As Christopher Nolan’s epic “The Odyssey” closes in on $1 billion in ticket sales at the box office, one of the leading translators of the Homeric tale eviscerated the summer blockbuster as a grandiose and superficial movie that strays from classical interpretations.
The scholar, Emily Wilson, weighing in on Mr. Nolan’s big-screen adaptation in The London Review of Books, said she would have been “ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Her 4,000-plus-word takedown of this year’s most-talked-about movie appeared to temporarily crash The LRB’s website and fueled a debate over balancing commercial success with literary authenticity.
Here’s what to know about the controversy:
Who is Emily Wilson?
In 2017, Wilson became the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” from ancient Greek into English, an interpretation widely celebrated in academia and the literary world as comprehensive, modern in sensibilities and faithful to Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old poem.
The project took several years to complete for Wilson, 54, who has published four books on ancient literature, including a 2023 translation of “The Iliad,” another epic poem by Homer.
In her translation of “The Odyssey,” which was published by W.W. Norton & Company, Wilson departed from the masculine framing used by her male predecessors. She has said on several occasions that the decision has subjected her to online harassment and misogyny from men and far-right figures who object to her translation.
While promoting his blockbuster movie, Nolan mentioned Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” as one of his influences.
Wilson is department chairwoman of Classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania and was recognized as a 2019 MacArthur fellow for “bringing classical literature to new audiences in works that convey ancient texts’ relevance to our time.” She has a bachelor’s degree in Classical literature and philosophy from Oxford, a Master of Philosophy in English literature from Oxford and a Ph.D. in Classics and comparative literature from Yale.
What did Wilson say about Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”?
Five days before the movie “The Odyssey” had its premiere, Wilson, appearing on a July 12 episode of “The Daily,” the podcast of The New York Times, said she was “pumped” to see how the tale played out on the big screen.
“I mean, it’s going to be exciting that so many people who may have thought, Oh, ancient literature is boring, or it’s not for me, or it’s too inaccessible, are then going to realize, actually, this is a really compelling story,” Wilson said. “And some proportion of the people who go to the movie will then turn back to the original poem, which I think is great. I love that.”
Asked about purists potentially taking exception to Nolan’s artistic choices, Wilson said it would not be the first time that Homeric poems were adapted for performance.
“I think it’s totally fine and valid for a director to explore his own vision,” she said of Nolan.
But after she saw the movie, the floodgates of criticism opened: Wilson wrote that Nolan’s adaptation lacked many of the elements that made the poem great.
“It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours,” she wrote. “It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal.”
Wilson argued that the movie embraced style over substance.
“It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display — and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth,” she wrote.
Nolan’s casting choices also drew criticism from Wilson.
“Most of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” she wrote.
On Wednesday Wilson expressed regret on Bluesky over how she had presented that criticism.
“In this piece, I regret the paragraph about the uses of the POC actors — who are all great, but IMO under-utilized (and why couldn’t Himesh Patel be Odysseus instead?),” she wrote. “I still think the film largely wastes its strong cast, but I framed it badly.”
What was the response to Wilson’s criticisms?
Nolan, whose “Oppenheimer” won seven Academy Awards in 2024, including for best picture and best director, has not responded publicly to Wilson’s scathing review.
Among those who have pushed back against Wilson’s criticism and in Nolan’s defense are the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, a retired professor of the humanities at Princeton and a National Book Award winner.
“Yes, her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates wrote on X. “Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.”
Oates said she would have expected a translator, whose role she described as having subjectivity, to be more tolerant.
How do other scholars feel about Nolan’s adaptation?
In an online commentary for Slate, Theo Nash, who has published on the textual history of “The Odyssey,” accused Wilson of using “baffling arguments” to “flay” Nolan’s latest movie.
The article was titled: “I’m a Classicist. Were Emily Wilson and I Watching the Same Odyssey Movie?”
Nash said Nolan was entitled to artistic interpretation.
“Wilson is naturally at her best when discussing the poem itself: This is a work to which she has dedicated years of her life, and she knows it intimately,” Nash wrote. “But too often she simply criticizes Nolan for deviating from it, as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation. The close attention to the text that informs Wilson’s translation is lacking in her reading of the movie, and the idea that Nolan might have something new to say about ‘The Odyssey’ is denied.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of humanities at Bard College whose own translation of “The Odyssey” was published last year by the University of Chicago Press, wrote in The New York Review that the most authentic thing about the movie was its “densely braided narrative,” while the “tormented hero sounds like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies.”
“Whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer,” Mendelsohn wrote.
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