周威霖的雜記與雜感 第四集
david chou
Mike Rogers is anti-China in his political platform and public record, though his political opponents have scrutinized his private-sector business history for past corporate ties.
Public Record and Platform
· Hawkish Stance: During his political career in the U.S. House of Representatives and his campaigns, Rogers has positioned himself as a "China hawk", focusing heavily on national security risks related to the Chinese government.
· Telecom Investigations: As a former congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers led high-profile inquiries into Chinese telecommunications firms like Huawei, warning that they posed major espionage and security threats to the United States.
· Campaign Focus: In his political campaigns, he frequently campaigns against Chinese economic influence, sharply criticizing proposals like the Chinese-backed Gotion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan.
Criticisms and Counter-Arguments
· Private Sector Work: Political opponents and critics have pointed out that after leaving Congress, Rogers worked with or for major global corporations (such as Nokia and AT&T) that have maintained business relationships or market operations intersecting with China.
Abdul El-Sayed is neither explicitly "pro-China" nor "anti-China." As an American progressive Democratic politician and U.S. Senate nominee for Michigan, his foreign policy focus centers primarily on domestic issues, diplomacy, and criticizing unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel, rather than Sino-American relations.
Stance on China and Foreign Policy
Opposition to Conflict: El-Sayed has expressed opposition to what he describes as a "warlike pathway" pursued by the foreign policy establishment regarding China, noting that competition between the U.S. and China is not predestined to result in kinetic war.
Diplomatic Focus: His general platform emphasizes international cooperation, human rights, and prioritizing diplomacy over escalation, aligning with mainstream progressive views that favor managing superpower competition without unnecessary military confrontation.
Michele Tafoya is anti-China. As a conservative political commentator and U.S. Senate candidate, she has repeatedly criticized the Chinese government's human rights record, its geopolitical ambitions against the West, and corporate and athletic ties to the nation.
Views and Statements on China
· Human Rights and Foreign Policy: Tafoya has publicly denounced the Chinese government over human rights violations and stated that Beijing harbors ambitions to "destroy most of the Western world and own the globe".
· Corporate Disentanglement: She has argued that major American corporations and sports entities, such as Disney and the NFL, should "disentangle themselves" from China rather than overlook abuses for financial gain.
· Public Criticism: She has criticized public figures and athletes for accepting praise or writing favorable columns in state-run Chinese media while ignoring domestic conditions inside China.
· Domestic Energy and Manufacturing: On the campaign trail, she has raised concerns regarding the U.S. reliance on solar panel manufacturing originating in China.
[According to AI and public records, Minnesota politician Peggy Flanagan is neither explicitly "pro-China" nor a champion of the Chinese government; rather, her official platform describes a standard mainstream U.S. democratic stance that is critical of China's trade practices]
Foreign Policy
The United States has a responsibility to keep Americans secure, expand economic opportunities, and promote democratic values around the world. Yet, the only consistent aspect of Donald Trump's foreign policy is that he will always put his own money making schemes ahead of American interests. Every day we are losing ground in the fights with our adversaries and losing the trust of our allies–while Trump cozies up to dictators and strongmen around the world. Trump said he'd end several conflicts on Day 1. Like always, he didn't deliver. All the while we see American farmers and industries lose access to resources and markets overseas. This chaos must end. Over the past decade as a state lawmaker and Lt. Governor, Peggy has joined business development and trade missions, become a staunch advocate for our agricultural industry, welcomed foreign dignitaries to Minnesota, and promoted Minnesota as a destination for investment and opportunity. - Peggy supports eliminating tariffs that are devastating Minnesota farmers, while maintaining those protections that are vital for industries like Minnesota iron mining, and ensuring that farmers receive aid to support them as we rebuild the agricultural market access Trump has destroyed. - Peggy believes that establishing ongoing peace and stability in the Middle East requires a lasting ceasefire and a two-state solution which allows for a secure Israel and Palestinian self-determination. Peggy would have joined Minnesota Senators Smith and Klobuchar in voting to halt offensive weapons sales to Israel. Peggy believes the United States and global partners must surge aid to Gaza and help rebuild the area. - Peggy supports rebuilding ties with our NATO allies, and supporting Ukraine in their fight against an unjust invasion by Putin. Trump's waffling on Russia, and insulting of our allies continues to isolate America in a time of increasing instability. This puts all of us in danger. - China has a history of unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft. Peggy supports cracking down on foreign actors like China who cheat to undercut American workers and Minnesota businesses.
david chou
No major or viable Republican or Democratic candidate running for the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives openly favors the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or displays explicit hostility toward Taiwan.
Support for Taiwan and a strong posture against Beijing's aggressive policies remain a deeply entrenched bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress. While candidates may occasionally debate the specific tactical approach to trade, economic tariffs, or the management of military aid and arms packages, none openly campaign on a pro-CCP or anti-Taiwan platform.
Bipartisan Consensus
· Strong Deterrence: Both Democrats and Republicans routinely support legislation aimed at deterring Chinese military aggression and maintaining cross-strait stability.
· Congressional Delegations: Lawmakers from both parties frequently travel to Taipei to meet with Taiwanese leadership and reaffirm commitments to the island's self-defense.
This is the Bay Area Taiwanese American E-Mail Group. Our main objective is to provide open communication channel for the Taiwanese American community, let the Taiwan Spirit grow and pass down to the future.
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如要取消訂閱這個群組並停止接收來自這個群組的郵件，請傳送電子郵件到 bay-area-taiwanese-...@googlegroups.com。
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david chou
Appendix I
Bringing In the Horse
By Mary Lefkowitz
The American Scholar
Virgil’s account of the sacking of Troy has similarities to the political situation of our day
4, 201
Greek mythology can provide a rather frightening parallel to the situation in which the citizens of the United States find themselves. That situation is the decision made by the male citizens of ancient Troy to break down their city walls and bring in the wooden horse left to them as a “gift” by their enemies, the Greeks. As we all know, that was a disastrous decision. Why did the Trojans make the choices that brought their own destruction, when they could have so easily saved themselves? All they had to do was leave the horse where they found it, outside the city walls—or better still, set it on fire. But as Homer tells us, they decided to bring the horse in, drag it up to their city’s acropolis, and then sit down around it. There were three proposals: break through the wood with their swords, throw the horse down from the acropolis, or let the horse stand as an offering to the gods. Homer doesn’t say why the Trojans made the one choice that would bring about their destruction.
Other ancient Greek epics told the story in more detail, but only fragments of these narratives survive. The Roman poet Virgil, who knew Greek literature well, drew on some of those sources when he wrote about the fall of Troy in the Aeneid. The narrator is Aeneas himself, the Trojan prince who escaped the burning city and eventually went to Italy. Virgil has Aeneas tell Dido and other guests at a banquet in Carthage that the Trojans went out to explore the encampment that the Greeks had deserted, and stood wondering what to do about the immense horse that the Greeks had left behind. Thymoetes, the brother-in-law of King Priam of Troy, urged the Trojans to bring the horse inside the walls and place it on the acropolis. Aeneas wonders if Thymoetes, whose wife and son Priam had put to death many years before, meant to deceive the Trojans, or if his actions were governed by fate. Aeneas’s friend Capys and other sensible men suggested that instead the Trojans should push the horse into the sea, or burn it, or at least pierce its hollow womb to probe its inner chambers. But as a group, the Trojans were still uncertain, divided into opposing factions.
At this point in Aeneas’s version of the story, the Trojan priest Laocoön rushed down from the acropolis and, with fiery intensity, asked the Trojans why they presumed that the Greeks had abandoned their camp. Didn’t they know what Ulysses (Odysseus) was capable of? Laocoön warned his countrymen that armed men might be concealed inside the horse, or that some other trick was involved. “I am afraid of the Greeks,” he said, “even when they offer us gifts.” He threw a spear at the side of the horse to show that it was hollow and thus able to conceal something.
Just after Laocoön uttered his warning, shepherds dragged in a prisoner, a young man with his hands chained behind his back. He told the Trojans that he was a Greek, that his name was Sinon, and that he had escaped from the Greek army because they planned to offer him to the gods as a human sacrifice. The Greeks, he said, had been advised by their prophet Calchas to offer such a sacrifice so that the gods would send the favorable winds needed to return home. Sinon claimed that he had been chosen as the victim because he was a personal enemy of Ulysses.
Priam, the king of Troy, told the shepherds to take off the young man’s chains. He then welcomed Sinon and asked him to tell truthfully why the Greeks had created this massive horse. The young man explained that the gods were angry because Ulysses, along with another Greek, Diomedes, had broken into the temple in Troy that housed the Palladium, a sacred statue of Minerva (Athena). The two Greeks had killed the men who guarded the statue, and with bloody hands had brought the statue to the Greek camp. To appease the goddess, the prophet Calchas had instructed the Greeks to leave an offering of a large wooden horse. The Greeks had made the horse so large to prevent the Trojans from dragging it into their city—and to thus keep the goddess from supporting the Trojans if, in the future, they sought to invade and conquer Greece.
This last section of the young man’s story persuaded the Trojans that he was telling the truth. Aeneas tells his audience that Sinon’s story “seemed believable because of these lies and Sinon’s skillful narrative—we were taken in by trickery and false tears—we whom neither Diomedes nor Achilles nor ten years could conquer, nor a thousand ships.” “Then,” says Aeneas, “another and more frightening event was hurled at my poor countrymen and threw their hearts into confusion.” Laocoön had been near the seashore, sacrificing a bull to the god Neptune, when suddenly two huge serpents came out of the water, ate both his sons, and crushed him to death. The serpents then went to the temple of Minerva and took shelter around the feet and behind the shield of her statue. Hearing this, the Trojans immediately assumed that Minerva had punished Laocoön. They opened the gates of their city and tore down part of their walls so they could bring the horse to the goddess’s temple, hoping to win her favor.
As the horse was dragged across the threshold of the city gate, it stopped four times—stopping or tripping when crossing a threshold was a bad omen. Further, when the armor worn by the soldiers inside the horse clanged, the Trojans paid no attention. The priestess Cassandra prophesied doom, but they did not listen to her.
That night, there were celebrations. After they had died down and the Trojans had gone to sleep, the Greeks (who had been just out of sight in their ships behind the nearby island of Tenedos) sailed back to Troy. Sinon then opened the door of the horse and let out the Greek soldiers hiding inside, as the Greek army rushed in through the city’s open gates.
Virgil makes it clear that the disaster might have been prevented by asking questions and finding the answers, all of which were readily available. Why accept Sinon’s explanation for the size of the wooden horse? Why didn’t the Trojans bore a hole into the side of the horse to see if anything was inside—Laocoön had already shown them that it was hollow. Why didn’t the Trojans also make sure that the Greeks really had gone away and were not lying in wait? The Trojans also might have asked themselves if there was another reason why the serpents attacked Laocoön and his sons. Could Minerva and the other gods have wanted to get Laocoön out of the way so that he couldn’t stop the Trojans from bringing the horse into the city? Instead of asking any of these questions, the Trojans were eager to believe that the Greeks had given up the war and gone home.
Perhaps the Trojans might have been more willing to take Laocoön’s advice if he had tried to persuade them, instead of simply telling them what he thought they ought to do. He could have reminded the Trojans of an incident when they had gotten the better of the Greeks, thus praising their courage and wisdom, a strategy the orator Demosthenes often used to persuade the Athenians. But instead, Laocoön criticized his countrymen, telling them they were gullible, and reminding them of how in the past they had been similarly deceived by the Greeks. Virgil has Aeneas describe the Trojans’ reluctance to listen to Laocoön with a phrase that the Romans seem to have used to describe other cases of self-deception and flawed thinking: si mens non laeva fuisset, “if our minds hadn’t been turned in the wrong direction.” Laeva (left) is the proverbial unlucky or unfavorable side.
By contrast, Sinon’s story was carefully constructed to win the Trojans’ sympathy. He began by keeping them in suspense, at first hesitating to speak, using a rhetorical technique that the Romans called insinuatio (ingratiation). Sinon then claimed that he was an enemy of the hated Ulysses, who had treated him cruelly and unfairly, and that he had offended the Greeks by refusing to keep silent about Ulysses’s crimes. But then Sinon stopped abruptly in the middle of his narrative, employing another rhetorical trope, permissio (surrender), by which he appealed to his audience for support before continuing with his story.
Only after gaining his listeners’ sympathy did Sinon explain why the Greeks had prepared to offer him up as a human sacrifice and had constructed the large horse. Sinon mentioned the family that he had left behind and would never see again—a personal appeal, designed to elicit the audience’s sympathy, often employed by defendants in trials. This appeal, combined with Sinon’s pitiful condition and his tears, affected the Trojans so deeply that they did not even try to interrogate or torture him. If they had, and if Sinon had been forced to answer them truthfully, the Trojans might have discovered that Sinon in fact was Ulysses’s first cousin, not his enemy. Like Ulysses, Sinon was a grandson of Autolycus, a notorious trickster and thief. Like Ulysses also, Sinon was a gifted narrator, eminently able to make his lies sound like the truth. Laocoön —as Virgil characterizes him—did not possess the same rhetorical skills.
The Trojans were so sympathetic to Sinon that they did not stop to question his explanation as to why the Greeks had made the horse so disproportionately large. The Trojans were eager to have the support of powerful Minerva, but they might have asked themselves why the goddess would be willing to help them now, after she had been actively helping their enemies during the whole previous part of the war. In the recent past, Minerva had refused to accept a beautiful robe that Hecuba, Priam’s wife, had offered to her; why suppose that the goddess would now be interested in protecting Troy? Yet the Trojans were so encouraged by what Sinon told them that they imagined Minerva would be on their side if, at some later point, they decided to undertake an invasion of Greece.
As Virgil relates it, the tale of the Trojan horse is par excellence about the state of mind that leads to self-delusion. It isn’t just that the Trojans ignored Laocoön’s sensible advice to check to see what was inside the horse before they dragged it into the city. Or that they didn’t interrogate Sinon to make sure that his story was true. Why were they prepared to trust Priam’s judgment, when they all had every reason not to? They knew that Priam had been warned that a male child born on a certain day would cause Troy to be destroyed, and his wife, Hecuba, had herself dreamed that she was about to give birth to a firebrand. Yet when Hecuba and Cilla, the wife of Priam’s brother-in-law Thymoetes, gave birth to sons on the same day, Priam had Thymoetes’s wife and son killed. Priam put his own son, Paris, out to die in the wilderness, on Mount Ida, but the baby was rescued and raised by a shepherd. The Trojans would never have become involved in a war with the Greeks if Paris had not been allowed to live.
Paris’s judgment was no better than his parents’: his selfish decision was the direct cause of the Trojan War. When as a young man Paris was shepherding his flocks on Mount Ida, the god Mercury (Hermes) asked him to pick which of three goddesses was the most beautiful. Each of the goddesses—Minerva, Juno, and Venus—offered Paris a gift. Minerva offered him wisdom and victory in battle, and Juno (Hera) offered him rule over all of Asia. But Venus (Aphrodite) offered him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta, the daughter of Jupiter (Zeus). Paris was bound to get into trouble whichever of the three goddesses he chose because he would anger the two goddesses whose gifts he had declined. In such circumstances, the most sensible course would have been for Paris to refuse to make the decision—or at least to pick the most powerful goddess, the one who could best protect him against the other two. That goddess was Minerva. Instead Paris chose Venus, the weakest of the three goddesses, who gave him Helen as his reward. Unfortunately, when Paris took Helen away to Troy, she was already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta, who then came to Troy with his brother Agamemnon and an army to bring her back.
So it was not coincidental that after all those years of fighting, the Greeks won the Trojan War by deception rather than by sheer force. Ulysses and Minerva had reason to believe that the Trojan royal family, if given a choice, would be eager to pick whatever they most wanted for themselves, be it saving their own son’s life, or winning the most beautiful woman in the world as a bedmate. Because Priam would want the war to be over, he could be counted on to assume that Sinon was telling the truth about the horse.
There is a lesson for us here, one that is not particularly encouraging. Virgil’s narrative shows us that people will believe what they want to believe, even when warned by wise advisers to be mistrustful. It also seems that people will ignore well-informed and well-intentioned advice if it goes against their own desires. This tendency is well known to psychologists. As Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has suggested, human beings make two kinds of judgments: fast and slow. The fast system is immediate and intuitive; the slow system is more deliberative. But even time does not always guarantee that people will make an informed choice. Presidential campaigns in the United States go on for many months, but often—too often—we stick to our initial fast judgments about the candidates. We believe each other and are quick to believe what we are told by people who appear to speak with authority. As Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue in their recent book, The Knowledge Illusion, “We live with the belief that we understand more than we do.” When groups of people depend on others for information and advice, they seem to be as vulnerable to error as individuals.
Another factor appears to have affected the Trojan royal family’s decisions, at least as Virgil describes the course of events: the mental process that modern psychologists call cognitive dissonance, which is the state of mental tension that arises when a person holds two conflicting beliefs or ideas. When that tension occurs, people tend to pick the belief or idea that pleases them more, even when it does not comport with reality. Or, to put it another way, cognitive dissonance becomes what psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson call the “engine of self-justification,” a process that persuades you to believe that the decision you have made was the right or even inevitable decision. Priam and the Trojans wanted to believe that the Greeks had given up their siege and gone home. They sympathized with Sinon because he too had been treated cruelly by the Greeks, he said, and was an enemy of their enemy. And they liked the idea of bringing the horse into the city because that was precisely what the Greeks supposedly did not want them to do.
So the gates were opened, the city wall was breached, and the horse was brought into Troy. But even then disaster was not inevitable. Suppose that some of the Trojans, like Capys or Aeneas himself, had they had reservations about bringing in the horse, had spoken up and suggested that Sinon be kept under guard, and that the horse itself be surrounded by soldiers until they could be sure that no one was hidden inside? Sinon would not have been able to release the men hidden inside the horse, and they would have eventually surrendered or died of thirst. Had the more judicious Trojans suggested that the breach in the city wall be promptly repaired to prevent invasion, Troy might yet have been saved, or its destruction postponed.
The historian Barbara Tuchman chose to use the story of the Trojan horse as the first chapter of The March of Folly, From Troy to Vietnam (1984). In that book she explores the failures of leadership over the centuries. But leaders cannot succeed without cooperation from their citizens. On the cover of the paperback edition is a reproduction of Tiepolo’s painting The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy, depicting the Trojans struggling to push and drag the horse into their city. The people of Troy shared the blame for the disaster because in their ignorance they wanted to believe that what their leaders had told them was true. History would have looked more favorably on them if they had tried to circumvent their leaders’ commands, and if by causing delays they had managed to save themselves and their country.
Appendix II
Question 1: In Homer’s Odyssey, did any Trojan who first encountered the Wooden Horse left by the Greeks raise any doubt or distrust?
AI’s Reply
Yes. In classical mythology, multiple Trojans doubted the horse and voiced distrust. However, Homer’s Homer Odyssey only briefly mentions the horse without naming the skeptics; the detailed stories of the doubters come from Virgil’s Aeneid and lost epic cycles.
The Skeptics and Warners
Laocoön: A Trojan priest who threw a spear into the horse's side and warned his people not to trust the Greek gift ("I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts").
Cassandra: King Priam’s daughter, cursed by Apollo so that she foresaw the city's doom and screamed warnings about the horse, but no one ever believed her.
Helen of Troy: In one tradition mentioned in the Odyssey, Helen walked around the horse and called out to the hidden Greek warriors while mimicking their wives' voices, trying to force them to answer and expose the trick.
Question 2: In the movie The Odyssey, what were the initial reactions of the Trojans when they discovered the giant wooden horse on the beach?
AI's Reply
In Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the Trojans initially discover the massive wooden horse half-buried and waterlogged in the surf. Believing the Greek fleet has departed and abandoned the structure as a peace offering and divine gift to the gods, the Trojan scouts and soldiers react with curious trust, approaching the unwieldy 35-foot structure on the beach before hauling it toward their city gates.
Discovery and Reactions
· Surprise and Curiosity: Scouts find the colossal, rearing wooden sculpture half-sunk in the coastal sand and tides.
· Trust in a Gift: Guided by the deceptive words of the remaining Greek left behind (Sinon), the Trojans accept it as a sacred parting offering to the gods.
· Relief: They assume the decade-long siege is finally over, viewing the structure as a symbol of Greek surrender rather than a military ruse.
· Hauling the Statue: Trusting their safety, thousands of Trojan soldiers mobilize to drag the heavy, water-logged structure up the beach and inside their citadel walls.
Appendix III
Why The Odyssey has caused so much controversy
27 June 2026
Nicholas Barber
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260626-why-the-odyssey-has-caused-so-much-controversy
Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Ancient Greek epic, starring Matt Damon, Zendaya and many more, is the most anticipated film of 2026 – but also the most contested. Here's why.
Christopher Nolan's last film, the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, was about the invention of the atomic bomb, and the ethics of killing tens of thousands of civilians in a global conflict. All things considered, he must have thought that his next film would be a lot less controversial.
After all, The Odyssey is based on Homer's ancient poem about warriors and kings, gods and monsters. What is there for anyone to grouse about? The height of Polyphemus the Cyclops? The wood used to make the Trojan horse? Well, maybe not. But it turns out that people have groused about pretty much everything else.
The Odyssey, released in July, has become the most contentious film of the year – a lightning rod for all kinds of political and cultural grievances. What is it about a swords-and-sandals fantasy epic that is so upsetting?
Casting controversies
Much of the grumbling has consisted of conservative fears that the film might be too liberal. Not everyone approved when Nolan hired a transgender actor, Elliot Page, and a rapper, Travis Scott, to play a so-far-unidentified male character and the poet Demodocus, respectively.
People have also objected to his choice of black actress Lupita Nyong'o to play Helen of Troy – described by Homer as "white-armed". Wolfgang Petersen's Homer adaptation, Troy (2004), loosely inspired by The Iliad, didn't have a vocal fanbase a year ago, but recently it's been held up by some on social media as superior to Nolan's, at least in its casting of Brad Pitt as Achilles and Diane Kruger as Helen.
One right-wing blogger, Matt Walsh, declared that Nolan had cast a woman of Kenyan heritage as Helen because he was afraid of being called a racist. He didn't offer evidence of Nolan's supposed fears. And indeed the vast majority of the cast is white. But that didn't stop Elon Musk chiming in with his agreement.
Some on social media, in response, accused Walsh and Musk of being bigoted. Others took a more scholarly approach. Prof Daniel Mendelsohn, whose translation of Homer's poem was published last year, said at the UK's Hay Festival in May that he was amused by "all of these bros suddenly worrying about Greek literature". According to a report in The Telegraph, Mendelsohn said: "What's so funny is that Helen has the tiniest role in The Odyssey… so the debate is particularly silly." But he proposed that Nyong'o's casting was "consonant with the concern of the Troy myth, which is how to think about beauty… I think [Nolan's] choice of this very beautiful actress who happens to be African lands you squarely in the middle of a very old discussion."
I wonder whether we have become inclined to treat mythological material as though it were historical material – Prof Susan Deacy
In Elle magazine, Nyong'o gave her own pithy response to the attacks. "This is a mythological story," she said. "Our cast is representative of the world." But some people have pointed out that this isn't wholly true, lamenting the lack of Greeks among the actors. Greeks had been "left out by Hollywood, again and with no explanation, from our foundational mythologies and epics", wrote a Greek-British journalist, Chris Cotonou, in The Guardian. "If your film sets out to represent the world, wouldn't it be obvious to fill one space at this large, wonderfully multicultural table with the people who are most authentically connected to the source?"
Not every criticism of The Odyssey has been explicitly conservative, then. When the first trailer was released in December, people sniped that the dark armour worn by Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) resembled Batman's costume, and that Odysseus's boat looked like a "Viking ship" – the implication being that films with giants and witches in them should nonetheless be as true-to-life as possible.
[The appearance of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy has been one of the film's most talked-about elements so far (Credit: Getty Images)]
"I wonder whether we have become inclined to treat mythological material as though it were historical material," Prof Susan Deacy, the author of The Greek Gods and Their Worlds, tells the BBC. "Yet the Odyssey is continually being reimagined, with pretty well every age producing its own Homer."
The accents issue
Another fuss arose from a trailer in which the actors – even the British ones – were heard to use American accents and modern colloquialisms. Exhibit A was Tom Holland saying, "My dad is coming home," in his Spider-Man voice, instead of intoning "father" in a manner befitting the Royal Shakespeare Company.
"It sounds like they're trying to have an epic conversation on the sidewalk outside the Starbucks," cracked one commenter. "It felt so out of place," said another. "I'm hoping the dialogue isn't too contemporary and pulls the viewer out of the period."
Christopher Nolan makes films in which the left can find endorsement as easily as the right, and frequently at the same time – Tom Shone
This doesn't quite makes sense. Considering that the "place" is Greece and the "period" is thousands of years ago, the dialogue still wouldn't be true to Homer even it was slightly more pompous and old-fashioned. The fact is that the Ancient Greeks, whether real or mythological, didn't talk like 21st-Century American actors or 20th-Century British ones. But it's a time-honoured Hollywood convention that sword-wielding Greeks and Romans, much like wizards, Norse gods – and even some Nazi officers – should sound grandiose and English.
"British accents in historical epics can feel right because of a long cinematic tradition," says Deacy, "not because they're any closer to ancient Greek speech." For that matter, she adds, formal dialogue isn't any closer to Homer than informal dialogue is. "More colloquial dialogue could even be closer to the spirit of Homeric storytelling than the elevated language that can be associated with antiquity – especially as the Odyssey was oral performance and popular entertainment, not just canonical text."
Why this film has become a target
So what's the problem? One answer is that people love to protest on social media if a film isn't exactly how they wanted it to be, and The Odyssey offers the biggest imaginable target. Nolan's films are significant cultural events – massively expensive, highly publicised and endlessly discussed – so anyone who gripes about them knows that someone will listen. And this one is adapted from one of the most important works of literature ever written, so anyone with even the vaguest knowledge of Greek mythology can have a view on it.
[Tom Holland plays Odysseus' son Telemachus – and like other British actors in the film, speaks in a US accent (Credit: Universal Pictures)]
Certainly, when Emily Wilson published her translation of The Odyssey in 2017, she was subject to what she has described as "misogynist trolling" for her modern wording, among other things. "I find it quite baffling. It's people who don't care about the poem, yet when it comes to this culture-war internet discourse, they perform anger about it and a protectiveness of it," she told Vulture this week. "It has to do with an idea of a totally stable notion of greatness and masculinity… Anything that challenges that interpretation of what ancient history is threatens their identity in terms of their gender and racial identities."
It's significant, too, that Nolan is an unusual figure in the culture wars, says Tom Shone, the author of the definitive book on the director, The Nolan Variations. One quality that separates Nolan from his peers, Shone tells the BBC, is that his films' ideologies aren't always simple. "He's a Rorschach director. He makes films in which the left can find endorsement as easily as the right, and frequently at the same time."
Imagery and rhetoric from his Batman trilogy, for instance, have been adopted by the right, so people of that political persuasion might feel betrayed that The Odyssey appears to be more progressive. "I think of all the blockbusters that provoke anti-woke sentiment – from Star Wars to The Little Mermaid – The Odyssey is the most painful for [conservatives] because on the surface at least Nolan films feel like they might skew rightward not left," says Shone.
Nolan also makes films his own idiosyncratic way. Whether he's taking on Batman or World War Two or outer space, Nolan doesn't follow genre rules – and his defiantly distinctive approach can seem sacrilegious when he's taking on a text as revered as Homer's Odyssey. Still, the things which have prompted complaints about his new film are the things which should ensure that it's a hit. The Odyssey is already known for its colossal scale, its complexity, its literary pedigree and its uncompromising individuality. That's why people are criticising it, and that's why they will go to see it, too.
The Odyssey is released on 17 July [2026] in US and UK cinemas.
This article was amended on 27 June [2026].