{"id":714354,"date":"2026-07-27T22:50:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T22:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/714354\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T22:50:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T22:50:20","slug":"famed-odyssey-translator-rips-nolans-film-i-would-be-ashamed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/714354\/","title":{"rendered":"Famed ‘Odyssey’ Translator Rips Nolan’s Film: “I Would Be Ashamed”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cAs they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of\u00a0The Odyssey<\/a>\u00a0into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: \u2018Tell me about a complicated man.\u2019 But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s Emily Wilson<\/a>, whose poetic translation of The Odyssey is probably the most well-liked and eminently accessible for modern readers, writing<\/a> in the London Review of Books about Christopher Nolan<\/a>\u2018s latest film. Wilson is not your stereotypical, John Houseman-type academic. She\u2019s a lot younger and hipper than Houseman\u2019s ilk. She can speak easily about Zendaya and Athena. She has tattoos up and down her arms. She smiles.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaybe it\u2019s surprising, then, that her piece in the LRB is fairly hard on what many critics consider the best version of Homer\u2019s story ever put onscreen. Wilson, who has a deeper knowledge of The Odyssey than just about anyone \u2014 including Nolan \u2014 seems to find a way to twist a knife of contention even when she\u2019s offering praise for the film.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cChristopher Nolan\u2019s $250 million action movie version of Homer\u2019s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours,\u201d she writes. \u201cNolan\u2019s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for\u00a0The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan\u2019s other films,\u00a0The Odyssey\u00a0is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It\u2019s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display \u2014 and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHer main complaint seems to be that Nolan\u2019s film does not do justice to one of the foundational texts of Western literature. That might be true. But what adaptation does? She lists Euripides\u2019 Helen, Virgil\u2019s Aeneid, John Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost, James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses, Derek Walcott\u2019s Omeros and Margaret Atwood\u2019s Penelopiad among the most \u201ccreative responses\u201d to Homer\u2019s original. On the big screen, one might throw in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But that\u2019s very, very rare air \u2014 just a handful of entrants over thousands of years \u2014 and a steep ascent for a modern filmmaker working with runtime of 2 hours and 52 minutes.<\/p>\n

\n\tWilson admits that adaptations or \u201ccreative responses\u201d must take liberties.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAdaptations needn\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation,\u201d she writes. \u201cSome of the best radically transform or resist the source material, providing what Harold Bloom called \u2018strong misreadings\u2019 of their ancestors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe adds, \u201cDespite the manufactured online outrage, there is nothing inherently wrong with the movie\u2019s attempt to approximate contemporary American speech. If you\u2019re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn fact, Wilson did something similar with her translation of the poem, using iambic pentameter rather than the archaic Greek dactylic hexameter \u201cbecause it is the conventional meter for regular English narrative verse.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tShe praises Nolan for maintaining Homer\u2019s story-within-a-story narrative framework, but says the director simplifies his characters.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAs in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget,\u201d she writes. \u201cYet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character\u2019s desperate quest to recover and\/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan\u2019s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But\u00a0The Odyssey\u00a0features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMore specifically, Wilson says, \u201cDamon\u2019s Odysseus isn\u2019t complicated or wily or artful.\u201d He isn\u2019t \u201ca complicated man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHomer\u2019s Odysseus survives on his wits as much as force of arms.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDamon\u2019s Odysseus is motivated mostly by anxiety and guilt\u201d over his complicity in war, she says. \u201cBut the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie\u2019s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it \u2014 a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar \u2014 but Nolan doesn\u2019t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy \u2014 which he supposedly organized \u2014 Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe more modern sensibilities of Nolan\u2019s Odysseus extend to other areas that are more morally ambiguous in Homer\u2019s text.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMany of the film\u2019s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer\u2019s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour \u2014 all perfectly fine in the world of Homer \u2014 are, in this version, very bad. This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film\u2019s own values and vision don\u2019t hang together, and if the characters\u2019 motivations don\u2019t make sense on their own terms.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat may be Wilson\u2019s main point: She doesn\u2019t think the narrative or the characters work.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnne Hathaway, as Odysseus\u2019 wife Penelope, is a shell of Homer\u2019s vision, says Wilson.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHathaway\u2019s face is as expressive as ever, and she looks beautiful and mysterious, glimpsed mostly through the veil of a clever set design that separates the women\u2019s quarters from the main hall. But the script gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown. The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo DiCaprio in\u00a0Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also complains about the lack of sex onscreen, which again highlights the mores of ancient Greece vs. those of modern-day audiences.<\/p>\n

\n\tHomer\u2019s hero has extramarital affairs with goddesses Circe and Calypso \u2014 the latter of whom traps him and forces him to sleep with her each night for seven years.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy contrast, says Wilson, \u201cCharlize Theron\u2019s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She\u2019s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled,\u00a0PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe scholar does have high praise for one actor\u2019s performance: Robert Pattinson as Antinous, whom she says \u201cdeserves one of the Oscars that will shower down on this movie like the golden rain of Zeus.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tWhen it comes to internet outcry over \u201cdiverse casting,\u201d Wilson says there is \u201cnothing progressive about it,\u201d and uses the topic to lodge another objection.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe race-neutral casting of Nolan\u2019s\u00a0Odyssey\u00a0was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors \u2013 Zendaya, Lupita Nyong\u2019o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott \u2013 play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist\u2026 Nyong\u2019o\u2019s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is hugely underwritten; she is given only a few minutes of screen time to perform a set of brief tableaux of female victims (the outraged bereaved mother, the abused wife, the repentant adulteress).\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also deplores the lack of visible gods in the film \u2014 they have a large presence in the poem. That complaint is shared by others. It is the primary gripe<\/a> about the film from The New Yorker\u2019s Richard Brody.<\/p>\n

\n\tWilson curiously saves another complaint for the very end of her essay: \u201cThe most troubling ethical problem with Nolan\u2019s\u00a0Odyssey\u00a0concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalizing the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tIn the end, however, Wilson does express a degree of appreciation for the film\u2019s impact, if not its art.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDespite all this, the release of\u00a0The Odyssey\u00a0is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas\u2026 Nolan, who studied English at University College London \u2013 where students still study\u00a0The Odyssey\u00a0as a first year \u2018foundational text\u2019 \u2013 is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWatch Wilson\u2019s recent interview at the 92nd Street Y below.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAs they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2826,219995,49,50,22546,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-714354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-emily-wilson","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-the-odyssey","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}