Emily Wilson’s ‘Odyssey’ Translation Inspired the New Movie. Her Review Is Scathing

Classicist and translator Emily Wilson has some thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, “The Odyssey,” calling out the film’s lack of “narrative and emotional depth,” its depiction of the female characters and the misunderstanding of its themes, among many other criticisms. “The Odyssey,” which hit theaters July 17 and stars Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Zendaya and more famous faces, has received overwhelming praise from fans and critics alike. The epic, an adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek poem, has landed at the top of the box office for the last two weeks, already bringing in over $280 million domestically and nearly $640 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. The fantasy flick also debuted with a 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and has a 97% audience rating as of July 27. But some classics professors have voiced their issues with the film, most notably Wilson, whose translation of “The Odyssey” influenced Nolan. Before the film’s release, the auteur quoted Wilson’s translation in a November 2025 interview with Empire. “I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man’,” Nolan said at the time. “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.” After seeing the film, Wilson penned a review for the London Review of Books, which she titled “An Uncomplicated Man.” In the lengthy critique, Wilson broke down all the areas in which she argues the film fell short, writing that although she was “humbled” when she read Nolan was familiar with her translation, she would have been “ashamed to have written any part of this script.” Wilson began her review by complimenting Nolan’s version of “The Odyssey” for not being boring. But she credits that to the strength of the source material. She describes the Oscar-winner’s imagining as “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display — and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.” She noted a pattern of “grandiosity and superficiality” she has seen in some of the director’s past works and similarities particularly in the action-packed sequences. Wilson then mentioned multiple scenes in the movie that she said didn’t elicit an expected emotional reaction, such as the moment Odysseus and his crew sail past the Sirens. She also said the film is less focused on developing its characters but succeeds “at conveying big bangs and big giants.” That appears to be the crux of her criticism: the epic tries to do too much. She wrote, “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.” However, one creative choice she didn’t mind was the movie’s the use of American accents and modern contemporary language. “Despite the manufactured online outrage, there is nothing inherently wrong with the movie’s attempt to approximate contemporary American speech,” she said. “If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English.” But that doesn’t mean she was a fan of how the choice was executed. “The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat,” Wilson added. While she applauded some performances, like Hathaway as Penelope and Samantha Moron’s Circe, she said that none of the female characters were portrayed as well as they were written in Homer’s poem. In summary, “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,” she said. Although she found the film’s message to be murky, she ended her review explaining why she is still “grateful” the movie was made. She pointed out “The Odyssey”’s worldwide success in a streaming era and how it is driving fans to read multiple translations of the original. “Nolan, who studied English at University College London — where students still study ‘The Odyssey’ as a first year ‘foundational text’ — is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful,” Wilson concludes. Social media users reacted to her scathing review on X. Many disagreed with her take, writing that “The Odyssey”’s themes and message about the effects of war were clear. “I do think The Odyssey had quite a lot to say about war, actually,” one person tweeted. Another said, “She’s so caught up in literal translations that she’s missing the broader point of a modern interpretation, which stops her from experiencing an excellent film.” A third agreed that Wilson seemed unwilling to let go of the source material and immerse herself in the adaptation. “All love to emily wilson who has a way different relationship with the odyssey than the rest of us but that critique is on some level her being unable to reconcile w the fact that this is ‘nolan’s odyssey’, not ‘nolan making homer’s odyssey into a motion picture,” the X user said. Others shared Wilson’s point of view. “I love how she defends Nolan’s right to make his own story out it as Homer itself is and then goes to town on what is actually made,” one praised. “This is a great critique piece.” Another simply said, “Did i love the movie? yes. is emily wilson also correct? Yes.”