Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer's “The Odyssey” published in 2017 inspired Christopher Nolan in crafting his blockbuster adaptation of the nearly 2,800-year-old poem, has some thoughts on the film.
In a scathing missive to the London Review of Books, the British-American classicist dissected Nolan's work with a scalpel so sharp that he may need to borrow some of Matt Damon's armor to read it from cover to cover. Last fall, the acclaimed director cited Wilson's translation when telling Empire magazine why he was drawn to the story. “I think it's Emily Wilson's translation that begins: 'Tell me about a complicated man,'” he said. “The genius of the character, his cunning, his inventiveness, that was a big part of what interested me. He's not just a soldier. He's an incredible strategist, a very astute person.”
Wilson, though admittedly “humiliated” by the filmmaker's nod, wrote, “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer's “Iliad.” In his review of the film, he compares Nolan's nearly three-hour epic to Peter Jackson's “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones” and says that, by the end, he “almost expected everyone to start speaking Elvish.”
Earlier this month, Times film critic Amy Nicholson wrote that “Nolan has sacrificed Odysseus himself to satisfy his own needs, eliminating the character's irritable personality and conveying a Trojan horse message about how empires collapse. … Horrified by the customs of men, he has dug his own Circe-like fingers into Homer to manipulate history into a moralistic prequel to 'Oppenheimer.'”
Wilson seems to share the sentiment.
“Unlike other Nolan films,” he wrote, “'The Odyssey' is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to completely spoil. It's a familiar audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display, and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.”
When the film's casting was announced, it was no surprise that culture wars broke out over the casting of Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o to play Helen of Troy, with Elon Musk in the lead.
Nolan responded, telling the Telegraph earlier this month before the movie hit theaters: “These conversations that happen before people see the movie, they're always irrelevant, because no one who has them knows what the movie really is yet.”
According to Wilson, Nolan's racially neutral casting “wasn't anything progressive about it.”
“Most of the non-white actors (Zendaya, Lupita Nyong'o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott) play versions of the black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide help to the white protagonist,” he wrote.
Wilson focuses on Homer's portrayal of female characters in another major review: “There are more female characters than in most Nolan films, thanks to the source material. But none of them have much to say, unlike the [characterizations] in the poem.”
While Charlize Theron's Calypso should have been angry, funny, rhetorically skilled and libidinous, according to Wilson, she is “an unpaid therapist.” Of Anne Hathaway's Penelope, Wilson writes that the script “gives her nothing to do except pine for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown.” And Zendaya's Athena “turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus' consciousness, not a scheming, bloodthirsty war goddess.”
And then there is the human cost of war, the central theme of the film and which, according to Wilson, contradicts Homer's poem.
“The depiction of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord renders the film's imagined world meaningless,” he writes. “We are not shown that war or murder is bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it; a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of both victims and perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar, but Nolan does not.
“The film asks us to be horrified by war and to celebrate the action movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally puts his hands on his bow and the blood begins to flow.”
Since Nolan announced “The Odyssey” in December 2024, several versions of the poem have been in high demand in bookstores and libraries, especially the only English-language version written by a woman: Wilson's 2017 translation. Louise Brockett, spokeswoman and head of communications for WW Norton, told USA Today that domestic sales of Wilson's translation surpassed one million copies this year.
Concluding his review of Nolan's “Odyssey,” Wilson says the film's release “is still an event to celebrate.”
“In what we are told is the age of streaming, this epic is returning audiences to theaters. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the 'death of the humanities,' translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.”
Nolan spent $250 million making “The Odyssey,” and on opening weekend the film grossed a total of $264.1 million worldwide, according to studio estimates.
