Somewhere along the way, “Hollywood made something” turned into shorthand for “Hollywood ruined something.” Most of the time, we’re not wrong. But Christopher Nolan just spent three years and a mountain of his own credibility building the most audacious theatrical experience in a generation, and half the conservative movement is too busy screaming about casting to even notice.
That’s a mistake. And it’s worth saying so, loudly.
Let’s deal with the complaints first, because they’re not fake. Elon Musk called Nolan “racist against the Greek people and their cultural heritage” for casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, and for putting Elliot Page in the film. Matt Walsh piled on, saying he doesn’t buy Nyong’o as the woman whose face launched a thousand ships. Fox News ran story after story cataloging the backlash. Matt Damon’s Odysseus, meanwhile, spends the film wrestling with what critics and Nolan himself are describing as PTSD and moral injury, not the swaggering conqueror of the source material but a broken man hiding his trauma in a lotus flower addiction.
Fine. Those are real artistic choices, and you’re allowed to have opinions about them. Homer’s Odysseus is not a case study in clinical depression, and reasonable people can say the update doesn’t sit right with them. Reasonable people can also say Helen of Troy, in a story about the most famous face in the ancient Mediterranean world, is not automatically improved by a colorblind casting call. Have that argument. It’s a fine argument to have.
But here’s what conservatives are missing while they’re busy having it: Ben Shapiro and Lara Trump, both about as hard right as it gets, came out defending the film. And they’re right, for a reason that has nothing to do with identity politics on either side.
Christopher Nolan just did something no filmmaker in history has done. “The Odyssey” is the first feature film ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras, framed for the full 1.43:1 IMAX screen, top to bottom, no cropping, no compromise. In an industry that has spent fifteen years farming out its imagination to a server farm, Nolan built more than a thousand custom LED panels, nicknamed “Pyrohedrons,” and programmed them with natural flame-flicker patterns to light the fall of Troy from up to a mile away. Practically. With fire that isn’t fire, lighting a set the old-fashioned way, because the alternative was cheaper and Nolan said no. His crew even solved a decades-old problem with IMAX cameras being too loud to use in dialogue scenes, building a new silencing rig just so they could shoot intimate conversation on the same stock used for the epic battle sequences. That is not a marketing gimmick. That is a man refusing to let the craft die on his watch.
And audiences noticed. “The Odyssey” pulled a 95 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest of Nolan’s career, and a 97 percent audience score, a new personal record. It opened to roughly 123 million dollars domestically and over 260 million worldwide, the biggest global opening weekend of Nolan’s career. People are not just tolerating this film. They are packing theaters for it at a level Nolan himself has never hit before.
Here’s the actual point. Conservatives built an entire identity around being the side that still believes in craftsmanship, in effort, in doing hard things the right way instead of the cheap way. We mock participation trophies. We mock corner-cutting. We mock an entertainment industry that has forgotten how to build anything with its hands. Remember when Disney couldn’t be bothered to cast seven actual actors as the dwarfs in its Snow White remake, opting for CGI creations instead because it was cheaper and easier? That’s the industry Nolan just told to get lost. He built a thousand LED panels and hauled cameras across real oceans instead of phoning it in from a render farm.
So when a director spends three years and a fortune proving that real fire, real film stock, and real human performance still beat a green screen and a server rack full of AI slop, and conservatives respond by trying to torch the movie over a casting choice, we’re not defending our values. We’re abandoning them because Twitter told us today’s enemy is Christopher Nolan and Hollywood at large.
That’s not principle. That’s a bandwagon. And bandwagons are exactly what we claim to despise about the other side.
You can think the Helen of Troy casting was a misfire. You can think giving Odysseus a therapy arc softens a warrior epic into a support group. But don’t let that argument talk you out of admitting that a man just did something genuinely beautiful in an industry that has forgotten how, and that beauty doesn’t stop being beautiful because the guy who made it also made some choices you didn’t love.
Give credit where it’s earned. Go see “The Odyssey” in real IMAX 70mm if you can find a theater that has it. Argue about the casting on the drive home if you want. But walk in ready to actually look at what’s on the screen, because for once, Hollywood built something worth looking at.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any opinions expressed in the following piece are solely that of the author and are not a direct reflection of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
