The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

[Never Cursed]

Yeah, she doesn't want any of the association with Nolan's adaptation. It's a really harsh piece, but in spite of some of my doubts about her framing I can't really argue against it till I see the movie.

[hearthesilence]

Regardless of whether one agrees with her take (I haven't seen the film or read her translation), I can't blame her for publishing a harshly critical review. As I shared upthread, her work has clearly benefitted financially from the movie and Nolan citing her book. But it also means her work gets strongly associated with Nolan's, and that's a common discomfort for anyone - having something you dedicated a good chunk of your life too or something that once defined your life's work suddenly consumed or permanently redefined by someone else's doing. There's not much else she can do at this point except make her views about the movie very clear.

[ballmouse]

Reading about halfway through and the last few sentences, I got the impression that she was sort of resigned to the fact that she didn't like the movie but that she (especially) was not the target audience. You don't make a Hollywood blockbuster targeted to professors specializing in ancient Greek stories. You make one targeted to the Hollywood blockbuster/Nolan audience. And of course, there's not a whole lot of overlap. And I personally couldn't tell what her cinema knowledge was. She seemed to keep referencing how the film differed from the source material. Which is fine, but it's not a great piece of film criticism. Wasn't it Stephen King who famously hated Kubrick's film adaptation?

I guess I would have been more surprised if she loved it.

[Noiretirc]

But what would Homer think of Wilson?

[Brian C]

It reminds me a lot of the chorus of baseball fans that pop up whenever a new baseball fan is made. "Shoeless Joe was a lefty!" Ok buddy but it's a movie, the story doesn't really hinge on what side of the plate the guy is batting from. (Full disclosure that as a baseball fan, I am naturally sympathetic to a lot of these kinds of complaints.)

Or when Neil deGrasse Tyson insists on pointing out how every space movie gets the physics wrong. Cool but we're not using this as a NASA training film, so calm down.

Subject matter experts are always unhappy with movies that deal with their field. So are people who loved the books the movies are based on. Unfortunately, Wilson is both in this case, and it shows in this piece all too well.