This F**king Play Is About Us: The Odyssey Isn’t “Woke,” It’s a Damning Mirror

This discussion contains extensive spoilers for The Odyssey.Much like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, The Odyssey is a blockbuster about morality. That’s a rare combination. So often, we treat popcorn cinema as a time to set aside ethical nuance: good guys fight bad guys, good guys win, end of story.In Nolan’s hands, The Odyssey is not about a warrior trying to find his way home; it’s about a man reckoning with a tear in the social fabric, one he helped rip himself. That may make it sound like yet another movie about Trauma™ — and in a sense it is — but it is far from a trite exploration of that topic. And indeed, Nolan is not just concerned with the pain felt by Odysseus (Matt Damon), but with the deep civilizational impacts of war, violence, and xenophobic fearmongering. Those are 2026 concerns to be sure, but they have always been at the core of figuring out how humans can live with and among other humans. One message from the director, among many: We can come back from moments when the order seems to break down, and the Golden Rule seems shattered — but it may take a while.I would argue, as other critics have by now, that Nolan’s adaptation is not just the “woke” adaptation that many transphobes and racists feared based on the casting of Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong'o, but something larger: A deeply progressive film, one that diagnoses hatred and bigotry as much worse threats than whirlpools and sirens. This play is indeed about us, and more specifically, it’s about the kind of people who get so frothing mad over a trans person in their movies that they’ll vote for a warmonger.Fellow Them editor Quispe López joined me to talk through some of the movie’s downright leftist themes — and, of course, the nonsense casting controversy. Please note: This discussion is for people who have also seen the film, which we spoil in its entirety.Samantha Allen: Quispe, amid the really annoying culture war over Elliot Page’s casting, I noticed t