{"id":847942,"date":"2026-08-06T07:50:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T07:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/847942\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T07:50:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T07:50:14","slug":"emily-wilson-beating-a-trojan-horse-with-second-essay-panning-nolans-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/847942\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Wilson beating a Trojan Horse with second essay panning Nolan’s Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, celebrated translator and classics professor Emily Wilson made a portentous declaration<\/a>: She was going to go watch The Odyssey <\/a>again. Given that Wilson\u2014whose translation of the Homer epic reportedly served as at least the partial bedrock of Christopher Nolan\u2019s new movie version\u2014had already managed to crack the London Review Of Books web site in half with her pan of the film last week<\/a>, her sitting through another screening (as part of a Q&A presentation at New York\u2019s Jacob Burns Film Center) seemed destined to bring even more of Zeus\u2019 wrath down on the ongoing discourse. Now that reckoning has arrived, in the form of a new highly critical essay on Nolan\u2019s movie that landed on the shores of\u00a0The Atlantic\u00a0this week<\/a>. You may be wondering, weary traveler, if a second viewing has softened Wilson\u2019s stance on Nolan\u2019s efforts; between the title (\u201cA Trojan Horse Is Supposed To Have Humans Inside It\u201d) and its closing line (which calls the movie a \u201cvisually stunning, emotionally empty film\u201d) you may rest assured that it has not.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting piece overall: Part response to the criticism of her earlier review, part deepening of thoughts she\u2019s clearly been mulling over ever since, and part obvious second-draft effort. In portions of the essay, Wilson is clearly delving deeper into discussions and thoughts she\u2019s been thinking about over her two viewings of the movie\u2014notably its often-muddled stances on attitudes that have changed toward technological development and deception in the millennia since The Odyssey was first written. (Hence, presumably, why she takes as the more scholarly focus of the new piece historical depictions of the Trojan Horse, which Nolan\u2019s film posits as the Iron Age equivalent of Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s nuke.) Other thrusts feel like a more deliberate effort to filter out many of the more glib, easily dismissed swipes in the earlier review, notably scrubbing the majority of commentary on the movie\u2019s cast, and most of her droll asides about Nolan\u2019s specific filmmaking quirks. (Although Wilson still can\u2019t resist a genuinely funny swing in which she compares the director\u2019s blockbuster mindset to the Die Hard films,\u00a0\u201calso action-packed tales of one man\u2019s dangerous journey back to his wife.\u201d) \u00a0<\/p>\n

What remains is a genuinely interesting takedown of the film\u2019s attempts to build an often ill-fitting moral framework around Odysseus\u2019 story, including a point, repeated from the\u00a0LRB\u00a0piece, where Wilson notes that Nolan shot parts of the movie in \u201cthe disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people.\u201d As she writes it, \u201cThe choice underlines the lack of seriousness in Nolan\u2019s thinking about his themes: the ethical and cultural costs of entering other people\u2019s homes uninvited, for the purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear, from a perusal of her social media, that Wilson has had a lot of intellectually stimulating fun wrestling with the response that her first piece elicited. (Including writing of an Onion\u00a0headline mocking the whole situation<\/a> that \u201cNo professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this.\u201d) It\u2019s interesting to note, then, that in so far as it exists as a response to that discourse, the Atlantic\u00a0piece isn\u2019t a counterswing so much as a tightening of her initial arguments. By resisting the urge to backlash or refute, she produces a response that\u2019s more thoughtful, if less spicy, than her initial takedown of Nolan\u2019s filmmaking; that being said, if she wants a third essay in her budding film review career to go viral, it might be time to pivot and see if she has any historical touchstones to bring to bear on\u00a0Spider-Man: Brand New Day<\/a>, instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A couple of days ago, celebrated translator and classics professor Emily Wilson made a portentous declaration: She was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-847942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}