The world-renowned classicist and translator of Homer’s The Odyssey, whom filmmaker Christopher Nolan credited as inspiring his blockbuster film, has slammed the movie.
Emily Wilson, one of the foremost authorities on Homeric poetry and the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, wrote a brutal review of Nolan’s film for The London Review of Books, after Nolan expressed his admiration for her work.
“I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script,” she wrote, unimpressed with what she called the film’s “elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display.”
Nolan said Wilson inspired his film with her translation of the book’s opening line, but Wilson seemed skeptical that he’d read beyond it.
“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,” she wrote, after Nolan told Empire in November that his version of Odysseus was inspired by Wilson’s translation.
“I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man,” Nolan said then. “The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me. He’s not just a soldier. He’s an amazing strategist, a very wily person.”
Wilson, whose Odyssey translation shot to the top of the Amazon charts after Nolan’s film premiered, aded, “I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters.”
Instead, she said she found only Nolan’s “usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality.” Wilson also said she wished she’d had “a tub of wax for my ears” while watching the film.
Her primary gripe is not that the movie isn’t accurate to the text, Wilson explained. “Adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation. Some of the best radically transform or resist the source material,” she wrote. “But there is no restraint in Nolan’s version of The Odyssey: every second is jam-packed with incident, lights and noise, and nothing is ever at a human scale.”
What’s more, she added, “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 neighbors. 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. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
Despite her misgivings, Wilson wrote that she appreciates that the film is drawing interest to Homer’s poem. “Translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves,” she acknowledged. “Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language, and history departments.”
She added that Nolan is “doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.”
As a film, she wrote, Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t all bad: “Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely.”
The Odyssey is breaking box office records, making $652 million worldwide only two weekends after its release. The film is also generating major Oscars buzz.
