{"id":788182,"date":"2026-07-27T23:23:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T23:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/788182\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T23:23:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T23:23:10","slug":"the-odyssey-earns-negative-reaction-from-translator-emily-wilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/788182\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Odyssey’ Earns Negative Reaction from Translator Emily Wilson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Odyssey<\/a>\u201d has, by and large, sailed through pretty smooth waters in terms of the critical response to the Christopher Nolan<\/a> film<\/a>. But \u2014 perhaps like the bag of wind Aeolus gifts the Ithacan king that blows him off course in Homer\u2019s poem \u2014\u00a0one negative response<\/a> has riled up Film Twitter enough to crash the London Review of Books<\/a> website today, though likely not the film\u2019s box office trajectory.<\/p>\n

Professor Emily Wilson has published critically acclaimed translations of \u201cThe Iliad\u201d and \u201cThe Odyssey<\/a>,\u201d and her succinct, unadorned language has been cited by Nolan as an influence on his version of the story of one of Greek Mythology\u2019s most famous, and most complicated<\/a>, men. Wilson, a longtime contributor to the London Review of Books, wrote a review, of sorts, of the Christopher Nolan film and spoke on the publication\u2019s\u00a0podcast\u00a0about her reaction to it. The professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania had some notes.<\/p>\n

\"2026<\/a> \"'Hadestown:<\/a> <\/p>\n

Wilson tries to fire her critique through, if not 12, then at least several axes. She acknowledges Nolan is as well within his rights to shape an \u201cOdyssey\u201d adaptation<\/a> to his own ends as Virgil was in writing \u201cThe Aeneid,\u201d or James Joyce, or Margaret Atwood, or anybody else who tackles the popular myths surrounding the fall of Troy. The scholar also points out that \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d itself was an attempt to make those stories grander, more exciting, and more thematically engaging for a contemporary audience (in 7th-century BCE Greece). Nor does she give credence to any misplaced notions of historical accuracy (the poem itself isn\u2019t historically consistent) or the bad faith attacks on the film\u2019s casting that have been cynically fueling the right-wing outrage machine.<\/p>\n

But Wilson had few kind words about the project Nolan\u2019s adaptation engages in: its thematic anxieties about the sense of doom around the American Empire (aka the Bronze Age Collapse<\/a>) and the rot of unjust wars and xenophobia. \u201cNolan\u2019s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great,\u201d Wilson writes. \u201cIt has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior\u2019s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors. It lacks psychological, emotional, political, and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

She critiques the characterization of Odysseus (Matt Damon) as being particularly simplistic; of the women in the film being as underdeveloped as, well, as women in Christopher Nolan films<\/a> often are criticized to be; and of the film\u2019s perspective sidestepping offering any humanity to the victims of violence in favor of valorizing the perpetrators of violence. \u201cAny 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 \u2013 but Nolan doesn\u2019t,\u201d Wilson writes.<\/p>\n

Wilson especially takes Nolan\u2019s writing to task and, at one point, the professor writes that she would be ashamed to have been credited with the screenplay. Although Wilson reserves the \u201cmost troubling ethical problem,\u201d in her words, for the production\u2019s choice to shoot in the Western Sahara without the consent or cooperation of the indigenous Sahrawi people \u2014\u00a0the territory is mostly occupied by Morocco, and Sahrawi artist Mohamed Sleiman Labat recently wrote an op-ed in The Guardian<\/a> about the harsh conditions imposed by the Moroccan government while using foreign film crews for a \u201cromantic, tourist-friendly image designed by a regime deploying every political, economic and cultural tool to keep the occupation\u2019s status quo and deny Sahrawi existence and resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Public-facing scholars like Wilson and Mary Beard<\/a> will inevitably be asked for their thoughts on Hollywood films<\/a>, whether they are accurate (almost never, although that doesn\u2019t need to matter) to history or to the plot of a particular text. They\u2019ll also be asked what the reception of a work says about our contemporary times and what the bits left out \u2014 like all the sex Odysseus was definitely having in full knowledge that he still had a wife waiting for him \u2014 can tell us about what makes us uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

A lot of the pushback against Wilson\u2019s piece has been her obvious self-interest in \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d and the extent to which it\u2019s valuable for writers to weigh in on visual adaptations. There\u2019s also the designation of Wilson\u2019s piece as a film review, when Wilson spends most of the piece engaging with the film\u2019s differences to the poem (and therefore her understanding of the story) and not the visual language or style of Nolan\u2019s work beyond it being full of \u201clight and noise\u201d and \u201cjam packed with incidents.\u201d<\/p>\n

But \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d with its sold-out 70mm IMAX screenings<\/a>, Oscar-winning filmmaker Christopher Nolan and decorated scholar Wilson are all going to be fine. Wilson ends her critique with gratitude for Nolan\u2019s making a contribution and acknowledges that, unlike the citadel at Troy, nothing here is on fire.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London \u2013 where students still study The Odyssey as a first-year \u2018foundational text\u2019 \u2013 is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful,\u201d Wilson writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Odyssey\u201d has, by and large, sailed through pretty smooth waters in terms of the critical response to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,15279,88,2695,12720],"class_list":["post-788182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-the-odyssey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}