The trouble with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey starts with the casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus. True, this may not be as egregiously bad as John Wayne as Genghis Kahn in the 1956 movie The Conqueror — a choice so notorious that it inspired the title for a book about ill-advised casting, Damien Bona’s Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders (1996) — but did Nolan really wish us to associate the Homeric hero with the man who was Will Hunting, one of the lesser leads in the Ocean’s 11 franchise, and one of the conjoined twins in Stuck on You (2003)? This is not the typical resume for an Ithacan king associated with the manly attributes of persistence, valor, and brute strength. This is your Odysseus, Mr. Nolan?Now I harbor no grudge against Matt Damon — well, I harbor a little grudge against Matt Damon, mainly for his participation in the outrageous legacy media-fueled frenzy against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh via his appearance as Kavanaugh on Saturday Night Live. My assumption is that outside actors who agree to lampoon public figures on SNL, being under no compulsion to do so since they are not on staff, genuinely dislike those public figures, so I hold Damon, not the show’s writers, responsible for his egregiously uncharitable impression, which made a weepy mockery of the real Kavanaugh’s principled (and proper) indignation during his Senate confirmation hearing. I hold Damon responsible, too, for trotting out his parody again earlier this year, when an SNL skit depicted Kavanaugh in a bar with FBI Director Kash Patel (Aziz Ansari) and War Secretary Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost). This time, Damon brought particular vitriol to his portrayal of Kavanaugh, who was said to lament “male loneliness” — as though this real ailment, shared by millions of men though presumably not by the justice, was a joke.Even Odysseus goes through periods of “male loneliness” — how else to describe his condition on the island Ogygia with Calypso (played, um, by Charlize Theron)? Yet the real problem is not Damon’s political bent but what his casting reveals about Nolan’s overall approach to populating his version of The Odyssey: The movie, much in the manner of a 1990s-era Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespeare adaptation, is stuffed with stars but with little regard for their appropriateness for their roles. Much ink has been spilled on the selection of Elliot Page (in Prince terms, the performer formerly known as the actress Ellen Page, from 2007’s Juno) as Sinon, although let me pause to comment further: I recently learned that Nolan declines to make use of a smartphone, so perhaps this would explain his tone-deafness to our post-woke moment. How else to account for Nolan apparently assuming that the casting of a transgender actor as a Greek warrior would elicit no comment whatsoever?