Christopher Nolan spent months telling anyone with a microphone that Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey helped inspire his movie.
Wilson just returned the favor with a review in the London Review of Books that takes a blowtorch to his screenplay: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Wilson is the University of Pennsylvania classicist whose 2017 translation was the first published English version of the poem by a woman. Nolan repeatedly pointed to her opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” when discussing his take on Odysseus.
Her review title is the punchline: “An Uncomplicated Man.” The piece published this week and went viral almost immediately.
The Writing Gets The Worst Of It
Wilson’s core complaint is the script. She writes that the film has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history or war.
The characters lack believable motivation, in her view. The narrative structure leans on gimmicks. The movie is grandiose where the poem is deep.
In her telling, Matt Damon’s Odysseus loses the cleverness that makes the character worth 3,000 years of attention.
The poem’s hero thinks and talks his way out of trouble. Wilson argues the movie swaps that cunning for guilt.
She does throw the film one bone. Her teenagers had a good time, and she concedes the movie is never boring, crediting source material she says is impossible to fully botch.
That is not the compliment it sounds like.
The Casting Critique Nobody Saw Coming
Here is where it gets interesting. When the trailer racked up 700,000 dislikes earlier this year, the backlash came from fans across the board, a pile-on CBN tracked from 55,000 all the way up.
Wilson knows the feeling. Die-hard Homer fans have spent years ripping her translation over its stripped-down language.
Now she goes after the casting, but not the way the comment sections did.
She argues the film’s non-white stars, including Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins and Travis Scott, are stuck playing variations of the loyal sidekick whose only job is to help the white lead get home.
So Nolan’s Odyssey is now catching it from every direction. Fans buried the trailer in dislikes. The poem’s most famous living translator just buried the script. Different complaints, same target.
The Scoreboard Does Not Care
None of it is showing up in the numbers. The film opened with an ‘A’ CinemaScore and a 96% audience score.
It posted a $90 million second weekend that took a record off The Dark Knight, and it has cleared $650 million worldwide before even opening in China, Japan and Korea.
Critics are not with Wilson either. The film debuted at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, the best-reviewed movie of Nolan’s career, with only scattered dissenters along the way.
Even Wilson admits the movie is moving books. She notes that print copies of the poem, her own translation included, are surging.
She holds out hope the film convinces a few college administrators to stop gutting their literature departments.
She Is Not Done
Wilson kept going in an NPR interview published Wednesday, saying “it would have been better if Nolan had hired a scriptwriter.”
She also revealed she is now translating the poem all over again. Which means the final word in this fight will run several hundred pages and arrive in hardcover.
Nolan’s movie survived a historic dislike campaign and now the sharpest pen in the field. The ticket line has not blinked once.
For full coverage, visit our Odyssey movie guide.
