In brief
Sir Christopher Nolan’s latest epic, *The Odyssey*, has gone from box‑office triumph to target of a harsh critique by English translator Emily Wilson. In a publication in the London Review of Books, Wilson decries the film’s narrative as gimmicky, its characters unmotivated and its scenes devoid of emotional depth. She praises the renewed interest the movie has sparked in Homer’s poem, yet she finds the cinematic interpretation mechanically beautiful yet intellectually hollow. Contrasting her disapproval, mainstream press has lauded the film as a cinematic milestone, but Wilson insists Nolan’s adaptation fails to capture the complexity of the original epic.
Sir Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey, has turned the cinema into a battlefield for fans and critics alike – a battlefield where only one voice has officially stormed the trench: Emily Wilson, the scholar who translated Homer’s epic.
Wilson’s 2017 translation was cited by Nolan as a source of inspiration, yet in a scathing feature for the London Review of Books she openly states that “I would be ashamed to have written any of this script”. She calls the film’s narrative structure gimmicky and the writing abysmal, noting the lack of convincing motivation for characters, the absence of romance or cinematic depth, and that food on screen “looks horrible”.
Despite her scorn, Wilson acknowledges that the film has rejuvenated interest in the original poem. She sees the release of The Odyssey as “an event to celebrate” and believes the cinematic spectacle could persuade institutions to keep their literature, language, and history programmes alive.
However, when she discusses the film’s characterisation, Wilson laments that even with its relatively higher number of female roles, none demonstrate much depth. She is disappointed by the film’s surface‑level grandeur; the epic’s “vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped”, and her teenage children, although enjoying the spectacle, were left feeling the film had “the same level of narrative and emotional depth”.
Behind the scenes, Nolan himself admitted during a press tour that he drew directly from Wilson’s line – “Tell me about a complicated man” – to craft the heroic framing of Odysseus, played by Matt Damon. This foreshortens a paradoxical relationship between the translator’s fidelity to the ancient narrative and Nolan’s cinematic stylisation.
While Wilson’s review paints the film in a harsher light, mainstream critics have lauded The Odyssey as a “film of the year”, describing it a “colossal piece of cinema” and a “masterpiece in every way.” The film’s hybrid of massive visual spectacle and conventional storytelling continues to generate debate about the role of epic storytelling in modern cinema.
