Author and Greek translator Emily Wilson was left “unsatisfied” with director Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, despite the film raking in more than $260 million worldwide during its opening weekend and receiving praise from critics.
“I want to celebrate the fact that so many more people are aware of The Odyssey — but at the same time, I had the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem,” Wilson told Associated Press.
While the author has enjoyed Nolan’s The Odyssey helping her 2017 edition of Homer’s epic reach the top 5 on Amazon.com, she nonetheless questions a variety of the director’s choices, such as the omission of two major Greek Gods, Zeus and Poseidon.
Wilson — a classical studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania — also described Nolan’s messaging in the film condemning both war and physical cowardice as “incoherent.”
The Greek translator went on to note that she didn’t want to come off as “snobby” or nitpicking, but found Penelope’s role in the movie so diluted that it put “any possibility of believing in this marriage” at risk.
Wilson also cited notably the scenes with Odysseus’ dog, Argos, remarking that they “catered towards modern sentimentality.”
“Everybody’s a sucker for a dog,” she said.
When asked by Associated Press to give Nolan’s film a grade or ranking, Wilson declined, but recommended the movie for others — as long as they see it in a theater.
“It was fun to be there with my kids,” Wilson said. “I didn’t feel it was pulling teeth to engage with it. If you can see it on a big screen you should absolutely go.”
Fellow scholars have also questioned the film, including Daniel Mendelsohn — an author, translator, and essayist who is considered a liberal intellectual — who expressed admiration for the director’s cinematic flair, but surmised that he was more focused on making a “Christopher Nolan” movie, which led to poor choices.
“Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image,” Mendelsohn said in an analysis published Friday in The New York Review of Books, before accusing the director of having “imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer.”
He also claimed that Nolan gave the public an Odysseus with “no cleverness, no humor, no wily charm.”
“In this Odyssey, there is no cleverness, no humor, no wily charm. In this Odyssey, the hero doesn’t trick the Cyclops with his brilliant ‘nobody’ pun; he and his men just poke the giant’s eye out and make a gridiron-inspired run for it,” Mendelsohn wrote.
“This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men agonized by pasts they wrestle with in different ways,” the critic added.
Author Gareth Hinds reportedly had a similar reaction to Mendelsohn’s regarding Nolan’s interpretation of Odysseus, noting that the “wily trickster and smooth talker” is now an “everyman who appears to be honorable, except in select situations which then continue to haunt him.”
Hinds also commented that Nolan’s The Odyssey has made him question how much a director can change a main character before the story itself becomes something different entirely.
“That’s one of many interesting things Nolan has left us to ponder,” he said.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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