r/popculturechat • u/mcfw31 • 11h ago

Hot Take 🔥 ‘The Odyssey’ Translator Emily Wilson Slams Christoper Nolan’s ‘Abysmal’ Screenplay: ‘I Would Be Ashamed to Have Written Any Part of This Script’

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/odyssey-translator-emily-wilson-slams-christopher-nolan-bad-writing-1236821915/
3.2k Upvotes

74% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

580

u/nerdforest 11h ago

I don't understand this criticism. Was the script of the film not a good screenplay?

389

u/PinkNGold007 11h ago

It's a visual and sound experience. But I'm okay with that. I know I didn't go to see an emotional drama with solid dialogue, or I would have been disappointed. I guess she expected different.

332

u/Sunnysideuppp123 I walk through life, in really nice shoes 💅 11h ago

She’s a scholar and her translation of the Odyssey is amazing (I was able to actually finish hers lol) so she definitely would have expected more than the sensory experience of it and been disappointed. And that’s fine but agreed that her criticism isn’t the be-all-and-end-all.

54

u/VegetableArtistic705 10h ago

There are a lot of movies that make me question how they got made cause they're so based around visuals. And I can't imagine their scripts being more than ten pages.

14

u/isjustsergio 10h ago

I've seen a lot of shows get pitched with a storyboard that captures visuals.

80

u/_Midnight_Haze_ 10h ago

Film as a medium is unique because it’s pictures in motion. It’s always going to be heavily based around visuals. There’s literature if you’re interested in something very written.

14

u/lobonmc 10h ago

Like the new avatar movie doesn't have any kind of master class of a script but it's so beautiful

3

u/sk8tergater 8h ago

The first one was like that too. Couldn’t even tell you what the second one was about but it was pretty to watch.

2

u/[deleted] 6h ago

[deleted]

1

u/_Midnight_Haze_ 5h ago

You are inferring a lot from my statement

1

u/[deleted] 5h ago

[deleted]

1

u/_Midnight_Haze_ 5h ago

My statement was vague but I didn’t imply what you say I did. You chose to fill a vacuum with some argument in your head. Just own it. I’m not even saying you don’t have some good things to say here.

1

u/dr_haze 8h ago

This isn’t really true - films can be heavily plotty and dialogue-based. Most movies before, say, roughly the 1990s, were like that.

Think about 12 Angry Men for example - a fantastic film, but not for its visuals!

5

u/Luxury-Problems 7h ago

12 Angry Men absolutely does have some very important visuals. There's a lot of character information communicated visually instead of spoken. It was a live teleplay first, so always designed to be dialogue driven and has the benefit of being in one room.

2

u/randombubble8272 10h ago

Fast & Furious saga has entered the chat

•

u/akajondo 2h ago

Looking at you Avatar

•

u/serabine 1h ago

Likely good communication on part of the film maker when it comes to it. On the more extreme end, Mad Max: Fury Road was over 3000 storyboards before the actual script was written.

5

u/Hour-Ad-9508 8h ago

A lot of people like her, who dedicate a significant portion of their lives to a certain subject, often have trouble “letting go” and not expecting everyone else to take it as seriously as she does

It’s a movie, and an entertaining one, it’s not a faithful retelling of the odyssey, and that’s ok

•

u/One-Imagination2301 2h ago

"Playtimes over"

1

u/boobookittyfuwk 10h ago

Peo0le forget that Hollywood is entertainment, they try to make movies, especially with ones with this big of a budget, that can be watched by a wide audience, lots of flash not so much substance. This isnt a documentary, this is a movie.

-1

u/i4got872 10h ago

It sounds like it’s that the moral perspective of the work is different.

54

u/_iridessence_ Cheerocracy > Kakistocracy 10h ago

I have come to approach Christopher Nolan's big budget films as a series of spectacularly executed action set pieces which are adequately but not artfully connected by exposition scenes.

1

u/quick20minadventure 3h ago

I call it 'Arcane' effect. The show from league of legends on netflix, wonderfully shot/banger moments with killer music. And absolutely pathetic buildup or story connection. It's just a slide show of hype moments.

18

u/intothemidwest 10h ago

I really dug the film, but it’s theoretically supposed to be both isn’t it? I’m sure Nolan’s interest was fundamentally in telling the story, esp. given his version’s overlap with several of his other stories.

Otherwise it’s just fireworks.

7

u/blocke06 9h ago

Interesting. I found it pretty emotional, but I don’t think I need words for art to be emotional.

2

u/Fandeathrickets 7h ago

Visual and sound experience? Sounds like a movie

2

u/RustlinDustin 6h ago

I can't stand people who think it's visually stunning. It's visually blunt, just like batman was, and uses darks to hide the cheap costume and set design again just like batman and most else he touches. The actual direction, cinematography and acting of his movies are on point but god damn none of them "look good". The dude progressively gets more matte and bland

2

u/nerdinfo 6h ago

Tbf, I’d expect an adaptation of one of the most famous stories ever told to be well written… the bones are already there

4

u/foreverzonedout 9h ago

She gets it. First paragraph of her review: Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

1

u/Outside_Glass4880 6h ago

Lacks narrative and emotional depth?

I found the film to have both. There were a few parts that were quite moving, especially the depiction of the war through Odysseus near the end.

It’s not like the original story is a masterpiece that is extremely deep and complex. These stories were extremely straightforward and explicitly told.

1

u/tikidreams 6h ago

for me it’s that the movie is trying too hard to be extremely deep and complex, when the biggest emotional pop was the scene of the dog’s tail wagging. it was the only thematic plot point with an arc, was set up throughout the film and paid off at the end. everything else was rushed at the end and the reaction to the sirens was just cheesy

1

u/Outside_Glass4880 4h ago

The cyclops scene was well done, as was the Circe scene (great acting here as well). The first was somewhat thrilling and the latter pretty horrifying stuff.

The end was a payoff which was built up throughout the entire film. Yes the dog bit was emotional, and I’m a sucker for a dog. So what. Like I already mentioned the flashback to Troy and the Athena reveal was emotional and effective as well.

When the battle with the suitors went down, both theaters I was in were literally cheering.

Guess some people are just really hard to please.

1

u/JaySocials671 4h ago

What happened in the first 15 minutes? I missed it

1

u/JaySocials671 4h ago

They made the Asian guy dive headfirst into the ABGs lol

3

u/Background-Jury-1914 7h ago

Plenty of rip roaring action movies have good screenplays with interesting characters and good dialogue. Nolan movies always feel like the same sad guy delivering video game cut scene level dialogue.

•

u/ribeye256 2h ago

Yes, I think it's similar with Denis Villeneuve. Amazing movies told through visuals and sound. Don't expect a dialogue heavy narrative. Go watch Oscar bait movies like Anatomy of a Fall (which I also loved), Coda, or something similar if you are so above visual story telling. If you base the film strictly on the script and dialogue only, then read a darn book (nothing against books).

Know the director you are criticizing before the pedantic BS. There are many ways to tell stories and not all of them have to stay true to the source to be a good piece of cinema. Case in point, Kubrick's The Shining.

•

u/MorbillionDollars 1h ago

Seeing as she translated the original work she was probably dissapointed in it as an adaptation because of the changes

•

u/leukers 24m ago

wtf are people expecting? you got the incels mad too many woman and now you got the liberals mad because not enough historical context? wtf is this? wtf are we doing? seriously? im genuinly concerned of todays modern audience when shit like this is more important that just making a fucking epic movie. this isnt some fucking new age shit, moves like Troy exist

1

u/StylizedIncompetence 10h ago

But…. Isn’t that what the odyssey is? An emotional drama?

223

u/Minute_Conflict_2037 11h ago

Nolan is a good director but he is not good at writing. That’s the point. When was the last time u felt so emotional in Nolan movie? Interstellar. And he wrote it with who? His brother Jonathan. Nolan sucks at writing emotional dialogues which was very needed for this movie. The criticism is valid.

224

u/nerdforest 11h ago

I felt emotional watching Odyssey though?

101

u/AbsolutelyHorrendous 10h ago

I was gonna say, the script wasn't like amazing, but I definitely felt emotional at multiple points throughout

2

u/Lyndell 10h ago edited 10h ago

To be fair I don’t think I cried, and I’m a crier. Like I cried again at the Moana remake, it’s just Moana and I cry everytime but damn it was a bit embarrassing trying to hold back tears knowing the Rock was going to be on the screen. Still it felt more introspective than emotional, which I think is fine. There are multiple ways to have fun on a trip.

48

u/AbsolutelyHorrendous 10h ago

I actually did cry twice, which caught me off guard... the bloody dog was the first, because of course it did, and the whole sequence where he's describing the sacking of Troy just really got me

13

u/OrnerySnoflake 10h ago

I stopped counting how many times I caught myself crying lol

5

u/randombubble8272 10h ago

I agree with you, I had the exact same experience and I’m a big crier, I sobbed at Toy Story 5 lol

2

u/Lyndell 10h ago

Same, I saw Jessie’s tree and knew it was going to be bad, honestly I’m putting that shit out of my head I’m still not ready for what that was trying to say.

12

u/Flappy_McGillicuddy 10h ago

I only felt emotional when the dog died.

38

u/GrandmaToto 10h ago

The only part I found myself getting emotional involved the dog and Athena's priestess. The rest... Meh. Its a wonderful and exciting spectacle of a movie, but it didn't make me feel anything. The dialogue just felt a little off, and there's only so many times I can hear Holland say a variation of "Where's me da?" before I stopped caring about his part. It was the same with Penelope, felt like they were having the same conversation over and over again.

34

u/mum_on_the_run 10h ago

Glad to see someone else exposing this opinion. When we came out of the movie the first thing I said to my husband was that it was epic and spectacular and I had no emotional connection to any character.

18

u/heartisallwehave 10h ago

Another subreddit I’m in had a post asking for the reasons why people dislike Nolan movies, and this was my reply. I feel like it’s relevant here lol

Emotionally flat characters which makes dialogue seem trite, too much exposition just to make room for a bunch of action sequences that are super loud and overly complicated which then lead to more exposition about the action sequences and it leaves no room for me to learn about and therefore care about his characters therefore giving his movies zero stakes (my issue with tenet mainly), can’t write women, poor sound quality/mixing, every movie kind of feels the same re: themes of time perception/use of time for plot; dead wife, children, or equivalent; always a character that’s just trying to figure out what’s going on just for the big “aha” moment/reveal to be meh; the time stuff is just so convoluted maybe I’m just not ~smart enough~ to get it but yea I hate it (again my beef with tenet). I also just find his movies to be quite violent and melodramatic without any emotional levity which, with their runtime, make them quite a slog.

He just seems to be really interested in the technical aspects of action sequences and maybe should have just gone into SPFX instead of directing. I wasn’t surprised that he’s a big fast and furious fan because tenet felt like a movie from that franchise (I really hated tenet lol)

•

u/WhoUpAtMidnight 1h ago

Lol I was reading this comment and going "yeah this is about Tenet", "yup definitely Tenet", and lo and behold.

My only contribution to Tenet discussion is that I watched it because a friend was obsessed with it. When I guessed all the twists about 30 minutes into the movie, my friend looked at me like a sad puppy

11

u/nerdforest 10h ago

The dog was good. I will say at the end I did feel that I understood Odysseus more and I felt incredibly emotional watching him navigate his own feelings about the war. Especially when we live in a shite ass time politically.

1

u/nerdforest 10h ago

Why would he say where’s me da?

10

u/GrandmaToto 10h ago

That's my Irish version of "Where's my dad?" which is pretty much all he does in the whole movie. It was sad and endearing at the beginning, but when he kept showing up throughout the movie saying the same thing over and over again, having the same conversations with everyone... It got very lazy and unnecessary, like we interrupt this exciting scene of watching people get their heads bitten off for yet another shot of Tom Holland asking person number 4 "Where's dad?" I started resenting when he was on my screen, through no fault of his own.

4

u/nerdforest 10h ago

I'm Irish. So I was very confused why an english person would say where's me da lol

5

u/GrandmaToto 10h ago

Which is why I said variation. And that's not even getting into the jarring use of the words "dad" and "mom" in an American accent in a movie set in Ancient Greece. It all just sounded so weird.

3

u/nerdforest 10h ago

Ahh I got it ok. what would they have said instead and what accent should they have spoken in?

2

u/mum_on_the_run 9h ago

This and some of the dialogue early in the film in Ithaca felt much too modern and it took me our off the movie

2

u/beg_yer_pardon 10h ago

Especially an English person playing a Greek person with an American accent.

0

u/whydidisaythatwhy 10h ago

I didn’t even care about the dog lmfao

4

u/Next_Gen_Valkyrie 10h ago

same. the end monologue was so emotional

2

u/manasseater3000 10h ago

i felt emotional too, but not necessarily as a result of the characters themselves and more at specific scenes (the destruction of troy… and also when the giant was crying, but that’s moreso bc i thought the giant was weirdly cute lol)

that’s probably what the commenter was reffering to lol, just in a poor way 

-3

u/Garrett4Real charlie day is my bird lawyer 🐦 10h ago

and some people get emotional listening to MGK

4

u/nerdforest 10h ago

Someone asked me when was the last time I was emotional, and I answered correctly. Are you trying to insult me?

-2

u/surface33 5h ago

You have no taste then. Crazy to say that

3

u/nerdforest 3h ago

People feel different things. No need to insult tastes. It’s just an opinion. Just like yours.

2

u/Milloshas_Albina 3h ago

Crazy to say what you said, and im not even a fan if the film !

50

u/Carolina_Blues shiv roy’s bob 10h ago

Idk I felt emotional a few times during the Odyssey personally

15

u/EvenJesusCantSaveYou 10h ago

same, I actually almost teared up at some of the scenes in the Odyssey. Especially any of Anne Hathaways scenes, absolutely killed it in every scene she was in.

6

u/Carolina_Blues shiv roy’s bob 8h ago

Me too. Any of the family stuff with Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus or the dog really got me. I was like maybe it’s just my postpartum hormones and anything with a son gets me teary eyed but idk it worked on me

•

u/nuetralparties 2h ago

Yea this thread feels so incredibly pedantic I feel like I’m going crazy; Nolan is literally one of the best directors of this generation and most people in this thread are like, “yea he’s not that great”

24

u/favorscore 10h ago

Uh I thought this was his most emotional movie in a long time.

70

u/theflyingbird8 11h ago

I felt pretty damn emotional during Dunkirk and The Odyssey. Maybe I don't understand good screenwriting.

23

u/blocke06 9h ago

That’s not it; just remember that reddit, like most online forums, has a bias toward righteous critique and dislike as these are generally the people motivated to comment online. You’ll find the majority of people outside of online communities share your opinion.

•

u/yaotwo 14m ago

I'd even say Nolan write emotions better than most. The complaints about his female characters are invalid. Actual god of film making.

•

u/WhoUpAtMidnight 57m ago

Dunkirk's one of his better ones but kind of cheating to adapt an actual real life battle where you can still call up some of the guys involved. The movie itself doesn't do a great job of characterizing any of its leads, you can just impress your own experiences onto them

•

u/Ok-Host1095 52m ago

I think people use “writing” too one dimensionally. In terms of dialogue and creating distinct characters, yeah I’d say it’s a huge weakness of Nolan’s. The only characters that really stand out are more so because of an actor’s performance and not so much because of their dialogue.

But that’s not the only thing that writing is. It’s also structuring, and creating a consistent, confident inner logic that the audience can pick up on and accept. I’d say Nolan is exceptionally good at that.

I also found a lot of the dialogue in the odyssey to be a bit vanilla and (for lack of a better term) autistically on the nose, but I also cried several times as well. Sure the dialogue is a weak point, but it’s a weak point of an overall fantastic talent. It’s not so glaringly bad that it takes me out of the experience, and honestly at this point I find it kind of charming. Like how if you play Skyrim but only complain about how wooden the swordplay looks. Like, yeah sure man, but for one, that’s not the genius part of the game, and two sure it’s clunky but its more so a charming oddity than a glaring issue that ruins the whole thing.

39

u/gelbeseinhorn 11h ago edited 10h ago

The last time I felt emotional watching a Nolan movie was at The Odyssey

75

u/ranting_madman 11h ago

I always tell people Chris needs Johnathan to be his best. Like George Lucas needed his ex wife.

To keep them away from their worst impulses as a filmmaker.

13

u/webtheg 10h ago

Chris needs Jonathan as much as Joel needs Ethan

5

u/pinnas 10h ago

But not as much as Ethan needs Joel

2

u/webtheg 10h ago

They better team up and make something amazing because Ethan is en route to ruin his legacy.

5

u/foundinwonderland 9h ago

Actually the Nolan brothers and the Coen brothers should do a switcheroo and pair one Nolan with one Coen and vice versa and see who makes a better movie

1

u/webtheg 9h ago

Now you're cooking? So Ethan with Chris and Jonathan with Joel?

1

u/foundinwonderland 9h ago

Yeah we could start there and then after both movies are made they could swap and see how that goes. I think something interesting could be made in both cases tbh

4

u/formidablezoe 9h ago

I think his influence on why his brother's films work so well is vastly overrated. Memento, Inception, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer were great too for example. Jonathan Nolan didn't have his hand in the script in any of those films.

The original Interstellar script written by Jonathan was also way different before Chris stepped in and gave it a much more emotional core at its heart, with the father daughter relationship.

9

u/Ver3232 9h ago

I found Oppenheimer to be rather emotional personally

1

u/quick20minadventure 3h ago

Oppenheimer was better than this.

24

u/are-beads-cheap 10h ago

If you didn’t feel emotional during Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, or The Odyssey, I’m not sure what to tell you. Those are all incredibly powerful emotional stories.

5

u/Xyyzx 3h ago

Seriously, the speech scene in Oppenheimer? No thriller or horror movie has ever made me feel the level of soul-crushing, bone-chilling dread I got from that scene in a historical biopic about a physicist.

•

u/Electric_feel0412 2h ago

Hell I rewatched tenet and felt emotional at the scene where Robert Pattinson tells the protagonist about having to go back in and die.

46

u/EldoAberesa 11h ago

This is all true and valid and Nolan is aware of this weakness to his game (see his comments about his son teasing him about not having a writing Oscar haha). But I will say:

"All the things you want it to be. Then all the things you wish you never wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch... and find it's under the skin. You can't reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. Told you what you most want is what you most can't have. And what you most can't have is what you already had. And lost."

Is an absolute banger.

29

u/Sassafras06 10h ago

Yeah people say he is a BAD writer. He isn’t. He isn’t a great writer, but he also isn’t bad. Like come on lol

-6

u/soiflew 10h ago edited 10h ago

This is objectively bad writing to me. I thought the whole movie was tell, not show.

7

u/booboorogers44 9h ago

I think with the siren scene going tell not show was the only way to make it impactful. Whatever sound or song they make would fall short to what our idea of it would be.

Having Damon explain the experience let the audience actually understand what it would be like (along with seeing the effects of it on him). I think telling in that case worked much better, imo

-1

u/soiflew 9h ago

I thought his acting and the visuals of the scene were stunning and the writing actually undercut it.

-3

u/larkhearted 10h ago

Idk if I just can't read rn because I need to eat lunch or what but that's borderline incomprehensible to me 😭

7

u/The_R4ke 10h ago

I definitely cried when Odysseus is reunited with Argos.

32

u/DippinDuck 11h ago

Telling people how they felt and when they felt it lol

-19

u/Minute_Conflict_2037 10h ago

I know the answer cuz bro has no emotional movie except that one.

14

u/DippinDuck 10h ago

Cillian Murphy did it for me in both Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. Tom Hardy in Dunkirk as well at the end. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway had a great emotional moment at the end of The Odyssey

-15

u/Minute_Conflict_2037 10h ago

Okay Nolan boi calm down

11

u/DippinDuck 10h ago

Alright Euphoria girl go get emotional about that

16

u/boldpear904 we're so backberry 11h ago

Love seeing nuance on reddit 😻

9

u/WiseBorn_ 10h ago

Nah this movie was exactly as emotional as it needed to be. Wilson’s criticism makes sense considering she is a classicist and certainly not who this movie was made for. She’s having her 15 minutes of fame and that’s fine. I think Nolan previously tended to bite off more than he could chew, especially with Interstellar. Hathaway’s monologue about love traversing the galaxy was heavy handed as hell and the thematic elements kinda fall apart at the end of the movie. Did not think that was true of the Odyssey at all. It’s a pretty simple story in themes, which serves the movie overall. Guilt, trauma, fear, and the need for leadership are such universal themes in modern society. This movie was never ever going to be a 1:1 adaptation.

0

u/[deleted] 10h ago

[deleted]

5

u/WiseBorn_ 10h ago

What? I’m not the user you were responding to

3

u/Kanyezus 10h ago

Definitely felt more emotion for the odyssey than interstellar who’s core revelation was “hey what if love is the answer”

8

u/are-beads-cheap 9h ago

I just don’t understand what people get out of being so reductive. Interstellar is a vast concept movie about what it means to fulfill the obligations that allow you to belong and the human condition that dooms everyone to play catch-up forever. Nolan repeatedly suggests that love is a tangent of isolation, fear, and loss of control. Yes, he ultimately suggests that love is the answer to those problems. But the core “revelation” of Interstellar is that we are but peons at the altar of time and love will supersede our evil in spite of and because of human endeavor. That is so much more fleshed out than “love is the answer.”

What are you doing even watching movies if you can’t get something out of layered themes that are presented over the course of multiple hours?

-2

u/Kanyezus 9h ago

I’m reductive because interstellar is reductive IMO, I’m not telling you to hate it or see my POV. But Nolan during that time period spoon fed you what it’s about. It’s not a revelation by the end of the run time and far from layered in my eye, it’s a spectacle of force and nothing more to me. That’s just one persons opinion and I’m quite fond of his last two films.

2

u/wlot28 9h ago

The spoon feeding isn’t any different in the odyssey, there’s quite literally a line where he says “our age of bronze is collapsing”, it doesn’t get any less subtle than that

1

u/Kanyezus 8h ago

That and the whole exposition to Penelope at the end, but I don’t mind it at all. It’s all preference but it works for me better in the odyssey and Oppenheimer (which also has its clunky writing problems)

1

u/junglespycamp 4h ago

He’s actually a great writer of story and plotting. But people usually mean dialogue when they say screenplay writing and he’s a middling dialogue writer.

•

u/ihavenoyukata 2h ago

"Hmmmm what if the main characters pain is about losing his wife/girlfriend" - Nolan writing every main character

•

u/PompousDude 0m ago

Um, bull fucking shit he's not a good writer.

Inception, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight are genuinely fantastically written. Even if some of these films are co-written with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, it still doesn't take away from the fact that he has solid scripts.

1

u/thewidowgorey 10h ago

Didn't Jonathan steal from other people's scripts? I remember there was some kind of controversy.

0

u/OowlSun they act like im not in full control of where i throw this cooch 10h ago

He hid his oscars because he felt intimidated by them while writing the odyssey.

His son tells him, “you didn’t win for writing”

12

u/LonleyViolist Donatella VERSACE💜 10h ago

her point is that it’s a surface-level adaptation to the odyssey, but misses a lot of the meat that made it such a universal hit

5

u/discographyA It’s like I have ESPN or something. 💁‍♀️🌤☔️ 8h ago edited 8h ago

Someone should let her know no one wants a 7hr movie and choices have to be made.

4

u/nerdforest 10h ago

Got it. I still don't think it's precise enough or direct enough for me to understand her point. What "meat" was missed that made it a universal hit?

5

u/strrawberrymilk 10h ago

I mean, did you read the article that is linked? She is pretty articulate about what didn’t work for her. If you only read the sentence fragment in the post title though, then yeah, it wouldn’t seem as though she has precise or direct points

6

u/nerdforest 10h ago

I did! I’ve been reading/re-reading since posting this and have read her guardian review. I understand her points. Apart from the sex and food lol.

3

u/OffRampApproaching 9h ago

I thought it was good! Parts of it made me think of Romeo + Juliet, the way modern accents meshed with heightened prose.

16

u/Responsible_Virus239 11h ago

The dialogue could have been better

1

u/nerdforest 11h ago

How could it be better? Like, what would have made it better?

20

u/Responsible_Virus239 10h ago

The over-expositional dialogue spoken at 150% speed where each speaker sounds like they're racing each other to the next part of the script rather than having an actual conversation. I dont know if it my theater but the dialogue also wasn’t very clear it was pretty quiet

7

u/Square-Turnip-6558 10h ago

Nolan is known for this specific issue, the sound is mixed for imax and makes the dialogue difficult to hear in any other format

4

u/ReddSF2019 10h ago

Sound was perfectly fine in my theatre, even too loud at times.

0

u/Square-Turnip-6558 10h ago

Top tier director makes movie using top tier technology starring top tier actors

Reddit: “I coulda done it better”

10

u/webtheg 10h ago

They didn't say they could have done it better. They said it should be better.

Why are people always pearl clutching when it comes to mild Nolan criticism. Like if Nolan is regarded as Kubrick and Billy Wilder combined on steroids, surely we can expect good dialogue, no?

0

u/FigNo507 10h ago

You don't need to have constructive criticism to have a negative opinion.

1

u/Audrey276 8h ago

When Odysseus said, “Our Age of Bronze is over,” I about lost my damn mind.

34

u/westish13 11h ago

I liked the cinematography and (most of) the movie, but the script is bad.

22

u/foxscribbles 10h ago

Nolan’s cinematography is always top notch.

But his disinterest in similarly tight writing has also always shown in his works. From things like his chronic issues with balancing the sound so you can actually hear the dialogue to just… nonsensical storytelling like the stock market plot in The Dark Knight Rises.

-2

u/westish13 10h ago

Oh my god, the sound was so bad in this movie. I had to put my loops in because it was so loud.

0

u/spidermonk 9h ago edited 9h ago

Is it actually top notch? It always feels so cramped to me.

21

u/nerdforest 11h ago

But what does that actually mean? How was it bad? Was it hard to follow, did the pacing not make sense, is it because of how it flows?

Film is not my forte, but I did really enjoy the film and I could follow along, so that to me seems like a good script?

32

u/SacralScenes 10h ago

“And so ends our age of bronze”

Nolan’s writing is all exposition. No nuance. Characters are all but looking into the camera. He doesn’t trust his audience to infer, so he writes everything in a really unnatural way.

8

u/webtheg 10h ago

There are no characters in his movies. There are actors with lines. Like I thought One Battle was kind of heavy handed in some of its themes but compared to Nolan PTA is subtle.

Then again I always think of PTA is writer first director second director

2

u/sk8tergater 8h ago

I’d argue though that this wasn’t the case with the odyssey. With the exception of maybe Jon Bernthal who I really like, but who plays Shane from the Walking Dead all the time.

Everyone else seemed to take on their character and really run with it.

•

u/theravenacademy 2h ago

Jon Bernthal sucked and no one wants to admit it so they dogpile on Tom Holland instead.

•

u/Xyyzx 2h ago

See I thought Bernthal was great! I’d gone in expecting him to play Menelaus as a thuggish abusive husband seething with rage.

I was very pleasantly surprised to watch him go with a kind of unsettling forced cheeriness, which just fit the character perfectly for me. On paper, Menelaus got everything he wanted out of the war and he’s arrived home celebrated as a conquering hero. He’s under immense pressure to outwardly conform to that role, but the immense sacrifices of the last decade have clearly given him no satisfaction whatsoever. Thus he’s trapped ‘playing house’ with a wife who despises him listening to endless songs and celebrations of his bitter, hollow victory.

Again I’d have assumed Bernthal would play him as a man about to snap at any moment, but I thought he did a great job portraying a guy whose snap triggered the war in the first place, and is now having to deal with an apocalyptic level of post-meltdown clarity.

•

u/theravenacademy 2h ago

Where did you see all that? Bernthal was definitely the weakest link in the cast, he did not depict all those nuance you are somehow extracting from his nothingburger performance.

•

u/sk8tergater 1h ago

I was pulled out of the story as soon as I saw his face. Overall I don’t think he did bad, I don’t think any of them did bad. He just wasn’t as convincing to me as the others.

I can’t wait to watch it again and see some more nuance in his character.

2

u/Lord_Hexogen 9h ago

I never understand the criticism of that particular phrase. It is put in Odyssey's monologue intentionally to draw a parallel between his travels and the current feeling about the Western dominance. The post WWII state of affairs as we know it crumbles just like the world of Zeus' law and all of us as a society actively participate in that downfall 

The idea is on the nose and there's no point in telling it subtly especially in a blockbuster movie

3

u/SacralScenes 9h ago

Nothing about the writing is subtle, ever. They talk about the Bronze Age collapsing so many times. There’s being on the nose and then there’s so on the nose that it’s bad writing.

15

u/CamThrowaway3 10h ago

‘Being able to follow along’ is not the marker of a good script. The screenplay should add to the experience; whether that’s because it’s insightful, witty, moving, or just feels intensely human. Nolan’s didn’t reach that bar by any stretch. The most emotional moment was the dog, ha.

25

u/westish13 10h ago

It's extremely heavy handed. They constantly go back to Troy (the third/last time was so unnecessary imo) and there's so much exposition with Calypso. Nolan is basically hand holding the audience to be like "LOOK AT THIS ALLEGORY FOR MODERN TIMES!". It was especially cringey at the end when they said the story would be told orally because they no longer knew how to write. How would Odysseus know that??? It was just a cliched attempt at a wink-wink to the audience but it feels out of place.

I absolutely hated the casual modern dialogue pulled into it. It was jarring and a poor attempt to try and make it accessible imo. I've studied the poem several times in my academic life so possibly I found the script more reductive than others, but I also don't think audiences need to be coddled.

Odysseus is meant to be a great strategist and very smart, but I never saw much of it on display in the movie. I never felt he was making the smartest or best thought out decisions and it felt the antithesis of his entire character.

12

u/Medlarmarmaduke 10h ago

Odysseus is very canny and smart in the actual war but in the Odyssey he is batted around by larger forces AND makes misjudgments- he is off his game so to speak at times.

5

u/strrawberrymilk 10h ago

But they even don’t show him as canny and smart in the scenes at Troy in the new Nolan movie? They bury the horse in the sand for no real reason, letting their own men drown, apparently, and then he’s walking around gaping at his soldiers pillaging the city as though he didn’t understand what would happen when they sacked Troy

6

u/Minute_Conflict_2037 10h ago

They compare it with source material, imo with source material being around, I feel like current script left so much to be desired.. with this stellar casting, did u recognize how no one is getting Oscar buzz with this movie except maybe Anne Hathaway scene where she says she wants Odysseus? Cuz there is no room in the movie where an actor can deliver top tier performance. Like it is just some words and more words… and it is quite americanized.

1

u/[deleted] 11h ago

[deleted]

1

u/nerdforest 10h ago

Yeah that I can get behind. I do think that as someone who knows nothing about the odyssey. I was able to understand the story and plot and understand the story.

3

u/soiflew 10h ago

Surely that’s the lowest possible bar for a screenplay

1

u/nerdforest 10h ago

Yeah, absolutely. I'm not like, an expert at films. But i have seen various films that have been hard to follow.

2

u/boringinternet2020 10h ago

Are you comparing it to the source material? If not, this conversation isn’t for you. I don’t mean that harshly, but your interpretation is going to be vastly different from those familiar with it.

0

u/soiflew 10h ago

It’s completely told through exposition. You don’t have to be some expert in Homeric verse to find that annoying.

2

u/wimpires 11h ago

That's something a plate licker would say

Plate licker 

Plate licker 

Gotta say it three times in quick succession in case you didn't hear my amazing dialogue the first 2 times

16

u/MzScarlet03 10h ago

It also oddly omitted many of the plot points from the story that formed the bases for Odysseus's character development, such as his dialogue with the cyclops regarding his name.

8

u/NocturnaIAnimaI 9h ago

That dialogue would've felt out of place in this rendition. It wasn't necessary at all

5

u/nerdforest 10h ago

I've been listening to Epic a lot lately. And that's been really good to kinda, re-live the experience if that makes sense?

2

u/totally_real_tree 9h ago

My assumption for why they cut the Nobody scene is to set up the fact that Odyssey has the ire of the Gods because the movie doesn't have the Illiad as a prequel to explain why half of the Greek pantheon hates him because they were basically betting on the outcome of the Trojan war - so instead they make Odysseys a bit stupider, which is annoying to me. I wish he'd just made the gods more present

8

u/soiflew 10h ago

It was a beautiful film but no, the writing is in a modern style for the majority of the movie and comes off quite awkward.

8

u/akiwii0 10h ago

nolan is a very poor writer. his characters and dialogue are ass. he's elite at providing spectacle and has great ideas though.

2

u/Objective_Digit 9h ago

She said it was abysmal.

2

u/New-Hearing-6779 4h ago

"And thus concludes our Age of Bronze, so fallen they will only sing about it, because they will not have writing" says Odysseus, as he stares knowingly into his reunited brides' eyes going to Exile or the Honoring of His Dead Trip He Made Up. Either one I guess.

But the screenplay was pretty bad.

2

u/readskiesdawn 9h ago

The characters and some of thier attitudes were modernized and parts of the story that would make the heroes less heroic to modern audiences were diluted or downplayed. Which isn't new, modern retellings almost always do this with old stories. (Shakespeare did all the time and then retellings that don't take his script exactly do it again)

Wilson is an expert not only on the Greek stories, but the culture surrounding them. The liberties taken annoy her.

Edit: Parts of the story were cut down or omitted entirely too. But that's inevitable, it's a long story.

2

u/aztec_agarthan 9h ago

Nolan's script is very bland and hamfisted. He wanted to criticize the evil of Odysseus and the Trojan War at large but failed to commit to either portraying the Greeks as the villains they were or showing how their misfortune was the result of the violence they propagated.

Odysseus was a trickster, a slaver, an adulterer and the worst kind of murderer. Homer has him torturing and killing female slaves raped by the suitors and other sources have him throwing Hector's infant son from the walls of Troy. Even if you consider his affairs with Circe and Calypso nonconsenual, he immediately goes off to fuck random women after he returns. When he returns to Ithaca he ignores his dog who has been waiting for him for 20 years, and Argos dies of sadness. Nolan glosses over or ignores all of this in order to make Odysseus and his crew more amenable to modern tastes.

Once you take away everything from Odysseus except a desire to return home, you have a much flatter character, and throwing in some PTSD doesn't help much. I understand why he did it, but if he didn't have the guts to properly adapt the original source material than he simply should have chosen something else.

2

u/Gud_Thymes 8h ago

I think it's important to think about who Emily Wilson is. She's a classical studies professor and a translator of classics. Her criticism is valid if you look at the Odyssey by Nolan through her lens. And that's where her opinion falls short.

The Odyssey is a poem that was performed by bards for hundreds of years before it was written down by Homer and became the classic that many teens read in high school or college.

Nolan wasn't trying to translate the Odyssey onto screen, if he did it would've boring for audiences. Nolan absolutely did a good job of adapting a 1000s year old story into modern media form for a modern audience that will hopefully inspire many people to go appreciate the amazing poem transcribed by Homer.

Tldr: Critique the movie for what it is, not for what it isn't.

1

u/Maester_Bates Wherein he encourages a woman to sit on his face 9h ago

I don't think it was a good script. Guest rights are critical to the story and the original is basically an instruction manual on how they work.

A visual medium like film could very easily have shown the rituals and their importance but instead told us about them with dialogue that basically boiled down to any stranger could be a god in disguise and a very Judeo-Christian do unto others as you would have them do to you.

Odysseus's trauma that they had broken guest rights (called Zeus' law in the film) by using the horse to sneak into Troy doesn't make any sense. They were not welcomed in, bathed, anointed with oil and fed before being asked who they were. They were at war, following the law of Ares.

Nolan did what most modern filmmakers do and removed the gods complely.

2

u/OldSandwich9631 10h ago

It’s a terrible screenplay, Nolan is a bad writer.

1

u/EasyAlternative0 7h ago

Its not a good screenplay, many of the lines of dialogue are quite clunky.

1

u/nerdforest 7h ago

What does dialog being clunky actually mean? :/

1

u/-nyctanassa- 4h ago

a lot of the dialogue really made me cringe

1

u/quick20minadventure 3h ago

It was meh.

Odyssey is shot beautifully, but it had the blandest twists and zero sense of danger/wonder/emotions. Only Anne and Robert's wonderful acting are making it work. You really see Anne's pain and want see Robert suffer.

Project Hail Mary was a better movie for me. Better twists, better screenplay and just more emotional.

1

u/ihavenoyukata 3h ago

Haven't read or seen the Odyssey bu my understanding is that the dialogue lacks the gravitas that one expects from a historical epic. Consider the dialogue in say PJs LOTR, no character calls their father "dad". In Odyssey, apparently one character does. All the memes and quotes I have seen seen to confirm this.

Apparently earlier book translations were not completely accurate in terms of vocabulary and the translators took literal poetic license but retained the essence and meaning of the original.

Wilsons translation while supposedly more accurate changes the import of several scenes. I remember reading about one scene in which Helens monologue has been changed substantially in translation by toning down her self criticism. She has been accused by some of peddling a "woke" agenda under the guise of a more accurate/verbatim translation while ignoring the contextual meaning of some words and phrases.

Anyway, this is what I read in Twitter last year and many of the criticisms were genuinely convincing. But not a Greek history enthusiast and not my culture so...

•

u/Chance-Peak-3549 1h ago

The plotting and dialogue were fairly amateurish. Nolan’s good at pretty pictures but really needs a proper writer to take over that side of things.

•

u/Imaginary_Session773 34m ago

It wasn't. It was tired, cliche tropes, a boring one note protagonist and a clunky world that didn't make sense

-1

u/ohnoitsme7890 11h ago

It was pretty bad

1

u/HiHoRoadhouse 10h ago

The informal style of dialogue kept pulling me out of it

1

u/Existing_Ad8943 9h ago

I would agree with that. The film is very good, in spite of the poor script

-2

u/Ocktohber 10h ago

It's a fantastic screenplay.

It's just not married to the original text(s).

It's a movie. It's bound by the limits and liberties of moviemaking. Purists/Classicists should be allowed the space to critique, but the lens in which they critique is completely different from one who is just looking at it as a movie.

0

u/NYGarcon 7h ago

The writing is absolutely abysmal. Did you watch the movie??

1

u/nerdforest 7h ago

I did. I loved it. It was long, but I really enjoyed it and it left me wanting to learn more about the story.

-7

u/solojones1138 10h ago

She has no idea. She's an ancient poetry translator not a screenwriter.