Emily Wilson’s essay on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is out now. Wilson, whose 2017 Homer translation Nolan had previously cited when he described Odysseus as “a complicated man,” comes at the film hard, especially its writing and the way it handles the adaptation.
She calls the piece “An Uncomplicated Man,” and the title tells you where she lands. In Wilson’s view, Nolan’s movie flattens the hero and drains away much of the poem’s psychological, emotional, political, and ethical depth. She also goes after the film’s “gimmicky” structure, what she sees as weak character motivation, and its decision to strip out so much of what makes Homer feel alive on the page: the body, the food, the sensuality, almost all the sexual content. At one point she puts it bluntly: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Anyone keeping up with the argument around Nolan’s film should read the essay. Wilson’s larger case is that this adaptation cleans up and simplifies a story that was built to be messy, intimate, and morally tangled, even if some people defending the movie treat those omissions as deliberate artistic choices.
The blowback has gotten critics’ attention, but there’s been little public response from Nolan or his writers, and only limited documented reaction from other classicists or from audiences in Greece. Meanwhile, the film has still cleared $652 million worldwide. Wilson’s essay is available online, and the whole dispute has also helped push her translation past one million domestic copies, while stirring up fresh interest in classic literature.
