The bad politics of Odyssey, 2026 films

By Jason Williams
Williams is a writer, researcher and founder of Taxpayers Association of Oregon,

The Odyssey will be among the year’s biggest, most-watched films and will likely go on to win a bounty of Oscars. Too bad the director, Christopher Nolan, decided to politicize it and perpetuate Hollywood’s hero demoralization. Nolan based his film off of Leftist author Emily Wilson’s 2017 modern political translation of the Odyssey.

Movies like this matter greatly because film, music and TV are ways that the younger generation and the non-political get their political lessons.

Students used to learn that Communism was bad by reading the novel, Animal Farm. But in 2026 Hollywood recast the anti-Communism book and replaced it with an anti-Capitalist plot.   They made Elon Musk’s wife the villain.

We can’t ignore this indoctrination.

For starters with the Odyssey, Nolan takes one of the most known and celebrated stories of all time and demeans the hero in ways not in the original story and in ways never even conceived before. The hero Odysseus becomes a war-criminal guilty of war crimes like standing by as women have their heads cut off, when he helped defeat the city of Troy. Nothing in the original story suggests that the Greeks committed war crimes.

Hollywood just made it up.

As a result, Odysseus walks around mostly in the three-hour epic as a sad, depressed and condemned man. In the final scene (spoiler alert) he decides to exile himself for his crimes, so he lives the rest of his life in sad penance.

In other ways, in the film, he lies, he deceives and he violates his own ethics code.  He acts recklessly, like striking Cyclops when he was already defeated, which caused the monster to be more enraged and kill a number of his men. Heroes don’t do these things. They do the right things and inspire us, but this movie fails to inspire. Hollywood is defaming our heroes one by one and replacing them with soulless and low-value characters that no one wants to emulate. The film waxes long about how evil men are, and without a heroic virtuous contrasting hero, the film becomes liberal nihilism.

One of the villains in the film, a witch, gets full sympathy attention. So villains get elevated, and heroes downgraded.  Backwards ethics.

Also, the film introduces Helen of Troy, who has been famous in history as one of the most beautiful women who have ever lived. The poet said she had a face that launched a thousand ships. In the film they downgrade her beauty by showing her scarred on her face. Her attire and accessories are minimalistic just like every other character in the film. Every scene has her angry or distant which was not helped by her almost absent screen time. Hollywood has taken an object famous for beauty and made nothing of it, which is another example of them tearing down things of virtue and glory.

We see this pattern everywhere. A few weeks before Odessey was released, the film Supergirl came out, which was based on a classic wholesome comic book hero. In this film she is a depressed alcoholic who recklessly endangers other people’s lives and takes extreme merciless revenge on her opponents. She is even indifferent to people being human trafficked. A scene has her urinating. Another scene has her drinking a space drink made from alien feces that was excreted right in front of her at the space bar. Her dog urinates on a photo of Superman as a show of disrespect. See how Hollywood is defaming our heroes? The people on our movie screens are just as immoral, empty and lost as the addicts on our Portland streets.

This year Disney released a live-action version of Snow White – based upon the most virtuous movie of all time. The film starts by repeating a line borrowed from the Central American communist line, “The land belongs to those that work it.” This justifies people stealing from the kingdom. Snow White’s current parents ran a kingdom where everything is shared equally. The BBC called the film a “Marxist call to arms”. The Snow White actress made headlines about how the original Prince charming was a stalker. She also supported defunding the police.

Also this year the Oscars gave top honors to he film, One battle after another, which openly celebrates extreme political violence. They shot at ICE agents to break open their facility in order to set-free all the prisoners. They blew up a courthouse killing potentially dozens of innocent people.

Please stop supporting political films with your dollars.