All behavior can be traced back to instincts. When justice is denied, instincts turn to vengeance. —Anonymous

This made-up, sophomoric quote is the first thing that appears on-screen in Citizen Vigilante. Like the movie itself, it might at first appear profound, but it foreshadows one of the movie’s two terminally diseased premises: the alleged moral supremacy of “instinct” (i.e., unthinking emotionalism) over reasoned thought.

We need spend only a few sentences on the movie’s almost total lack of artistic merit. Writer/director Uwe Boll intentionally makes bad movies and has openly admitted that he’s a terrible filmmaker.1 Citizen Vigilante is poorly written, poorly cast, poorly acted, poorly filmed, poorly scored, and poorly edited. None of this should be hard to believe for anyone who has seen any of Boll’s other films—but these criticisms, severe as they are, aren’t important here. Most important is what Citizen Vigilante’s generally positive reception says about the quality of thought, discourse, and art in the modern world.

Citizen Vigilante isn’t merely a bad movie. Boll has made dozens of those; a few are entertaining because of their sheer badness, and most can cause no harm beyond wasting a few hours of your time. Citizen Vigilante is a different, much worse kind of bad movie: the kind that tries and fails to take a moral stand against a severe, real-world problem—and then proceeds to dump jet fuel on the fire from a bucket labeled “water.”

The titular vigilante is Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer), whose name is never spoken aloud and only briefly seen in print once. (Boll’s intent in making the protagonist nearly anonymous seems to be to show him as someone with whom all of us should identify or sympathize; “anonymity as relatability” is a common device in vigilante stories.) Sanders takes it upon himself to fix Europe’s failing justice system—as though “Europe’s failing justice system” were a singular monolith—by torturing and murdering people who deserve it, according to his own blatantly whimsical and emotionalistic judgment. The movie doesn’t even specify the country in which it takes place; Boll only tells us that it’s set in Europe.2

In real life, some parts of Europe have been increasingly plagued by violent attacks similar to those depicted in the movie, and these attacks often are committed by migrants like those against whom Sanders retaliates.3 America has also been rocked by many high-profile cases of senseless violence committed by illegal immigrants in recent years, including those of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray.4

However, Boll’s film opens not by asking serious, carefully formulated questions about what justice requires in such cases but by reveling in the violence itself, which is almost always shown in gory, over-the-top detail. Within the first three minutes, an unnamed and presumably illegal African migrant stabs an innocent woman in front of her son for no discernible reason. Shortly after that, Muslim immigrants gang-rape a teenage girl and try to defend themselves by saying that the act was morally permissible under the teachings of Islam. Similarly graphic scenes comprise much of the rest of the film, and they clearly are intended to anger the viewer into accepting (or further entrenching) the premise that “outsiders are bad”—not to make him think.

Rational, good people are and should be enraged at the individuals who have committed such crimes in real life. Just as important, rational, good people don’t morally judge any individual on the basis of anything other than that individual’s words and actions—and they understand that morally judging others is not always necessary or appropriate. Codes of values, on the other hand, are and must be subject to moral judgment because they are volitional—people choose to create them, choose to accept them, and choose to act on them—and because the ideas and values on which people act have direct impacts on human well-being. Groups of people can be morally judged wholesale only insofar as membership in a particular group is both volitional and necessarily constitutes a moral issue; not all volitional choices are moral issues, but all moral issues are matters of volitional choice. This is why we can—and must—pass moral judgment on all Nazis, all rapists, and all murderers but cannot legitimately judge all men, all white people, or all immigrants.

Citizen Vigilante never attempts to make any of these distinctions. Within the first ten minutes, it becomes clear that the movie either cannot or will not define its terms; the phrase “illegal migrants” (and often just “migrants”) is consistently used as a synonym for “violent criminals,” and the words “rights” and “individual” are never used at all. This refusal (or, more likely, inability) to be precise about whom the film regards as enemies of human well-being not only enables but necessitates all the equivocation, conceptual unclarity, and moral whitewashing that follows.

The first dozen violent migrants we see in the film come across as glaringly exaggerated in their ethnic diversity: two African men, a generic (non-native) Western European woman, an ambiguously Eastern European man, a handful of vaguely Middle Eastern gangsters, one man who might be some kind of Asian, and two whose countries of origin are impossible to guess—Boll’s point clearly being that they’re “not from around here.” Sanders witnesses them all harass, rob, rape, and/or assault innocent locals—and the first instance we see of his “justice” is when he uses a gun to threaten a young man who gets on a bus without buying a ticket.

Some of Citizen Vigilante’s defenders are quick to claim that Sanders is not a racist or xenophobe but a staunch individualist because he punishes only violent criminals irrespective of their race, ethnicity, or migrant status.5 One of several problems with that claim is that it is not what happens in the movie. Sanders does punish some people who are shown to have seriously harmed others without cause—but he also “punishes” hundreds of presumably innocent people, most of whom are shown (or strongly implied) to be migrants.

Boll’s writing is so heavy-handed as to elicit eye rolls, as in a scene in which Sanders tells the manager of a property management company he owns, “Give me the addresses [of everyone who is late on rent], and I’ll have my people sort it out.” Worse than the clumsy dialogue is Sanders’s moral “reasoning”; it quickly becomes clear that by “sort it out” he means “use violence.” Sanders regards all his low-income tenants as criminals at worst or lazy losers at best—he says so explicitly several times throughout this scene—and he is particularly disdainful of those who are both poor and foreign. When the manager protests and points out that the police will intervene, Sanders blithely says, “Our lawyers will have something to say about that,” implying that his lawyers can somehow protect him from legitimate criminal charges of assault and conspiracy—and that the government would be morally wrong to file such charges.

As Sanders is leaving the room at the end of this scene, he stares pointedly at his employees—most of whom are of retirement age—and says, “It smells like a nursing home in here. Let’s get some fresh blood.” According to Boll, noble vigilantes don’t stop at threatening and “punishing” presumably innocent people based on race or income—old people are fair game, too.

As if mass assault and age discrimination weren’t bad enough, Sanders later kidnaps a judge who knowingly set violent criminals free—and murders several innocent people solely to demonstrate a meaningless anecdote to the captive judge, whom Sanders is about to kill anyway. While driving, with the judge in the passenger seat, Sanders says, “Human beings are such sheep. When you push them to the limit, they will obey the law, even if their own lives are in danger. Here—I’ll show you.” He then deliberately swerves into oncoming traffic, causing a random car in the opposite lane to run off the road and violently crash at high speed. He casually continues his sermon: “Did you see what happened? That car, when we went into their lane, instead of just crossing the line and breaking the law and going into our lane—they went into a ditch and most likely died.”

According to Boll, to the tens of thousands of people who have rated Citizen Vigilante four or five stars on IMDB or Amazon, and to the thousands more who are singing its praises on social media (including Elon Musk), Sanders is the sort of hero we need.6

Not once does Citizen Vigilante even accidentally imply the only premise that is morally correct with respect to immigration: People (including citizens, immigrants, travelers, and everyone else) who respect individual rights should be welcome in civilized countries, and those who do not should not.7 In fact, one of the most shocking things about the movie is the perfect consistency with which it avoids even a tangential connection to a proper moral stance (i.e., one derived from and consistent with individual rights). Instead, it frames the central conflict as, in part, “us against them,” with “us” being “those who were born in this particular geographic area” and “them” being “those who were born somewhere else.”

This is pure tribalism of the worst and most morally offensive kind. Such an attitude may not constitute racism or xenophobia in every case, but it often does, and it embodies exactly the same underlying premise: Individuals are to be judged not by their actions, character, or chosen beliefs but by some unchosen—therefore, morally irrelevant—characteristic that they happen to possess by sheer accident of birth or circumstance.

Another serious problem with this movie is its utterly unearned confidence in its dismissal of the moral validity of the rule of law. An incompetent Interpol investigator named Henry (Costas Mandylor) halfheartedly chases Sanders and serves as a one-dimensional caricature. “We have the law for a reason,” he says in one scene. “We cannot have vigilantes running around doing their own thing, you know? That’s why I’m here. We don’t want society to collapse.” This is the only reason viewers are ever given as to why Sanders’s actions might not be praiseworthy. Every other law enforcement official in the film is depicted as not merely incompetent but outright stupid to the point of comical absurdity, such as when the generic “European” equivalent of a SWAT team obligingly stand in front of the world’s most obvious trap and allow themselves to be gunned down by the vigilante—and then a second team does the same—and then a third. By the time this happens, yet another of Citizen Vigilante’s many blatant equivocations is on full display: “Some people in the justice system aren’t doing their jobs; therefore, everyone in the justice system is morally complicit and impossibly stupid; therefore, the vigilante is morally free to murder anyone who tries to stop him.”

By this point in the movie, superficially different forms of the same idea have surfaced at least a dozen times, forming a clear and sinister pattern. All immigrants are dangerous because some violent criminals are in the “immigrant” group. All late-paying tenants in the “poor” group are lazy freeloaders. All employees who are in the “old people” group must be underperforming—because they’re old. All police, judges, and politicians deserve death because they belong to the “naive idiots who still believe in the rule of law” group. Any given motorist on the road can be justly murdered on whim—because everyone except Sanders belongs to the “sheep” group.

This is pure collectivism—which has been Citizen Vigilante’s basic moral premise all along. Collectivism is not merely discussing people in terms of groups that share certain characteristics, nor is it equivalent to generalization or even stereotyping.8 Collectivism is the view—whether implicit or explicit—that the group (any group), not the individual, is the unit of moral or political concern. From any form of this view, it necessarily and immediately follows that individual rights either don’t exist or can be freely revoked so long as those individuals belong to some group that some person (or some other group) finds distasteful or inconvenient. Collectivism is the basic moral premise held in common by (to name but a few) the Nazis who murdered eleven million biologically or ethnically “inferior” individuals during World War II; the communists who executed three million individuals under Pol Pot explicitly for the crime of standing out from the group in any way (including simply by wearing glasses); the other communists who tortured, starved, and shot twenty million “dissenting” individuals under Lenin and Stalin; and the other, other communists who starved fifty million individuals to death in the name of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”

Sanders is no Hitler, Pol Pot, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao in terms of magnitude—but he is precisely their ideological soulmate. Just as these dictators and countless others believed that eliminating entire classes of individuals was merely the price to be paid for what they considered to be the improvement of society, Sanders believes himself justified in killing anyone who stands in the way of his vision of a better world. Sanders views himself as a wolf with unlimited license to prey on any number of sheep, but he is like a wolf in only one way: He acts on animal instinct rather than reasoned thought.

Citizen Vigilante’s basic concept of justice is that it is whatever you feel it is—so long as you are sufficiently outraged by people or things you feel are bad. In one of Sanders’s many tiresome monologues, he tells us explicitly what he (and by extension, Boll) feels justice is when he visits a rape victim in the hospital:

Sanders: The men who did this to you—what do you want to happen to them?

Victim: I want them to go to jail for the rest of their lives.

Sanders: And they might. Of course, we won’t know until the end of a trial, and that could take years. And of course, you’ll have to participate in that trial, telling the story of what those men did to you over and over in a room full of people who are going to call you a liar and try to poke holes in every detail of your story. We’ll also have to get lucky with the judgment; you never know how those things are going to turn out. And during that long, expensive trial, we have to hope and pray that the men who did this to you don’t do the same exact thing to somebody else. Is that the justice that you want?

Victim: No.

Sanders: Do you want justice?

Victim: Yes.

According to Sanders, an objective trial in which all the facts of a case are scrutinized carefully by dozens of people is not justice—nor is a public legal process intended to minimize the chances of imprisoning or executing innocent people—nor is a rigorous standard of epistemic hygiene and logical coherence. Rather, justice requires (or at least allows) the victim to sanction the murder of someone who may or may not be her attacker, at the hands of a stranger whose rationality and objectivity she can’t possibly gauge, at the risk of spending the rest of her life in prison for being a knowing accomplice or accessory to murder—all in the name of blindly emoting about what “feels” just while refusing to do any thinking about what justice requires.

Intelligent, interesting, worthwhile vigilante films point out real problems in the justice system while taking care to separate the clearly guilty, the plausibly guilty, and the presumed innocent. Such films then proceed to pose questions such as: What is justice? How do we know? How do we punish evil without becoming evil ourselves? What’s the cost of getting any of these answers wrong?

Citizen Vigilante is not intelligent, interesting, or worthwhile. Whereas other films such as The Brave One (2007) and Law Abiding Citizen (2009) take the issue of vigilantism seriously by encouraging the viewer to think carefully about it, Citizen Vigilante gestures vaguely in the direction of a real and serious problem, critically botches the diagnosis, and prescribes a catastrophically wrong treatment. This cycle of fundamental misdiagnosis followed by “solutions” that make the problem worse is increasingly common with respect to many real-world issues today; and as certain societal problems grow more severe, more and more people draw collectivistic lines in the sand, refusing to consider any view put forth by anyone not from “their side.” (I’ve provided a few examples throughout this article, but if you’re so inclined, simply search for both positive and negative reviews of the movie and assess the quality of the discourse yourself.)

Citizen Vigilante embodies exactly this kind of deeply ignorant arrogance, smugly asserting its own righteousness while refusing to consider that its basic premises may be wrong. This sort of movie is the last thing we need more of today. What we need—what we desperately need—is more reasoned, careful, good-faith discussion between people who are motivated not by a desire to destroy their ideological enemies at all costs but by a desire to discover and rationally validate objective standards of morality, of justice, and of everything else that human life requires.9 Citizen Vigilante claims to be a movie about righting wrongs, but the only reason to watch it is to look for everything it gets wrong—so that you can get those answers right. To avoid sliding irreversibly into the dystopian nightmare depicted in the film, we must start by taking the factual requirements of human life seriously, by clarifying our own thinking according to a rigorously evidence-based standard of objectivity, by dramatically raising the bars of both art and discourse, and by taking commensurate action in both politics and education—one mind at a time.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Running time: 173 minutes
Rated R for graphic violence, language, and brief nudity

There have been a great many translations of The Odyssey spanning hundreds of years, although the same half dozen or so tend to top the list of those most highly regarded by credible critics and literary scholars. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation—not one of them—served as director Christopher Nolan’s primary inspiration for the film (he also wrote the screenplay).1 In a glowing review of Wilson’s translation, Annalisa Quinn of NPR wrote:

Wilson’s project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup—the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms—to reveal something fresh and clean. . . . Though it’s silly to ascribe too much to her gender rather than her skill, Wilson does have a certain double sensibility that often translates male grandeur with a female half-smile.2

As if this weren’t a clear enough signal of the cancerous identity politics in Nolan’s film, the opening shot is a close-up of a black man presented—with unflinching seriousness—as a 12th-century BC Greek speaking to a room full of other 12th-century BC “Greeks” who are, in fact, primarily Asians, Indians, and other Africans.3

Here we go again.

Only Odysseus’s quest itself is grander in scope than the catastrophic failure of Nolan’s film. Its redeeming qualities are nearly nonexistent, and it fails not only as an adaptation of one of the greatest stories of all time but also as a film, and these two failure modes often overlap considerably.

The Odyssey is widely regarded as one of the greatest stories of all time, not because it’s old. It has been lauded for thousands of years because it is one of the best-known examples of long-form storytelling, and storytelling has one fundamental purpose: to depict the human condition and enrich human lives. The essential task of a storyteller is to convey meaning—that is, to engage deeply with ideas and values that always have been and always will be central to human life. This is what Nolan’s film utterly fails to do and indeed does not even attempt.

This starts to become evident during an early scene depicting Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant who can speak in the original poem but does not speak in this scene. Nolan’s decision to render Polyphemus mute here is not a minor change—it entirely misses and negates the purpose of the scene. In the original text, the cyclops encounter is the first of Odysseus’s major postwar adventures that he recounts to the Phaeacians (and the reader). This was not an arbitrary choice on Homer’s part. The reason the cyclops encounter is shown first is because its purpose is to convey, in part and in fundamental terms, what sort of man Odysseus is—and he reveals his character through a verbal battle of wits with Polyphemus, who displays near-human intelligence.

In the poem, Odysseus’s men are trapped in Polyphemus’s cave when he blocks the entrance with a humongous boulder. The men move to attack the creature, but Odysseus orders them to stand down—and he reaffirms the order even after Polyphemus brutally kills and eats several of the soldiers. Odysseus’s remaining men question the order but nonetheless follow it, trusting his judgment even though they do not yet understand it. Odysseus engages Polyphemus in conversation and witty banter, amusing the cyclops until he falls asleep. Odysseus then explains to his men that, if they kill the creature, they will be trapped forever in the cave because the stone blocking the entrance is far too heavy for them to move. They cannot fight their way out of the deathtrap—they must think their way out.

Over several days, Odysseus—who cleverly has told Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody”—lulls Polyphemus into complacency with more banter and flattery until the beast drinks too much wine (at Odysseus’s encouragement) and falls into a deep sleep. This allows Odysseus and his men to carry out the preparations for their escape plan—preparations that are loud and would have woken the cyclops had he not been drunk. When they are ready, they sharpen a large wooden stake and drive it into Polyphemus’s eye, blinding and enraging him. The cyclops gropes around for the men, but they are hiding among his sheep. When the giant eventually unseals the cave entrance to let the sheep out to graze, he feels each sheep as it passes by, still searching for the treacherous men who blinded him. Odysseus, having anticipated this, has already told his men to crawl out of the cave under the sheep, maintaining their disguise. As they board their ship, Polyphemus gives chase, shouting to his brethren cyclops and to his father, Poseidon, that “‘Nobody’ has blinded me.” Once Odysseus and his men are safely away from the shore, he cannot resist revealing his true name to Polyphemus, shouting “Tell [Poseidon] Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye: Laertes’ son, whose home’s on Ithaca!”4 Although Odysseus is remarkably smart, he nonetheless sometimes does stupid things; this is, in part, what makes him an interesting and relatable character. (Revealing one’s identity to the god of the sea after blinding his son is quite foolhardy when one needs to cross the sea to get home; Poseidon then proceeds to severely complicate the remainder of Odysseus’s journey.)

Nolan’s portrayal of this scene conveys none of this meaning. Polyphemus is mute, so there is no dialogue between him and Odysseus at all. Odysseus does point out to his men that slaying the creature will trap them in the cave, but this is framed as an almost accidental realization rather than the reasoned observation of a clever man who has been paying close attention to his surroundings all along. In the poem (and in the well-done, albeit hokey 1997 television miniseries), the tension of this scene comes from the duel of minds between hero and monster, wherein a single intellectual stumble or overstated word of praise could spell doom for the wayward sailors homesick for wives whose embraces they’ve forgotten and sons they’ve never met.

Nolan replaces this crucial dramatic tension with boilerplate slasher film tactics, substituting darkness and loud noises for the battle of wits in a clumsy horror scene that clashes tonally with the rest of the film. As in the poem, Odysseus taunts the beast by revealing his name as the men flee to safety—but because we did not first see his intelligence, his courage, and the depth of his concern for his men, he comes across more like a cocky braggart than a flawed hero. Throughout the rest of the film, Nolan continues to portray Odysseus as alternately rude and stupid while spending comparatively little time on his good qualities—and Matt Damon’s consistently phoned-in performance shows us an Odysseus whose two primary emotions are mild confusion and boredom. (I feel compelled to point out that Damon is a much better actor than this, and he deserved a vastly better script.)

The scene featuring the witch Circe is similarly butchered. Odysseus’s men, nearly mad with hunger, encounter a lone woman while foraging in the wilderness and demand food from her. Although they don’t threaten or harm her, they are unnecessarily aggressive, and she agrees to share her food with them. While they are eating, she gleefully turns them into pigs using her magic.

When Odysseus later confronts Circe, Nolan’s version of her is revealed to be another instance of modern Hollywood’s sexism:

Odysseus: You turned my men into pigs.

Circe: No—they are pigs. I only removed their disguises and showed them for what they are. They came to me with empty bellies and hot blood.5

Odysseus: Did they touch you?

Circe: They would have.

Odysseus never challenges Circe’s presumption about his men and resolves the situation by simply threatening to kill Circe’s sister if she doesn’t remove the curse.

In the original poem, there isn’t so much as a vague hint that Circe is a misandrist hellbent on punishing all men for their supposed inherent wickedness, nor is there any indication that Odysseus’s men treat her poorly; in fact, it is Circe who offers to help them, and they graciously accept her offer. She is portrayed as a mysterious and explicitly nonhuman creature, although she takes a human form and outwardly acts human in some ways. In fact, the sexual aggressor in the original text is not Odysseus nor any of his men but Circe; she uses both magic and seduction to lure unsuspecting men into her trap. Odysseus, aided by Hermes, counters Circe’s magic with mystical herbs, and although he does sleep with her, he does so not out of lust but in acquiescence to her demand and on the condition that she remove the curse she has placed on his men.6

Par for the course for Hollywood in 2026, Nolan’s version of this scene inverts Odysseus from a virtuous, clear-thinking man who is explicitly not ruled by his sexual urges into an apologist for horny thieves. One point of the original scene—which Nolan also misses or ignores—is that appearances can be dangerously deceiving, and that Odysseus is greater than most men in his ability to see the truth behind clever deceptions. Another idea central to the original version of this scene is that courage is virtuous in part because not all threats to our values can be fully understood; Circe’s nature and motives are mysterious to Odysseus, which frightens him greatly, but he nevertheless confronts her because he would rather die in the attempt to free his men than leave them to their fate.

In Nolan’s film, the cyclops scene, the Circe scene, and many others are oddly short but feel much longer because they are not enjoyable or interesting to watch. The 173-minute film feels both frantically rushed and exhaustingly slow at the same time, which also traces back to Nolan’s fundamental misunderstanding of (and disrespect for) the source material. The original poem is only slightly longer than the average novel, but it would be somewhat misleading to say “only” without qualification because the structure of an epic poem is so different from that of a novel. In general, epic poems are primarily descriptive; they summarize long, complex events in a few lines or stanzas with little exposition of motive or mechanism, leaving it to the reader to infer or imagine these elements.7 This is why an epic poem typically covers tremendously more narrative ground than a novel or short story of comparable length; the latter two, by virtue of their different structures, spend much more time on the “why” and “how” of the events shown therein.

In practice, this means that adapting an epic poem to film requires much more screen time than adapting a similar-length novel unless one is willing to massively abridge the original text—at which point the resulting film becomes not an adaptation but a different story that is, at most, loosely based on the original. Nolan’s film feels both rushed and plodding because it merely “checks off” each major scene without seeking to understand what it means or why it should be included at all. As a result, we get something that is less like a coherent, narratively driven film and more like a three-hour museum tour led by an overcaffeinated guide who started the tour an hour late. We don’t understand how Odysseus defeated the cyclops or what (if anything) he learned from the experience; we see five minutes of whispering and a brief skirmish, and then the film moves on. We don’t understand how he survives his encounter with Circe or how he changes as a result of it, if he does; we see five minutes of a bored man halfheartedly arguing with an angry woman who hates men for no clear reason, and then the film moves on. There are so many scenes in the movie, and most of them are so shallow, that the end result is an increasingly familiar one in movies today: a film that manages to say nothing despite speaking for a very long time.

I also must address Nolan’s frankly disgusting willingness to submit to the overt racism and sexism that have infiltrated so many Hollywood productions since the mid-2010s. The opening scene is far from the only one in which the actors’ sex, race, or ethnicity is wielded as a club clearly intended to “deconstruct” “white” or “male-dominated” stories. For example, there is no defensible argument to be made that Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy for either her acting ability or her resemblance to the character; only in the loosest sense of the word “acting” does she do any acting at all during her two or three minutes of screen time, and she couldn’t bear any less resemblance to an ancient Greek woman. The decision to cast a sub-Saharan African woman as Helen of Troy was made for one reason only, and everyone knows that reason, including those who pretend not to know: to “subvert” the “racist” assumptions of “white” audiences. Only slightly less ridiculous are the myriad scenes (at least six) in which Odysseus’s African, Indian, and Asian soldiers loudly proclaim to one another: “We are Greeks.”

Particularly offensive is the casting of Elliot Page as Sinon (a character who is not in The Odyssey at all; he is essentially a disposable extra in Virgil’s Aeneid, written centuries after Homer’s death).8 Page is five foot one and barely one hundred pounds. This alone should disqualify any male actor from playing a Greek soldier in any serious adaptation of The Odyssey—but Page is not a male, and no amount of surgery can make her look like a Greek soldier. The film pointedly ignores these facts, most glaringly when showing a shot of Page immediately after a shot of the (actual) boy who plays a pubescent version of the character in an earlier scene. Nolan extends the farce still further, rewriting Sinon from a remarkably unremarkable side character into “the greatest and bravest man I’ve ever known” (Odysseus’s words). Just as Sinon is blatantly claimed to be something he irrefutably is not, so too is Page—and the prevailing moral code of modern Hollywood dictates that no one is allowed to point out any of this.

Most of the other actors in the film deliver performances just as underwhelming as Page’s. Damon comes across as being there primarily for the paycheck, Tom Holland alternates between overacting and underacting (mostly the latter), and John Leguizamo—who is supposed to be playing a Greek servant—doesn’t even try to mask his extremely New York accent. The only notable exception is Anne Hathaway, who does what she can with the poorly written script and occasionally manages to breathe some life into otherwise yawn-inducing scenes, but she can only do so much. The film is, for the most part, similarly boring to look at; many scenes are underlit nearly to the point of complete obscurity, and most are dominated by dark blue, dark brown, or dark yellow filters. This, too, is typical of Nolan; most of his films are overwhelmingly dark in both color and lighting.

Nolan’s film is deeply flawed in many more ways, but unlike him, I will refrain from trying to cram more onto the page than the format can support. Even in my most charitable interpretation, there is almost nothing positive to say about the film, the final lines of which are possibly the least self-aware lines of dialogue ever written:

Penelope: Why will the stories [of us] always be sung?

Odysseus: Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.

Perhaps Nolan should try his hand at pop songwriting—because if this is the caliber of narrative writing that he thinks should be memorialized through the ages, then it’s time for him to put away his storytelling pen for good.

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?"

"In the last few days, you may have heard about Leopold Aschenbrenner—the wonder kid hedge fund manager who lost tens of billions over the course of a few days. It’s the biggest financial fiasco of the year.

"If you didn’t read about it in the news, don’t worry. Hollywood will certainly make it into a movie. This 25-year-old hot shot’s financial empire was literally collapsing while guests were showing up for his blowout wedding at a fake Tuscan villa in Carmel, California. The screenplay practically writes itself....

"This tyro’s investing strategy looks more like gambling addiction than high finance. Aschenbrenner borrowed to the hilt, using four time leverage to buy AI stocks by the truckload. Then he added to his risk by shorting companies he was sure AI would replace. In other words, instead of hedging his AI position—which is standard practice (and why they call them hedge funds), he doubled down, setting himself up for a failure of Biblical proportions.

"When you take chances like this, even a small downturn in AI stocks will wipe out your entire capital. That’s pretty much what happened last week.

"I wanted to learn more about the young man behind this collapse—so I went to his Wikipedia page. There I discovered his connection to fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and the latter’s Effective Altruism philosophy.

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?

"But there it is.

And—another coincidence!—the woman who assisted Bankman-Fried, and served 14 months in prison for fraud and money laundering, also helped run her college’s Effective Altruism club.

This is getting to be a trend.

"But, of course, none of this is coincidence...."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy'

(Aug. 5, 2026 / JNS)

Opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war against the Iranian government is nearly universal in the West. Polls show large majorities opposed in both the United States and Europe. Politicians across the spectrum, as well as the Pope, have called it strategically reckless and morally indefensible. These objections are serious. They are also wrong.

The ethical case in favor of pursuing this war against Iran is straightforward: bullies deserve to be punished, criminal dictators deserve to be overthrown, initiators of war deserve to lose them and totalitarian governments should be conquered.

The pragmatic argument in favor of this course of action is more complicated: The case is that the war is costly in terms of both treasure and human lives.

However, the central question isn’t whether this war carries costs. Every war does. All human action, in peace or in war, has a price. The question is whether the rewards outweigh the costs.

There are three key reasons as to why the benefits of the Iran war are greater than the costs:

1. The rights of Iranians need protection.

The rights to speak freely, assemble peacefully, practice one’s beliefs and participate in political life are not privileges granted by governments. They are universal human rights that belong to every individual regardless of nationality or where they happen to live.

For more than four decades, nearly 90 million Iranians have lived under a regime that systematically suppresses those basic human rights. Citizens can be imprisoned or even killed for criticizing the government, protesting in public, engaging in political opposition or advocating for greater freedom. Women have been imprisoned for removing a headscarf. Men have been executed for their sexual orientation.

When a government becomes the primary violator of its citizens’ rights, the principle of human rights does not stop at the border. Human rights belong to individuals, not states, and they do not become negotiable simply because the abuses occur within a particular country’s territory.

The international community cannot remain indifferent when millions of people are systematically denied their rights. At this point, to protect the rights of Iranians, there must be an intervention against the entity violating their rights—the Iranian government.

2. Iran’s government needs to be held accountable.

Critics of the war invoke the concept of “national sovereignty” like it’s a magic shield. Whatever a government does inside its own borders, the argument goes, is its own business.

That principle might apply to a legitimate government agreed to by its people, but the Islamic Republic of Iran is not one of them.

Governments derive their authority from a basic compact: Citizens grant the state its power, and the state protects their fundamental rights. The Islamic Republic broke that compact long ago with its violent suppression tactics, anti-freedom policies and outright mass murder of some 30,000 of its own citizens for protesting the regime.

Beyond Iran’s borders, the regime has spent decades funding and directing Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; organizations responsible for mass civilian casualties in Israel and sustained instability across the broader Middle East. Iran’s government is not simply an authoritarian state that mistreats its own people. It is a state that has exported violence as a tool of regional policy.

A government that operates this way has no legitimate claim to the sovereignty protections it demands from the international community.

Along with protecting the basic rights of Iranians, the Iranian government must be punished and held accountable for the violations it has committed.

3. The United Nations cannot protect Iranians or hold Iran’s government accountable.

The institutions built to prevent governments from slaughtering their own citizens have a well-documented response to the Islamic Republic: They tend to write reports about it.

After the massacre of protesters in Iran earlier this year, the United Nations produced empty statements and no action. It formally urged Iran to impose an immediate moratorium on executions—a request the regime ignored entirely. The International Criminal Court in the Hague issued no indictments. The ICC is presumably too busy doing exactly that for Israeli leaders, who are mobilizing their country for self-defense.

Rights without enforcement are not rights. They are aspirations written on paper. Something must enforce rights, and the United Nations has shown it cannot and will not.

The United States and Israel stepped in when the United Nations and the international community refused to do so. For the first time in decades, the Iranian regime is facing real consequences, not empty condemnations.




Originally published here.

When I was a teacher, many years ago, the Times Higher Education Supplement was on every staffroom table and was considered the voice of the progressive establishment. Perhaps I should not be surprised to see its modern incarnation, Times Higher Education, receive the sort of treatment that was once reserved for the tabloids when they got too nosey about people in power. Progressivism always has the progressivism of a generation ago among its prime targets. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education writes, “I was reported to police over Arday case. I was just doing my job”:

[…] I decided, on second thoughts, to take the voicemail at my desk, about 10 minutes away in Holborn.

I was shocked to hear it was from the Metropolitan Police, asking me to call them back. Why? Nothing remarkable had happened to me in the previous year. When I rang back the officer explained a complaint had been made against me regarding the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but the matter was now closed.

But it was important, the officer explained, that I didn’t contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.

However, I hadn’t emailed Arday in four months – my last direct email had been in September, offering formal right of reply to allegations that he had plagiarised his PhD.

That allegation was not made lightly: I had assembled a 63-page report which detailed how he had apparently used, without proper citation, huge chunks from a thesis written in 2009 by another student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a highly respected education academic at Brunel University of London. Further checks found passages that seemed to be lifted from the work of researchers based in the US, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the UK. In total, I submitted 97 pages of evidence to both Cambridge and Arday’s awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores University, for their investigation.

Serious allegations, certainly. Deeply embarrassing and distressing, definitely. Although Arday was eventually cleared of plagiarism by an LJMU review, a frenzy of coverage led to Cambridge opening an investigation into Arday’s academic record and CV, followed shortly afterwards by Arday announcing his resignation.

But were my inquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.

“We are Jason Arday,” say the Cambridge faculty.

They are all correct.

– Dinesh D’Souza