Amid both praise and controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the director finally addressed his “real problem” with critics of the film.
This blockbuster stars Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, and Lupita Nyong’o. Though it has won over most critics and audiences, the film was panned by renowned Homer translator Emily Wilson in a 4,000-word takedown and became a target for MAGA’s hysteria because of its racially diverse casting.
“When you’re talking about storytelling, you’re always in conversation with the expectations of the audience,” Nolan told political philosophy lecturer Zhong Shu in an interview in Beijing. “The criticism that is often leveled at movies in general is, ‘Oh, the character has to be made sympathetic’—so the character is manipulated in different ways or changed in different ways.”
His comments come after Wilson, one of the foremost authorities on Homeric poetry and the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, wrote in her brutal review of Nolan’s film for The London Review of Books, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Nolan credited the scholar for inspiring his version of the story’s central character, Odysseus, on the press tour for the film—but that didn’t save the movie from her scathing take. “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.”
She added, “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.”
Literary legend Joyce Carol Oates slammed Wilson’s review, writing in an X post that the scholar used the “crude language of MAGA folks” who had also savaged the film.
Nolan said, “That’s a fundamental flaw of film criticism in a way, or storytelling criticism, because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism.”
“That’s a real problem in criticism today because people have this idea that, ‘Because I can understand why the story affects me the way it is, therefore, it didn’t work,’” he continued. “That’s not how storytelling works.”
Nolan avoided directly addressing Wilson or the right-wing outrage over his casting of Nyong’o, a Black actress, as Helen of Troy, and the inclusion of trans actor Elliot Page as the film’s Sinon, but he had plenty to say about “amateur” critics in general. Wilson, a classicist, is notably not a professional critic.
“When I was talking about film criticism, I was talking more about amateur film criticism than professional film criticism,” he clarified, “Because professional film criticism tends to understand the necessity for the mechanisms. So you’re looking at a lingua frana of storytelling created by Hollywood for the last 100 years that is very effectively universal, and so it is its own language, and that language is understood by people all over the world, which is what’s incredible about it.”
“I’m thinking more of amateur criticism when I say that people who, because they feel they’ve identified the mechanism, they feel that it invalidates it.”
Another of Wilson’s gripes with the film was the way Nolan remixed the original story. “Adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation...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,“ she wrote.
Nolan said, “You can’t completely have a tabula rasa,” he said. “You can’t throw everything away. You have to make your choices in terms of ‘How am I orienting the story?’”
As for MAGA, Nolan was dismissive of pre-premiere outrage in an interview with The Telegraph earlier this month. “These conversations that happen before people see the film—they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet,” he said.
His latest remarks come as The Odyssey continues to rule the box office, earning $911.3 million globally, according to Box Office Mojo.
