Daniel Mendelsohn has little time for the staged culture wars that have erupted over Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film adaptation of Homer’s Greek epic “The Odyssey” which comes out on Friday. 

“There’s nothing to be accurate to,” said Mendelsohn, the renowned Princeton and Bard professor, who earlier this year put out an English translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which he spent six years finishing. “Classic scholars know that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are a mishmash of different kinds of armor — clothing, speech, and different eras in the evolution of Greek culture.”

Over the past few weeks, a mostly right-wing led online backlash to Nolan’s version of the famed Greek tale has metastasized into a campaign to drown the movie in bad reviews and its incorporated well known conservative voices like Matt Walsh and Elon Musk, who have taken Nolan to task for his “woke” casting decisions.

Arguably the most disturbing choice made by Nolan, according to his critics, was the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and the decision to have characters speak in a more contemporary, modern dialogue. Musk claimed that Nolan was “pissing on Homer’s grave.”

Other prominent figures on the right to throw verbal stones at Nolan included comedian Chrissie Mayr, who called Nyong’o’s casting “disgusting,” Megyn Kelly and The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles. The criticism about the modern dialogue was slightly more measured, with one commentator on the film’s YouTube trailer page writing: “It sounds like they’re trying to have an epic conversation on the sidewalk outside the Starbucks.”

Nonsense, says Mendelsohn. “None of these people look anything like the actual kinds of characters that Homer imagined,” he tells us, pointing out that only Nyong’o, as well as Elliot Page and Zendaya, were criticized for their roles, while Matt Damon, who plays the lead role of Odysseus, came out unscathed.

“Matt Damon doesn’t look a whole lot like an Eastern Mediterranean guy,” he said, noting that all adaptations of Greek classics fit with times that they are adapted to. He takes particular umbrage at the outrage of Nyong’o’s casting noting that anyone who has actually read The Odyssey knows, Helen of Troy has a small cameo in the story. “It’s not the hill you want to die on.”

Much of the criticisms lobbed at Nolan argue that his version of “The Odyssey” is historically inaccurate, as if a Greek mythological poem that features multiple gods, one-eyed monsters and actual witches is rooted in any kind of historical fact. “We go to operas where Black sopranos play 16th century English queens, we go to all Black productions of MacBeth … It’s not like you’re making a movie about Abraham Lincoln and casting a Chinese actor.”

In Mendelsohn’s eyes, the most important aspect of any adaptation of “The Odyssey” is that it fits with Homer’s spirit, rather than any specific casting choices.

When Page Six Hollywood asked him to review Nolan’s followup to “Oppenheimer”  (he has already seen it) in that light, he called it a mixed bag. “There are some things that he does incredibly well that are truly overwhelming. There are some things I take issue with,” he said.

“The Odyssey” is primed for a massive opening for a three-hour, R-rated epic. The latest tracking forecasts have it going as high as $120 million, which would be $40 million above what his multiple-Oscar winner “Oppenheimer” debuted to in 2023.

Mendelsohn expects “The Odyssey” to lead to an uptick in classic Greek literature, similar to how Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic “Gladiator” boosted interest in ancient Roman history. “This is going to send so many young people, and not so young people, to read the original.”