Emily Wilson's Christopher Nolan Hit Piece Is Painfully Transparent

The renowned translator of Homer's 'The Odyssey' penned a takedown of the blockbuster film that intentionally misses the point...so why did she do it?

Every week at 5AM StoryTalk, I publish a minimum of two feature articles. However, this week it became clear that the first of these – an epic breakdown of the approach to and storytelling decisions behind Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – wouldn’t be completed in time and, more, was so epic that a complementary second feature just wouldn’t be possible.

(Note: This breakdown has since been published. A follow-up, about the film’s use of symbols and signaling – from casting to costume choices to accents – will follow soon.)

'The Odyssey': How Christopher Nolan Adapted a 2,700-Year-Old Epic

Today, I want to share my thoughts on the review that Emily Wilson – the first woman to publish a complete, full-length English verse translation of The Odyssey – wrote about Nolan’s film. You might want to read it first here, but I suspect many of you have or at least seen it referenced in social media posts. I have little doubt that the editors at the London Review of Books didn’t press her for changes they would’ve demanded from other writers because they understood how much traffic they would buy themselves by allowing an incredibly credible academic behave so incredibly unprofessionally in public.

However you feel about it, this is a great opportunity to help us all sharpen our critical thinking and art deconstruction skills — even if you ultimately agree with Wilson over me, which, of course, some of you will. You should take advantage of the comments section to do that, too.

Before I dive into all that, I also want to invite you to join the conversation about The Odyssey being had at this newsletter’s last Weekly Question. It’ll only be active for a few more days before its comments section is locked so don’t miss out.

💬 Weekly Question: What did you think of 'The Odyssey'?

A lot of great, interesting thoughts on display there. While I disagree with some of the takes, I think it’s important we celebrate how exciting it is that the biggest film in the world right now generates so many different opinions and interpretations. That’s one of the things that great art does – it challenges us, it makes us debate, it makes us grow. In part, what we have to say about a piece of art — and how we choose to say it — reveals a great deal about who we are as a culture and, of course, as individuals. Now, about Wilson’s thoughts on Nolan’s The Odyssey…

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Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey was a key inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the epic poem, so many people were keen to hear the brilliant classicist’s thoughts on the film that’s become a culture-shaking event. Well, she’s penned a review of the film that’s dense with creatively cutting sentences, long, damning passages, and oozing with “academic seriousness” — but is also churlish and cringe-inducing, too often intellectually shallow when trying to score points, distorts details in ways that feel purposeful, and generally argues that she didn’t spend as much time paying attention to her cinematic subject as her kids apparently did.

I bring up her teenagers because she chose to herself:

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time.

She starts her review by literally telling you her kids are fucking idiots.

Of all the absurdly pretentious bullshit — oh, never mind. Moving on to the rest of her first paragraph:

Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. 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.

Every word of Wilson’s opening salvo is carefully crafted to insult Nolan for British readers, which makes sense given that she’s writing for a British publication here. But the cultural elite codewords and signals are all there. The film is entertainment, a stinging criticism from Britain’s intelligentsia (her kids enjoyed it because kids don’t know better yet). “Spectacle” rather than character work, which is, of course, why the title of the review is “An Uncomplicated Man”. Then, the coup de grâce, “like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display”, meant to make clear that Nolan, who grew up in the UK, is the purveyor of loud, meaningless American shit unlike the serious artists who would’ve been better suited to tackling a foundational text like Homer’s The Odyssey.

I’m not going to break down the whole “review”, but as many of my readers here know, I abhor criticism that centers the reviewer or their biases rather than the artwork or even the artist – which you can read another critique of here. Worse, I abhor reviews that were clearly written by people who don’t take the role seriously, the kind of person who, for example, would call an R-rated film filled with extreme violence, gore, and the dramatization of genocide “family-friendly”. It’s only the first of Wilson’s many distortions about The Odyssey.

As far as I can tell, this review was written by someone who brought the same interrogative curiosity to bear on her subject as I do the nutritional summaries on the back of cereal boxes. When she calls Nolan’s film “superficial”, I chuckle because her review makes no attempt to penetrate the artist’s actual intent instead of just reiterating over and over, in coy and not so coy ways, how much she doesn’t like Nolan’s work here or elsewhere. Remember, Wilson started this review by writing, “Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring,” and then wholly attributes that to how difficult the source material is to screw up…but don’t worry because, by her estimation, Nolan still managed to do that.

Here’s an example:

The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.

I’m not getting into what’s happening in the Western Sahara, no more than Wilson does here since she also carefully avoided explaining her statement. Instead, she uses a lot of trigger words to make Nolan sound like a Western imperialist who doesn’t know what he’s doing as a storyteller, never asking why he chose such a setting. She wants you to dislike him rather than spend a moment mulling what the visual use of this location means on screen, what the filmmaker is signaling that she willfully ignores for effect. She certainly fails to mention that Nolan packed symbol after symbol to help audiences internalize deeper meaning about the West’s relationship to the Middle East.

Consider: the Greeks wear black, speak with American accents, and invade a desert land, populated by warriors in white, all to control trade routes.

Bless Wilson because she wants you to think this is a superficial decision, “simply as a visually striking backdrop”, when the decision is intended to help explain the geopolitical allegory/updating of The Odyssey, vociferously announces depth of intent and purpose, and in no way, lets the character redeem himself in the end. Odysseus admits to genocide, admits to bringing civilization crashing down, and he self-exiles himself from his home, his culture, and his son because he no longer deserves to live there because…you know…war criminal. How the fuck is this an “ethical problem”? Wilson knows it’s not; she’s just hoping you don’t think any harder on the subject because her only audience here is people who already dislike Nolan’s work.

Here’s another section of the review that brutalizes the reality of what’s on screen:

The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. 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. Scott, as the Ithacan bard, Phemius, yells a few words and pounds a stick, but does not get to sing, tell a story or play the lyre: the most melodic note in the percussive soundtrack comes from the plucking of Odysseus’ bow (a beautiful sonic image of the archer as musician, borrowed from the poem). Nyong’o’s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is hugely underwritten; she is given only a few minutes of screen time to perform a set of brief tableaux of female victims (the outraged bereaved mother, the abused wife, the repentant adulteress).

Okay, come on. It’s not race-neutral casting, and Wilson knows it – she’s baiting the very racists who attacked the film online before ever seeing it. Instead, it’s intentional casting, and not just because the Mediterranean was quite diverse as Wilson also knows.

Nolan’s The Odyssey is the story of white men and the people who survive in their dangerous orbit — including white women — and every one of these casting decisions allows Nolan to attack, as he does in almost every one of his films, privileged white men who overturn civilization with their arrogance. Even when he’s not doing this, he’s usually dealing with the aftermath of that arrogance.

For example:

• Penelope, a white woman, doesn’t have power of her own, so she does what she must to survive.

• Circe, a white woman (and witch), kills and eats any man who comes near her because she knows they’re really “pigs” in human disguises.

• Athena, a Black woman here, emphasizes the colonial victims of white men; she haunts Odysseus wherever he goes. Even if she’s just a projection of Odysseus’s guilt, as Wilson accepts is one possibility, the point stands.

• Helen, also a Black woman, apologizes to Odysseus’s son not for what she did as she’s typically portrayed – but what was done in her name to justify the greed of white men.

• Her twin sister, Clytemnestra, watches as her white husband, Agamemnon – architect of the Trojan War – sacrifices their Black daughter to the gods for power. I mean, you literally see a white dad carry his Black-skinned daughter to the knives of his white priests. Must I remind you that white men who impregnated their enslaved Black women habitually put those kids out in the field, working them to death, for their own profit? This isn’t some random detail.

(Note: Wilson has taken to Bluesky to walk back this section of her review, saying she “framed it badly”.)

You can argue some of this was clunkily presented, sure – not that I would – but you can’t argue these keys decisions weren’t made to say something about women and especially women of color in Western culture today. Wilson knows this because she’s brilliant. She chooses to portray the truth otherwise because this isn’t about facts for her.

One section that made me laugh was this one:

The film wants to have it both ways. There are no gods, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of blinding the son of Poseidon and devouring the Cattle of the Sun. Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus. Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.

I’ve written a lot about this here at 5AM StoryTalk and apparently the idea of it makes Wilson uncomfortable. It’s called ambiguity and leaves it up to the viewer to define pieces of art on their own. The whole film is rife with it — beginning with a title card that says it’s a time of “apparent magic” and including the aforementioned possibility Athena is but a projection of Odysseus’s guilt and not the actual deity — which is because Nolan is playing the trickster role Wilson argues Odysseus should be more of. He’s constantly manipulating the audience and his characters, having a metatextual conversation between them, contemporary storytelling, and classical storytelling (which is why, by the way, he included Sinon as a character).

In other words: Nolan is playing 18-dimensional chess with his adaptation — and I don’t buy that Wilson doesn’t see what he’s doing.

Later, Wilson even defends adaptations that are “strong misreadings” of their source material while failing to acknowledge that that’s…exactly what Nolan’s adaptation is?

Except Nolan doesn’t misunderstand what he’s doing, as I hope I’ve made clear by now. He’s in complete command of his interpretation. Wilson is just disinterested in asking any questions about what his interpretation means because she believes his work is terrible, boring, shallow, etcetera, preferring instead to try to score points that repeatedly reek of the bitterness of a professional rival when the painful reality she doesn’t seem to grasp is that cinema doesn’t care about her work as a classicist. Her translation of The Odyssey was a springboard for someone else’s imagination to leap from, to say something new and personal to him and deeply relevant to the world we live in today. Nolan doesn’t give a shit about the literalness of what’s in Homer’s text. He cares about how he can use it to tell a story about the collapse of our own civilization – not because of war, as Wilson seems to misinterpret the film (and which she says he has nothing “convincing” to say about). But because of the toxic melange of masculinity, white supremacy, and capitalism that explains colonialism and has resulted in mass death and economic and climatological devastation. It’s the apocalyptic theme that explains almost the entirety of Nolan’s apparently “superficial” filmography – which is why his take on The Odyssey is also so blatantly apocalyptic.

The reason Wilson’s apparently idiot teenagers – her intimation, not mine – enjoyed Nolan’s The Odyssey so much is because they saw their own world depicted in it. The fantasy one in their mother’s translation of Homer’s poem wouldn’t mean shit to them on the big screen, nor would it mean shit to the rest of us. But those kids aren’t idiots. They’ve just been deprived of films that reflect their experience of our reality and Wilson would have them deprived of that in favor of an adaptation with make-believe gods playing chess with human beings as if every other adaptation of a Greek myth that took a similar approach didn’t come across as excruciatingly silly. Listen, I love Clash of the Titans, which Wilson also references. I love Laurence Olivier. But even he couldn’t make me care about Zeus’s opinion of anything on screen.

What a mean and silly thing this review is. I’ve sat at tables in London with Oxbridge academics who started going off like this and I had to politely excuse myself because my face can’t hide what I think of people. It’s not that they’re never without valid points. In fact, they often have many. Wilson makes a few good ones here. They just bury them in so much embarrassing and obvious self-aggrandizement that you can’t be fucked to pay serious attention.

I hope this review — or whatever you want to call it — helps Wilson feel she’s protected her authority over Homer’s The Odyssey from the rampant success Nolan’s adaptation is also having. I certainly can’t explain it beyond her need to ensure nobody ever conflates his contemporary interpretation of it with her super-serious work of super-serious academic erudition. Personally, if it was I who was watching millions of teenagers and young adults discover Homer and dive into poems I claim to care about all because of the blockbuster success of a “Hollywood movie”, I’d thank the gods for the miracle instead of writing something so painfully transparent as this.

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