If even Emily Wilson wasn’t impressed with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, something went sideways. Wilson isn’t coming from some random, right wing “chud.” She’s the author of the 2017 translation that Nolan himself cited as inspiration. In an Associated Press interview published during the film’s opening weekend, she said the film left her unsatisfied.
Wilson was quoted as saying she had “the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.” That’s not nitpicking. That’s the expert telling you the meaning of the legend didn’t survive Nolan’s adaptation.
Undoubtedly not the response the studio was hoping for. Emily Wilson made history in 2017 as the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, reframing the epic poem with a celebrated, modern poetic style. She works as a classical studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and her 2017 work served as a direct inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, but instead of a full endorsement, she gave it a cautious recommend, albeit with a list of caveats.
The AP goes on to report that other scholars and writers have been voicing the same concerns. While they praise the scale, visuals, and ambition, when it comes to the heart of the story, the very reason it’s lasted for thousands of years, the film goes sideways. Wilson described Nolan’s messaging in the film, condemning both war and physical cowardice, as “incoherent.” Odysseus isn’t the clever, sharp-talking survivor anymore. He’s another Nolan character, weighed down, stuck in his own head, and agonizing over his past decisions. That may have worked in another movie, but it’s not what made the original Greek myth endure for centuries.
As the AP points out, critics note that Matt Damon’s take on Odysseus has been stripped of his core defining traits and reshaped into a more familiar modern character who struggles with PTSD and guilt. The clever trickster is gone, and in his place is someone far more serious, sullen, and conflicted, and ultimately less interesting.
Other changes Nolan made follow the same pattern. The gods were mostly pushed aside, at least the male ones were. Penelope’s role is reduced so much that, as Wilson, an outspoken feminist scholar told the AP interview, it risks “any possibility of believing in this marriage.” And then there are the moments of pure manipulation, which Wilson calls out the movie’s focus on Odysseus’ dog, saying, “Everybody’s a sucker for a dog.”
Her nitpicks actually say quite a lot. Nolan’s film knows how to get a reaction, but it doesn’t earn those reactions the way the original does. Hollywood likes to call this kind of thing bold, “woke,” or subversive. But actually, it’s just safe. Nolan didn’t stick to Homer’s original, and he didn’t even stick to Wilson. He took a few pieces from both, then filtered them through his usual style, with a heavy focus on guilt, trauma, and inner conflict.
It’s also worth noting what Wilson doesn’t mention.
The AP interview keeps her focused on the text, themes, and story structure, but she doesn’t seem to share any other common complaints that’ve been floating around since its release, such as the casting, flat visuals, muddy sound, modern dialogue, and more. All the things regular audiences have been arguing about. It could be that she shares some of those concerns, but setting all of the usual critiques aside, if you can ignore the usual culture war noise and just stick to the story itself, this critique is actually much worse. The people closest to the source material are telling you something important failed to make it to the screen and it shows.
To be clear, Wilson still recommends seeing the film, but when asked by Associated Press to give Nolan’s film a grade or ranking, she declined. She says it’s a big, well-made movie, but admits many of the key themes of the story simply didn’t carry over. But once those are gone, it isn’t really The Odyssey anymore. It’s something else entirely, adapted from something that didn’t quite survive Nolan’s translation.
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English (US) · 