Is It Okay to Not Like The Odyssey?

4 min readWhen Christopher Nolan began work on his adaption of The Odyssey, he turned to a source he felt could best help him capture the Greek poem for a 21st-century audience: a modern translation by University of Pennsylvania classics professor Emily Wilson. The director praised her work in an interview with Empire magazine, and Wilson later told Esquire that she was excited to see the film because themes of time, memory, “and a man on a quest to get back to a beloved woman” are “Odyssey themes but also Nolan themes.” It seemed like a perfect fit: Two minds (three, if you count Homer), coming together in harmony to make a summer blockbuster for the ages.But after Wilson saw the film, the professor tore it to shreds. In a review for the London Review of Books, she wrote that she “would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” Ouch. “Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely,” she continued. “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.” Double ouch.While it’s fair that the first woman to ever translate a published copy of The Odyssey prefers the book over the movie, it is a bit shocking just how much she reviles Nolan’s work. After all, she told Esquire that The Odyssey was “designed to be propulsive, gripping entertainment” just a week before seeing the film for the first (and I assume also the last) time. But in her review, she said that she thought the film “lack[ed] many of the elements that make the poem great” with “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.”Roberto Ricciuti//Getty ImagesEmily Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania professor who became the first woman to publish an English translation of The Odyssey. Naturally, fans of the film have criticized the translator’s appraisal. She’s no stranger to combative opinions of her work. Becoming the first woman to translate The Odyssey brought a legion of insufferable detractors out of the woodwork. Movie opinions are a different beast, of course, and many people take disagreeing with their particular tastes as personal affronts. Still, even Wilson’s greatest defenders couldn’t make out why she disliked the film so vehemently.As fellow classicist Dr. Theo Nash wrote in a piece for Slate, he has defended Wilson’s work countless times from sexist and racist trolls on X/Twitter. But with this review? He just doesn’t understand. “This is a work to which she has dedicated years of her life, and she knows it intimately,” he 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,” he continues.To be fair, Wilson’s review does bring up some great points. It isn’t news that Nolan’s films have never exactly treated women with the same attention and importance he gives his leading male characters. There are many changes to the source material in the film—including bits from The Aeneid, The Iliad, and entirely new fabrications of the director’s choosing—that Wilson felt were unnecessary and antithetical to Homer’s story. Dialogue such as “Let’s get off this fucking beach” occasionally felt out of place for a Greek epic, and, according to Wilson, “There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.” But it’s confusing the hell out of people that someone praised for reinterpreting a story would bash someone for doing the exact same work in a different medium.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesWilson stated that lines such as Telemachus’s (Tom Holland) “My dad’s coming home” made her feel that Nolan should be “ashamed to have written any part of this script.”While defending Nolan’s film, best-selling author Joyce Carol Oates commented, “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 is a bit harsher than Dr. Nash here—there’s no need to call someone MAGA just for disliking a movie. Coming to Wilson’s defense, author Jeff VanderMeer wrote on Facebook, “This Emily Wilson Odyssey review furor is ridiculous.”“She wrote a very interesting review from her perspective,” he continued. “Now, the fever pitch of rhetoric against it is such it feels like people want her arrested for a crime.”Is it a shame that Emily Wilson had mostly harsh words for a director who had nothing but nice things to say about her own work? Yes. But she didn’t like The Odyssey, folks. She made that clear, even after expressing that she was glad—at the very least—that Nolan’s movie was helping to sell copies of her own translation. Her opinion, just like every other review of The Odyssey posted online for all to see, is just that, and she’s not wrong for disliking a movie even if you disagree with her.There’s a reason why there’s no Guantanamo for contrarian movie takes. We would all find ourselves there for one film or another eventually.