Picture a boy. He’s seven years old, small for his age, standing in the sun-baked dust of an ancient palace courtyard.
He is looking at a horse. But not just any horse. This is the King Horse. A towering, magnificent stallion, wild-eyed, muscle-bound, and vibrating with primal power.
Earlier, the boy escaped into the enclosure of the King Horse. This tiny boy, alone, faced the massive animal and even fed him salt. Beast and boy formed a spiritual kinship.
Now, eve...
Picture a boy. He’s seven years old, small for his age, standing in the sun-baked dust of an ancient palace courtyard.
He is looking at a horse. But not just any horse. This is the King Horse. A towering, magnificent stallion, wild-eyed, muscle-bound, and vibrating with primal power.
Earlier, the boy escaped into the enclosure of the King Horse. This tiny boy, alone, faced the massive animal and even fed him salt. Beast and boy formed a spiritual kinship.
Now, everyone who has seen a Disney movie knows what happens next. They are going to form an unbreakable, egalitarian bond, run across the sunlit beaches of the Aegean, and embark on a sweeping, heartwarming adventure to discover the true meaning of friendship –
– the boy’s grandfather steps forward, raises a bronze blade, grips the stallion by the mane, and calmly slits the animal’s throat.
The horse collapses in a geyser of hot blood. And the boy? He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t look away. He stands perfectly still, breathing in the copper stench of the arterial spray, and he learns from it. Because in this world, to be a man is to kill. And to be a king is to kill other kings.
Because this ain’t Disney. This is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die.
And you can’t handle the Greeks.
Well, here we are. After months, years even, of hype, on July 16th 2026, Christopher Nolan released his $250 million adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon. It is the biggest cinematic event of the summer. And I am just about to watch it.
But. Before I say anything I am going to hand you over to Damo (Past) who has NOT seen it, but is going to make 3 predictions about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey…
#
…that this will be the *tamest” ever telling of Homer’s epic.
The big story in the days before The Odyssey released was the search for tickets to see Nolan’s new IMAX spectacle in full resolution, possible in only 41 cinemas worldwide.
Because Nolan is the master of the technical spectacle. Nobody knows how to shoot 65mm IMAX format like Nolan. He is famed for shooting entirely on celluloid, packing the cinema screen with visual splendour.
But as a fully rounded creator, Nolan is the most overrated auteur director of the century. Think of Nolan as the rich man’s Michael Bay. Both specialise in IMAX spectacle, but Nolan comes packaged for a more upwardly mobile demographic. Scifi action blockbusters, with a patina of philosophical depth, but nothing to make it feel too much like homework.
Nolan struggles as a storyteller. But he compensates for this by bolstering every story with a narrative gimmick. Time runs backwards. Memories recompiled. Dreams within dreams. When people call Nolan movies clever, they mean clever like Sudoku. Nolan gives us logic puzzles we can feel smart for solving, to cover the lack of anything to make us actually feel.
So Nolan’s Odyssey is guaranteed to be visually magnificent. But assuming he doesn’t restructure Homer into seven criss-crossing timelines…which he very well might…what will Nolan’s Odyssey…be?
Well, I think we can predict it will be incredibly tame.
Nolan’s entire MO, his Modus Operandi, is to take the most out there, crazy, mind-bending mythic stories, and make the tamest possible version.
Just look at the filmography.
Interstellar. You have cosmic horror, infinite black holes, relativity, and a higher-dimensional future humanity reaching back to manipulate our present through a tesseract. This movie should shatter the human ego. It should be Silent Running on acid. 2001 on amphetamines.
Instead…Nolan uses a 5th-dimensional construct to deliver a Church of England sermon: “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” The infinite, terrifying universe is entirely subordinated to a Sad Dad trying to get back to his daughter’s bedroom.
Inception. The human subconscious is a realm of Jungian madness, primal terror, and chaotic sexuality. Think of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, where the dream world is a psychotic, hyper-colored parade of living dolls and fractured identities.
But instead Nolan turns the human subconscious into a corporate training session. Nolan’s dreamlogic operates on administrative rules and looks like a financial services head office. This is a deep dive into the collective unconscious for people who are too terrified to actually explore the collective unconscious.
The Dark Knight. Let’s give Nolan credit that he’s working with the established lore of Batman. But nonetheless this is a meticulously crafted movie trilogy about the broiling class war of modern life…that takes the side of a privileged son of the oligarchy, the ultimate protector of neoliberal capitalism, a billionaire who uses illegal, tech-authoritarian mass surveillance to defend the banking system against a guy in clown makeup.
Dunkirk is a requiem for the death of the English empire that never stops bashing the audience in the eardrums with Elgar. Oppenheimer is a movie about atomic weapons that doesn’t show you what the weapons were used for.
Nolan tames the political by presenting it as the purely personal. He takes the most terrifying, infinite concepts and shrinks them down until they fit neatly into a shopping mall multiplex and suburban living room widescreen tv.
Because Nolan absolutely knows his job. He’s the peak Hollywood director of IMAX spectaculars because his movies are entirely inoffensive to the widest possible audience.
So what happens when the tamest director directs the wildest myth?
Let’s make some predictions.
Prediction One: The Sad Dad Metric
The historical Odysseus is a terrifying, PTSD-scarred, slave owning Bronze Age pirate warlord. He is defined by his cunning—Metis—and his casual brutality. As the Odyssey opens he is responsible for the brutal murder of tens of thousands of humans. Nolan will manage to ignore this. The reason you cast Matt Damon is so he can be the everyman, ordinary guy. A hyper-competent, slightly stressed project manager whose sole drive is preserving his nuclear family. He will be a “Sad Dad” trying to get back to the suburbs.
Prediction Two: The Sanitized Gods
To the Bronze Age Greeks, the gods were not metaphors. They were feral, sociopathic warlords who lived in the sky and demanded blood. Poseidon isn’t just “the ocean”—he is chaotic, irrational, world-ending rage. But Christopher Nolan cannot handle the irrational. He will sanitize the divine into a solvable physics equation. Poseidon won’t be a terrifying sea god, he will be a localized weather anomaly. No magic. No divine terror. Just an extreme weather event that Matt Damon can defeat with his middle management logistical skills.
Prediction Three: The Erasure of the Bedroom
The classical Greek world was fundamentally driven by unapologetic polyamory and aristocratic, same-sex shagging. The Greeks literally had a word for a man whose entire existence was defined by domestication among women and children: a slave. But the bourgeois mind cannot process a hero who exists outside the nuclear family. Nolan’s Odyssey will completely erase the feral sexuality of the ancient world. Odysseus’s seven-year stint on Calypso’s island won’t be a captive sexcapade; it will be framed like an awkward corporate retreat he couldn’t leave due to bad weather. The entire film will be a $150 million homage to the egalitarian, heterosexual household.
Future Damo is going to step in and grade these predictions the second he walks out of the cinema. But before we get to the scoreboard, we need to ask the structural question.
Why is Christopher Nolan so desperate to domesticate the sublime? Why must he constantly shrink the terrifying universe into a manageable, suburban puzzle box?
To understand that, we need to understand what made him the Bourgeois Auteur.
For a brief, glorious window from the late 1950s through the 1980s, British culture was effectively hijacked by
the working class.
This was the result of the post-WWII welfare state, the expansion of state schools, and robust municipal arts funding. Suddenly, kids from council estates in Liverpool or the industrial Midlands had the time and institutional backing to experiment.
You got The Beatles. You got the “Angry Young Men” of cinema—actors like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, later, Gary Oldman. You got directors who understood the dirt under the fingernails of society. Their art was loud, it was deeply suspicious of authority, and it completely shattered the stiff-upper-lip, middle class monopoly over British culture. But when Johnny Rotten wailed God Save The Queen, The Fascist Regime in 1977, nobody knew the working class artists were about to be butchered.
Thatcherism destroyed the welfare state, crippled state education and slashed arts funding. Over the following decades of austerity, London went from a city bubbling with rebel artist energy to a billionaire’s playground. The cost of living skyrocketed. Today, surviving the requisite decade of unpaid internships and low-paying fringe theater to become a director requires a private safety net.
The “Bank of Mum and Dad” became the primary arts grant in the UK. And the result is that the culture was recaptured.
Taken away from the angry, rebellious working class.
And given back to the wealthy, comfortable bourgeoisie.
The acting world is now dominated by Eton and Harrow alumni: Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston. And the directing world is dominated by privileged sons like Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan.
By the early 2000s, British culture was incapable of giving the world another Ken Loach.
Instead we got Chris Nolan.
Christopher Nolan was educated at Haileybury, a highly elite independent boarding school in Hertfordshire. His background is the absolute epitome of the comfortable, secure English upper-middle class. And this socioeconomic reality perfectly explains his cinematic aesthetic, which we can call The Aesthetic of Control.
When art is made by people who have never faced genuine existential poverty or class precarity, the art loses its sense of danger. It becomes highly technical, highly polished, profoundly polite and utterley controlled.
If working class cinema is a 16mm home camera pointed at gritty reality, bourgeois cinema is obsessing over the precise exposure levels of 65mm celluloid depicting a series of fantastical scenes that never even existed.
Instead of asking, what does this film change, we ask, where can I buy a ticket for the full IMAX experience.
The art of the 20th century that terrified and changed the culture is all working class. Hiphop. Graffitti. The dogtown skateboarders. Grindhouse cinema. Punk. Metal. Science fiction, my art, until it was turned into polite lit-fic for the Booker Prize.
Co-opted by the bourgeois middle class.
Chris Nolan is the premiere director of science fiction IMAX blockbusters. But as a science fiction storyteller he is shockingly dull. Because his movies co-opt sci-fi working class energy, stories written to blow the minds of people trapped in systems we could not control, and turn them into tame domestic dramas for the bourgeois imagination.
And a prep-school educated, bourgeois auteur backed by a billion-dollar Hollywood studio is structurally incapable of handling the terrifying, blood-soaked madness of the Bronze Age Greeks.
HOMER: You want answers?
DAMO: I think I’m entitled!
HOMER: You want answers?!
DAMO: I want the truth…of the Bronze Age Greeks!
HOMER:
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE GREEKS! Boy, we live in a world built on myths, and those myths were written by mad blind prophets about men who fought naked with bronze spears. Who’s gonna translate that madness for the modern mind? You Damien Walter? You Christopher Nolan?
I have a greater responsibility to mythic history than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your sanitized, relatable heroes, and you curse the Bronze Age hierarchy. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that the brutal soul of the Bronze Age warrior, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, remains the foundation of the modern male psyche.
We use words like Arete. Moira. Kleos. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defying the gods and conquering the Aegean. You use them to sell popcorn in the suburbs.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain classical paiderastia or the sacrifice of the King Horse to a suburban house husband who rises and sleeps under the psychological structures of the Hero’s Journey I invented, and then questions the brutal, aristocratic mode in which I created it!!
I would rather you just said “thank you”, watched your four-quadrant corporate slop, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a hoplon shield, march in the phalanx, and accept your fate. Either way, I don’t give a damn what egalitarian representation you think you are entitled to!
DAMO: Did you lock 108 suitors in a dining hall and slaughter them?
HOMER: I sang the song the Muse commanded–
DAMO: Did you slaughter the suitors?!
HOMER: YOU’RE GODS BE DAMNED RIGHT I DID!
Because we can’t handle the Greeks.
We systematically launder ancient texts because their reality terrifies our modern minds. The Bronze Age psyche is like a ravenous wolf. And for the last two centuries, bourgeois culture has desperately tried to put that wolf in a nice, comfortable sweater.
If you look at what actually happened in the Homeric epics, or the historical reality of classical Athens and Sparta, you don’t find a society of proto-democrats fighting for human rights. You find a society that believed in rigid hierarchy, terrifying supernatural fate, and the absolute prerogative of the strong over the weak.
And being Super Gay.
The online right, you know those people who think “Western Civilization” is descended from ancient Greece while missing that most of the civilizations they think this makes them superior to are JUST as descended from ancient Greece
those people
are ENRAGED because a black actress of Kenyan origin was cast in Nolan’s Odyssey
Again missing the point that modern Kenya is in the region of ancient Ethiopia, fully part of the ancient Greek trade networks and frequently referenced in Greek myth including Andromeda the ETHIOPIAN PRINCESS
Meanwhile, SCOTLAND and FINLAND had absolutely zero relationship to ancient Greece. None. Which makes the Scots / Finnish Matt Damon, by the logic of the online right, the worst possible casting as a Mediterranean pirate.
Decades of white washing depictions of Greece and Rome mean generations of people actually believe the variously brown skinned people of these Mediterranean empires were “white”, millennia before “white” even existed as racial concept.
Because we can’t handle the Greeks.
Liberal, mainstream culture wants ancient Greece to embody our liberal values which it absolutely 100% did not.
But right wing conservative culture wants to believe they are the true heirs of Sparta. The watch 300 and think YES! They would be the muscled warrior kings of old if only the damn feminists stopped emasculating them!
When the reality is that if any of these whiny privileged sons posing on X as @BasedMarcusAurelius, or the bug eyed effeminate intellectual who hides behind the pseudonymous identity Bronze Age Pervert, actually had to live in the bronze age, you would all be buggered by hoplite warriors as their twink.
Because the bronze age Greeks were Super Gay.
SUPER GAY.
Even Zack Snyder calls 300 the gayest movie ever made.
The rabidly homophobic right wing have in idolising the Greeks picked the most super gay men ever.
Ever.
Because all the weird right-wing shriekweasels actually know about bronze age Greece comes from a bourgeois culture that has systematically tamed that which we cannot handle.
But if you want to see what happens when an author actually refuses to put a sweater on the wolf of antiquity, you have to turn off the multiplex, and you have to read Mary Renault.
Writing from the 1950s through the 1970s, Renault managed a literary miracle: she bypassed the modern moral filter, to write eight novels that trace ancient Greek history from the mythical Theseus, to the imperial Alexander, in all its brutal, unfathomable glory.
Renault was born into a comfortable middle class English family, and was educated at Oxford, briefly studying under JRR Tolkien. But then she did two things that helped her to escape the bourgeois mindset.
She got a real job. Renault trained as a nurse and worked on the medical frontlines throughout World War 2.
And she became a lesbian. Renault escaped the dull life of a borgeois tradwife, instead meeting her life partner Julie Mullard and fleeing Britain’s oppressive anti-gay laws to live abroad
But here’s the thing about Renault’s Greeks.
They aren’t feminist. Renault didn’t do what a bazillion dull bourgeois novelists have done in recent decades and “retell the myth of X from the perspective of Y zzzzzzzzzz”.
Instead Renault novels are studies of a psychology that the modern mind can barely comprehend.
When Renault tackles classical paiderastia—most notably in The Last of the Wine and The Persian Boy—the Greek institution of sexual relations between an older male (erastes) and a young boy (eromenos), the practice that literally gives us the term term pederasty, Renault does not flinch.
And she does not translate it into modern “gay romance.” She explicitly depicts the power imbalances, the rigid social expectations, and the military utility of these bonds.
For the ancient Greeks, sexuality wasn’t a matter of binary identity. It was a matter of power, domination and submission. The defining institution of aristocratic bronze age Greece, the mechanism by which aristocratic youths were inducted into politics, warfare, and philosophy, was the most despised moral violation of our times.
Renault recognised what modern adaptations like Nolan’s cannot even begin to show. That for the Greeks, being Super Gay was not a rebellion against the power structure. It was the power structure.
By refusing to soften them, she captured the aristocratic, heroic ideal—the Arete—that makes the myths so enduring in the first place. She understood that you cannot have the glory of the Greeks without the brutality.
Whatever you think the Greeks mean to you, think again.They weren’t the man you could be if the women would only let you. They absolutely weren’t the origin of modern, liberal, democratic values.
The only way in which ancient Greece is the foundation of Western civilization is that it’s the thing every last shred of our modern morality exists to escape from.
So is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey a good movie?
Sure, it’s an excellent IMAX blockbuster.
But that’s all it is. The idea that this product made for the shopping mall multiplex does anything but entertain
and generate character franchising opportunities
is an stark reminder of how entirely captured today’s culture is by bourgeois capitalist ideals.
Because Chris Nolan’s Odyssey has nothing to say about the Odyssey.
Homer’s Odyssey, like all great myths, confronts the modern mind with that most potent of intellectual tools – contradiction.
The purpose of this contradiction is not to solve it like a logic puzzle, not to try and make it go away, but to live in the discomfort of the contradiction.
The Odyssey is the contradiction between two ways of thinking. Or of being.
The Heroic, the Aristocratic, the noble and the brutal. Odysseus is the king among men who laughs in the face of death.
And the Domestic, the Bureaucratic, the safe and the bourgeois. Which is us, mortal men hearing the tale, we who cower and hide from death.
Christopher Nolan does what he’s paid to do. He tames the Odyssey.
As predicted Matt Damon is there to turn the pirate king into a modern, moral man, rooted in family. A Sad Dad dreaming only of return home.
As predicted the Gods are rationalised into forces of nature and inner voices. Because we all know Gods are “just a myth”, right?
As predicted, Greek feral sexuality is nowhere to be seen. The moral outrage at the heart of Greek culture cannot be shown because it is morally outrageous.
Chris Nolan tames the Odyssey into a domestic myth that lets us have our cake and eat it. That resolves the contradiction.
We the modern bourgeois man can have our modern morality, our safe and comfortable lives, and still be men like Odysseus.
But we can’t.
Nolan’s tamed Odyssey robs us of Homer’s Odyssey’s true meaning. That man can hurl ourself into the unknown void. That we can encounter the Gods.
We can be heroic.
Or we can stay safe at home.
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