play Helen of Troy, whom they claimed was historically white.
The second was that The Dark Knight auteur picked Elliot Page—who previously co-starred in his Inception—to embody Achilles, the greatest of all Greek warriors, despite being a transgender man. The response was swift and outraged, with those respective decisions decried by Newsmax host Rob Finnerty as a “rewriting of history” and by Elon Musk as “one of the dumbest and twisted things I’ve ever heard.”
It’s not difficult to identify the underlying prejudices and culture-war incitements at the heart of these objections, which are rooted in protests against DEI and wokeism. However, Nolan’s film, by its very nature, renders them silly and empty.
First, as Nyong’o herself has pointed out, Helen of Troy is a mythological character, not a real person, and her skin color is never definitively specified in Homer’s original.
While it’s true that she’s traditionally been portrayed in fiction as white, Black actresses have previously played her, including Eartha Kitt in Orsen Welles’ 1950 stage production of Dr. Faustas and Galyn Görg in TV’s Xena: Warrior Princess.
Moreover, Nyong’o’s Blackness is inconsequential to the tale at hand. Nolan doesn’t use it to add any novel racial dynamics to his source material, nor does it illogically contradict the narrative’s fundamental dynamics.
Then there’s the fact that Nyong’o is a talented Academy Award-winning actress who’s widely considered to be extremely attractive, making her more than suitable to personify “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Take all of that into account alongside Helen being arguably the most peripheral of The Odyssey’s famous characters—she appears for merely a few minutes in the 173-minute film (as does Clytemnestra, Helen’s sister and Agamemnon’s wife, whom Nyong’o also plays)—and this brouhaha comes across as simply a tempest in a teapot.
If the Nyong’o hullabaloo is inane, though, it pales in comparison to that surrounding Page’s participation in The Odyssey, which drove Elon Musk into a furious days-long tweeting frenzy about the issue.
Musk and company’s problem was that Page, a transgender man, was unfit to be Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War. Yet all this commotion preceded any official word about who Page was actually playing. And guess what? Page isn’t Achilles in The Odyssey. He’s Sinon, Odysseus’ cousin, who is a key figure in the Trojan Horse ruse. Which means that all this righteous right-wing indignation was much ado about literally nothing.
It’s no surprise that The Odyssey, by its very nature, refutes MAGA’s pre-release censures, since this campaign’s real objective wasn’t art criticism but, rather, riling up the base with incendiary culture-war provocations.
Nonetheless, it’s amusing to see the degree to which MAGA’s critiques fall apart in the face of Nolan’s finished product. Consider it a familiar lesson: judging a book by its cover—or a film by its trailer or publicity photographs—is a surefire way to be wrong.
