In the 2023 post I wrote about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, I began by explaining my ambivalent judgment of his work as a filmmaker. Though I recognized his virtues, including wild-eyed ambition that sometimes crossed the line into an outright audacity to 'make Big Statements while also earning hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office,' I also admitted that I often found his films 'overly plotted, tonally bombastic, and tangled up ' in conceptually muddled pretensions.' Despite this, I liked Oppenheimer quite a lot, including Nolan's own ambivalence about his subject's scientific/technological and moral legacy. Three years later, almost to the day, Nolan is back with his latest epic, an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey that has been stirring controversy for months based on pure speculation by very online right-wing 'influencers.' These anticipatory critics objected to Nolan's supposed 'wokeness' in casting the black actress Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and trans...
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