Before the release of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan had quoted the opening line of Emily Wilson's 2017 English translation: «Tell me about a complicated man». He said he had been drawn precisely to the intelligence, the inventiveness, and the cunning of Odysseus — a man who is not merely a warrior but a strategist capable of deceiving enemies and allies alike.
Wilson, after seeing the film, reached the opposite conclusion. In an essay for the London Review of Books she was sardonic about the fact that Nolan had read «at least the first line» of her translation, before calling the screenplay disastrous and the result grandiose but shallow. In her view, the characters have no credible motivations, and the film fails to say anything convincing about time, memory, war, history, or the relationship between Odysseus's glorious homecoming and the lives of the people around him.
Wilson does not literally argue that Nolan «didn't understand» the Odyssey. But that is the thrust of her demolition: the director recognised in the protagonist a complicated man, then proceeded to strip from the screen precisely his psychological, political, and moral complexity. Penelope, in her reading, has also been so diminished that the marriage — which should give meaning to the entire homeward journey — becomes less believable.
The problem is not scholarly fidelity to the text. Wilson was clear that she has no interest in playing the expert annoyed by every departure. What she disputes is what the departures produce: an Odysseus who is more straightforwardly heroic, a family with less depth, and a poem full of ambiguity turned into a big action story with explosions, giants, and simplified feelings.
Hers is not, however, an outright dismissal. Wilson acknowledges that the film works as spectacle, recommends seeing it in cinemas, and celebrates the effect it is having on the classics: her translation and other editions of the Odyssey have returned to the top of the sales charts. Nolan, she essentially writes, may not have given us Homer, but he is at least convincing millions of people to pick him up again.
