Emily Wilson just spent 4,234 words in the London Review of Books calling Christopher Nolan’s $250 million Odyssey abysmal, then admitted the movie is shoving her own translation off bookstore shelves. That tension is the real story. The most celebrated English-language translator of Homer looked at Matt Damon’s sun-blasted, IMAX-scaled Odysseus and essentially said: this man is not complicated enough, and the writing around him is a disgrace.
She is not wrong about the page. She is incomplete about the screen.
Wilson’s essay, “An Uncomplicated Man,” lands like a classicist’s haymaker. Nolan had publicly cited her 2017 opening line—“Tell me about a complicated man”—during the press tour. She returns the favor with zero sentimentality: “As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script. Sadly, Damon’s Odysseus isn’t complicated or wily or artful.” That is a clean kill shot. The man who made Inception and The Prestige got measured against the poem he claimed as inspiration and came up short on cunning, interior weather, and moral residue.
She keeps swinging. “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make 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. 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.” Later she adds that the film’s vision is “too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.” Her teenagers had fun. Her eyes stayed dry even for the dog. The food looked horrible. There is no sex. She is measuring the movie against the living organism of the poem and finding a fireworks barge.
Spectacle Is Not the Enemy of the Poem
Here is where the argument gets interesting instead of merely savage. Wilson knows adaptations are allowed to transform. She invokes Harold Bloom’s “strong misreadings” and lists the great descendants—Joyce, Walcott, Atwood, Miller—that wrestle the material into new shapes. She grants that Nolan’s nested timelines and obsession with masks, substitution, and drowning echo Homeric concerns. Then she decides the execution is too thin to matter. Fair. Nolan’s dialogue has always been functional scaffolding for images and structural games. Expecting him to deliver the ethical density of the archaic Greek text is like expecting a siege engine to write lyric poetry. The engine still knocks down the wall.
The movie opened to $124.5 million domestic and $264.1 million worldwide, hit an A CinemaScore, sits at 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and 97 percent from audiences, and has already cleared $707 million globally while running 173 minutes of pure IMAX 70mm. Those numbers are not a refutation of Wilson’s literary diagnosis. They are evidence that a different set of values—awe, momentum, mythic silhouette—still moves bodies into seats in the streaming era she herself flags as hostile to both cinema and the humanities. Wilson even concedes the point at the end: “Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. … Nolan … is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.” That closing note is more revealing than the pan. She cannot quite quit the cultural win.
The Script Can Be Thin and the Experience Still Land
I walked out of the same movie Wilson did. The Sirens sequence is pure Nolan claustrophobia and visual excess. The palace violence hits with the weight of practical wreckage. Damon plays survival as grim athleticism rather than layered guile; Anne Hathaway’s Penelope gets presence more than interior monologue; Tom Holland’s Telemachus feels like a modern anxious heir dropped into bronze-age stakes. Wilson is right that the human relationships never achieve the poem’s devastating specificity. The film prefers the set piece to the wound. Yet the set pieces are constructed with such physical conviction that the ancient story becomes tactile again for people who will never sit through a graduate seminar on xenia or nostos. That is not nothing. It is how epics used to travel—through performance, scale, and communal shock—before they became classroom objects.
Wilson’s sharpest ethical jab, the filming in occupied Western Sahara, deserves to sit outside the aesthetic debate and remain uncomfortable. Production choices have consequences the finished frame cannot erase. On the question of whether the movie itself is “abysmal,” though, the word feels like category error. Abysmal is the wrong register for a film this confident in its own muscular grammar. Superficial in the literary sense? Often. Incoherent in the way bad blockbusters are incoherent? No. It is a big, loud, intermittently moving machine that understands the Odyssey as a story of endurance and homecoming under maximum pressure, then shoots that understanding like a war correspondent embedded with the gods.
The larger cultural friction is healthier than either side wants to admit. We need Wilson’s refusal to inflate praise. We also need Nolan’s willingness to spend a quarter-billion dollars making the oldest surviving war-and-homecoming narrative feel expensive and immediate again. One protects the text’s difficulty. The other keeps the text alive in the bloodstream of people who buy tickets instead of monographs. Pretending only one of those jobs counts is how you end up with either bloodless prestige or empty noise. This time we got the argument in public, at full volume, while the movie printed money and the poem sold copies.
Wilson may well be correct that Damon’s Odysseus is not wily enough. The crowd still leaned forward when the mast hit the storm. Both things can be true. The film is a thunderous, imperfect vessel that gets Homer into the multiplex bloodstream without ever matching the poem’s mind. That is enough to matter.
WATCH. 7/10 — A visually overwhelming crowd epic that earns its spectacle even when the souls onscreen stay thinner than the source demands.
