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.

[spectre]

But what would Homer think of Wilson?

Amid the "debates" (if one could be so charitable) over the casting of Nolan's film – in which I saw someone remark that Homer would be "rolling in his grave" at Nolan's adaptation – I joked that Homer might well see the slightest misrepresentation of the gods or perhaps the very existence of cinema itself as a far bigger blasphemy than any given interpretation of these stories. But this is all ridiculous of course, given we can't even know for sure whether any such person existed, nor whether he would (or could) have an opinion on Wilson's plain-English 21st-century translation vs George Chapman's 17th-century translation or any other. I don't see any obvious reason to prefer one over the over from any kind of fundamentalist perspective.

Whatever one's view of Wilson's translation, it's fair to say that it's an attempt to capture the spirit of the work and at least a studied interpretation of its themes, whereas it sounds (at least from this and other reviews; I'm yet to watch the film myself, though have seen enough Nolan to have an idea of how this is going to be) like Nolan is trying to throw in a bit of everything and losing coherence in the process. Her piece reads to me at least that she's criticising the film on cinematic grounds, not for its lack of fidelity to her vision of the poem or anything similarly reductive.

[Zot!]

I mean people were complaining that Nolan was not faithful enough to Batman, so really that's the level of discourse nowadays. I'm more concerned that Nolan is somehow regarded as a radical political filmmaker, because that feels a pretty low bar to satisfy nowadays from both sides of the popular political regurgitation.

[Roger Ryan]

…writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat. Attempts at vigorous speech – ‘My dad’s coming home’ or ‘Let’s get off this fucking beach’ – sit uncomfortably next to grandiose meditations: ‘Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus’ law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.’

In this regard, Nolan’s approach is reminiscent of how Scorsese handled the dialogue/characterization in The Last Temptation of Christ - modern day personages who routinely appear to be quoting ancient texts to express themselves. It’s a choice and can make the material more immediately relatable to a general audience. It can also help relieve some of the pretentiousness of adapting scripture or an epic poem for a multiplex. Specifically, my reaction when viewing the film was “My dad’s coming home” is a clunker; “Let’s get off this fucking beach” plays just fine!

I think Nolan’s film works best, not as a literary adaptation, but as an action adventure film spiced up with a little philosophy.

[JSC]

With The Last Temptation of Christ they were adapting Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, which already used modern or
semi-modern language (also, Paul Schrader was the screenwriter ). Perhaps 300 might be a better comparison
as it is essentially a large scale action adventure film (in this case with the Persian wars as a backdrop).

[denti alligator]

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.

But her criticisms have little to do with accuracy or fidelity but with the failure of the film to engage with the moral complexity of the poem, and with its failure to give the characters the dialogue and scenes needed to reveal their complexity. It's a far more nuanced critique.

[Guido]

In this regard, Nolan’s approach is reminiscent of how Scorsese handled the dialogue/characterization in The Last Temptation of Christ - modern day personages who routinely appear to be quoting ancient texts to express themselves

I would have loved to see a gruff old John Lurie on Odysseys's ship

Many thanks again to Mr. Sausage for their brilliant post; as someone who went in with minimal knowledge of Greek mythology (save for Julian Jaynes's bonkers reading of Homer's epics in *The Origin of Consciousness*), it was hugely illuminating.

The film itself didn't do much for me. I can appreciate the surface pleasures of Nolan's films, but even his most experimental tendencies, particularly around narrative structure, have always struck me as fussy window dressing. It doesn't help that I find his style (I won't even touch on his writing) completely haphazard and perfunctory — especially apparent here in the first hour, where the sloppiness of the editing was just baffling to me. There's more imagination, poetry, spatial coherence, and sheer cinematic magic in 30 seconds of a King Hu film than the entirety of what I saw here.

And yeah — "Nostos: The Return" was a wonderful tonic.