‘The Odyssey’s’ Own Muse Just Delivered Nolan’s Harshest Review Yet

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ has spent the last several weeks dominating conversation both inside and outside movie theaters. The film has become one of the year’s biggest box office successes, earning $90 million in its second weekend in North America alone, with Matt Damon leading the cast as Odysseus and Zendaya starring as Athena. The movie also received an “A” CinemaScore during its opening weekend, a rare feat for a three hour epic built on a 3,000 year old poem.

Much of that buzz has been fueled by Nolan’s own words during the press tour. The Oscar winning director publicly praised Emily Wilson’s acclaimed 2017 translation of the poem, saying he drew inspiration from her opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” as a guiding principle for Damon’s portrayal of Odysseus. It was a rare moment of a blockbuster filmmaker crediting a classics scholar as a creative touchstone.

Wilson is not returning the favor. The translator has published a scathing review of Nolan’s film, writing “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script”. The essay, published in the London Review of Books, quickly went viral after Variety and other outlets picked it up.

Wilson argued that Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ “lacks many of the elements that make the poem great,” adding that it has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or the relationship between a warrior’s homecoming and the lives of those around him. She went further, writing that the film lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth, that its narrative structure is gimmicky, and that none of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words.

Wilson did not stop at thematic criticism either. She took aim at smaller details too, noting there are no sex scenes and that all the food in the film looks horrible. She also described the film as carrying Nolan’s usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality, arguing its vision is too confused and its characters too underdeveloped to deliver on its bigger ideas, even as it excels at big bangs and big giants.

Despite the takedown, Wilson has not been entirely dismissive of the film’s cultural impact. In her review, she conceded that the release of ‘The Odyssey’ is still an event to celebrate, noting that the epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas and that translations of the poem, including her own, are flying off shelves, a sentiment she elaborated on in a separate interview with the Sunday Times, where she admitted the film “didn’t land emotionally” for her and that she never felt invested in whether Odysseus made it home to his wife.

The disconnect between critical and scholarly reception versus audience turnout has become one of the more interesting subplots of the film’s release. ‘The Odyssey’ has received almost unanimously positive reviews from critics and continues to dominate the worldwide box office, even as the person whose work inspired it publicly picks the script apart. Do you think Wilson’s takedown holds up, or is ‘The Odyssey’ still worth the price of admission despite its “abysmal” writing?