It’s been made clear that the world’s richest man wasn’t too impressed with Christopher Nolan’s DEI-friendly twist on one of Homer’s iconic Greek hero stories. And he’s decided to do something about it.
X owner Elon Musk posted to his platform July 21 that “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
Musk’s pledge follows enormous fandom polarization between critics who saw Nolan’s rendition as a race-swapped, disjointed, jarring, mishmash reimagining of the Homeric epic and those who saw it as a true-to-form exhibit of Nolan’s creative pedigree. Leftist outlets like Vanity Fair already jumped the gun and exploited the film’s early box office success to bleat that it single-handedly debunks the “Go Woke, Go Broke Myth," despite the mitigating factor that Nolan happens to be one of the only directors in Hollywood left with a Midas Touch.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
Musk wasn’t buying the Nolan aura surrounding the film for months, as controversial casting like shoe-horning Elliot Page in whatever kind of bended gender into a character role from Virgil’s The Aeneid (Sinon) that appears nowhere in The Odyssey proper tainted the whole mystique of the era. In May, Musk took direct aim at Nolan for letting hubris get in the way of staying true to the source material: “Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award …”
He does have a point. The Academy Awards has explicit DEI requirements for an Oscar’s consideration:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category are designed to encourage equitable representation on and off screen to better reflect the diverse global population. Submitting a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form (RAISE) and meeting TWO out of FOUR of the standards will be required for the film to be eligible for Best Picture consideration. In addition, the film must complete the Best Picture Expanded Theatrical Run criteria to qualify.
Force-feeding the audience a trans activist like Page (who publicly denounced the two-gender binary as “completely false”) into the script definitely checks off the Academy’s stipulation for “The main storyline(s), theme or narrative of the film [to be] centered on an underrepresented group(s),” like LGBTQ+. We won’t give a spoiler, but a holistic perspective of the film does make it patently clear that Page’s non-canon character served as the conscience of the entire film despite having brief screen time. Other choices like casting Lupita Nyong’o as the Homer-described “white-armed Helen” of Troy also definitely checked off a few DEI boxes for the Academy too.
One thing’s for sure: Any objective analysis of Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) would deem it a departure from its Homeric foundations. Musk and those with an affinity for the great stories of Antiquity have had enough of modernity running roughshod over their beloved legends.
Besides, you know Nolan went too far when you have the infamous, feminist Homer translator Emily Wilson calling out the film for focusing too much on “shame” and not enough on “glory,” which is the central theme of the entire epic. Wilson reportedly told The Associated Press, “I had the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.
"Emily Wilson is bad translator because, uhm reasons okay, and she totally liked Nolan movie!"
Emily Wilson: pic.twitter.com/XbTwQgFNtr— MarquisAntiMedia (@Marquis_Crutch) July 21, 2026
The irony, as Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz noted, is that Wilson’s infamous, third-wave feminist rebranding of Homer’s The Odyssey was what apparently inspired Nolan’s take in the first place:
Nolan, sadly, picked up a very different book, Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey, a project dedicated entirely to making Homer’s heroes come across as a gang of preening, pathetic poseurs afflicted with terminal toxic masculinity and in dire need of a smart woman to save them all from their superabundance of penis.
Musk appears determined to return the story to its Greek roots. But how will a purely AI-generated film be received by fans? Time will tell.
