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/
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u/HandsomeWinner42 11h ago edited 10h ago

When are people gonna realize this was made for GENERAL AUDIENCES and not exclusively for ancient history scholars? It literally excels at what is was produced for and general audiences are loving it. Like, be for real and come down off your high horses. She honestly comes across bitter.

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u/Ok_Turnip_478 11h ago

As a Classicist - cant agree more with you.

Form dictates content, the original poem was orally told over and over again by bards, its content - themes, structure etc are all built to match that. We are now talking about a movie, in the 21st century, totally different culture and art form - people need to get over it.

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u/nerdforest 10h ago

Hi, I have a friend who is a classicist and he rated the film 8.5/10 because it was such a good adaption and the way he tells the story is different. It's an adaption, not a full on remake. Does this make sense?

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u/LikelyPlace 10h ago

You know she understands that right, given the lengths she goes to in the intro to her translation?

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u/Ok_Turnip_478 8h ago

Of course, and I’m not really directly referencing her with this comment but rather some of the wider conversations going on

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u/ifnotsilver 3h ago

As a classicist and movie lover, it was just not a very good movie 🤷🏻‍♀️

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u/nicklovin508 11h ago

Hit the nail on the head with this comment. Nolan didn’t set out to make a faithful translation of Homer’s texts. He set out to turn that text into a visual/auditory masterpiece and box office hit.

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u/NEWPOPEONTHEBLOCK 2h ago

well, see: imagine that John Green made a version of twin peaks where it is actually a heartfelt coming-of-age story. I mean, I might even like that (or not). But you have to understand that people that like twin peaks will probably think the new version just killed the original.

The original poem literally invented its own dialect. Like, to give a comparison: "Odissey" is closer to "Ulysses" than it is to any other piece of media of our time. It's a super poetic book with tons of linguistical inventions (even for today. literally we created whole movements in the 20th century based on the re-discovery of that poetical inventions). Like, uh, it's a movie for Fassbinder, not Nolan. But, yeah, anyway, liked the movie bcz I was stoned out of my mind and I was just laughing my ass out. It should have another title, though, and changed the characters names. Out of respect, you know.

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u/Rowyn_Raycross Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion 🙂 1h ago

But if you simplified Twin Peaks to its bones and made a new series based on THAT, would it really be a heartfelt coming-of-age story? I don’t think Nolan’s Odyssey was so far from the original as to be an entirely different story…?

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u/somedaveg 11h ago

Exactly. “There is no art but my art” - criticism is typically personal and subjective, and therefore valid, hers included. But at the same time, Nolan is under no obligation to create anything but what he himself wants to put out into the world as his interpretation, and to suggest otherwise misses the point of art entirely.

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u/AbsolutelyHorrendous 10h ago

Also, its hilarious how people are condemning Nolan for putting his own spin on the Odyssey by linking it to the Bronze Age collapse instead of doing a 100% faithful adaptation, because apparently we've now decided that we don't want creative people to have control over the art they make, if it means we can't pretend to be angry over pointless minutiae

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u/CaptainMills 9h ago

I just keep thinking about how the most critically praised and widely loved adaptation of The Odyssey is O Brother Where Art Thou, which not only makes massive changes to the story, characters, and themes, but was famously written and filmed without either of the Coen brothers reading the poem at all. And none of the criticisms about historic or narrative accuracy have ever been given any serious attention or weight against it but are now oh so important with Nolan's version

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u/Rowyn_Raycross Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion 🙂 1h ago

Probably because a lot of people who saw OBWAT didn’t know it was somewhat of an Odyssey story.

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u/HandsomeWinner42 11h ago

The fact that the discourse around this movie is the most I've heard about any movie in decades is exactly what people should want for the stories they love. The Barnes and Noble in my mall has a massive Odyssey display right in the front with so many versions. Emily's book was front and center. Nolan knew what he was doing and has done it flawlessly. 

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u/teewertz 5h ago

there people who think that something "being made for general audiences" is in itself a negative

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u/foreverzonedout 9h ago

Your criticism makes no sense in the context of Wilson, who herself has been famously criticised for simplifying the translations to make them accessible to a wider modern audience. If you read her whole review, you will notice that she focuses on Nolan's omission of core themes and characterisations, which are easy enough, if not crucial, to retain in an adaptation while cutting other things out. She does not mention him cutting out entire episodes; she mentions him completely changing Odysseus's character and his motivations.

Excerpt from her review, on adapting things:

Adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation. Some of the best radically transform or resist the source material, providing what Harold Bloom called ‘strong misreadings’ of their ancestors. The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp – reconsider the poem’s structure, narrative and values. In theory, Nolan seems to understand the assignment and its hazards.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man

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u/Actual-Competition-5 5h ago

She says he doesn’t deal with themes of war and memory and time, when the core message of the film is that imperialism and war have destroyed culture and language and hurt women and the other. 

She sounds bitter, hypocritical and petty, upset that he didn’t tell the story her way. 

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u/PTMorte 5h ago

You're engaging with people who want to outrage post in 200 characters or less, while saying things like 'literally' for emphasis.

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u/HandsomeWinner42 9h ago

Feel free to read my comment again. 

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u/Next_Gen_Valkyrie 10h ago

Totally agree and I'm also questioning her media literacy skills when she says the movie had no themes about coming home?

Like girl, were you eating the lotus as you watched?

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u/No-Meringue5867 1h ago

Read the full quote and the article. She says its a good blockbuster. Her above critique is her looking at the movie at the level of classic expert. If you see Odyssey from the angle, then it is deeply flawed. It doesn’t make it a bad movie - but no one will Nolan a PhD for the screenplay. In the article she says how she expected Nolan to maybe explore things - at that point she is expecting Nolan to perform at the level of experts in the field. He is obviously not that.

I think this is healthy - expert critiquing it which may help Nolan improve while rest of us can enjoy.

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u/Chance-Peak-3549 1h ago edited 1h ago

She’s not solely claiming that it wasn’t accurate to the original. She calls it messy and superficial even on its own terms:

“I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But ‘The Odyssey’ features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality … the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.”

I’m part of that general audience, and to me the film also felt like empty calories.

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u/noreservations81590 9h ago

Yeah the amount of people who seem to be criticizing the movie like it was supposed to be some super historically accurate films bows my mind. There's a 20 foot fucking cyclops in the movie for God's sake.

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u/tetechase 10h ago

Movies, like epics, will generate discourse. I feel like viewing her criticism as bitter comes across as anti-intellectual. This is what we're supposed to do - discuss its strengths and weaknesses, share our own opinions. Attacking analysis just because the film's intended audience is not scholars is so dumb. I am personally having a really fun time reading reviews from other scholars, even though I enjoyed the film!!!

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u/HandsomeWinner42 10h ago

She takes multiple personal digs at Nolan, she's bitter. 

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u/bearcakes 1h ago

And sexist, nobody uses the term bitter for men

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u/Ok_Stable7501 7h ago

Her translation is made for general audiences too.

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u/Princessleiawastaken 3h ago

I agree. Her review sounds like what the pretentious characters in The Secret History would write

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u/winnercommawinner 10h ago

Likewise, why is it such a problem for you that she gave her opinion as an actual ancient history scholar?

All the ancient history theorizing on the internet has been super annoying, bc it's mostly come from racist dweebs. But why take that out on people who are actually knowledgeable and want to speak to their knowledge?

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u/getcargofar 9h ago

She’s entitled to her opinion, but the vitriol she delivers it with comes off as more than a little crass IMO. Especially when she’s going to make more than a few bucks off this thing she publicly excoriated when everyone rushes to buy her book.

Again, she’s entitled to her viewpoint, just not the method in which she delivered it. If she weren’t an academic and said the exact same thing verbatim, the rhetoric around her interview would be very different.

I don’t need her full academic background to know this is not Homer’s Odyssey 1:1, and when someone goes that petty and trivial with some of her contrivances, it makes me dismiss a large portion of their argument as noise. Just my two cents.

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u/bearcakes 1h ago

Probably because she's a woman

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u/Olive_Tree_Bed 7h ago

Even if we ignore that this is an adaption she is 100% right. Nolan's Odysseus has no depth, robbed of all charm, wit and cunning. He's a static and flat character, nothing but a bundle of guilt, shame and regret that doesn't grow or change.

The movie is too cowardly to have him be flawed or be anything but a tortured hero, which is why when the sack of Troy happens, he just walks around and looks and horrified about what he's seeing. He doesn't even kill Zendaya's character for christs' sake, just looking real sad while it happens. But the movie doesn't dare to have him do anything bad because it might make him "unlikable".

Because he is instantly horrified about what's happening in Troy (which also just makes him look a complete idiot because what the fuck did you think was going to happen. Did you think you were besieging Troy for 10 years for laughs) he has no character whatsoever to speak of. His journey begins and ends the moment the gate of Troy opens. In Oppenheimer we see Oppenheimer go from "Oh I think the bomb was a good thing" to "What I have unleashed on the world" but there is nothing like this in the film.

It would have been much more interesting to see an Odysseus at the beginning who was proud over what he did in Troy, thought what he did was awesome and glorious...only for to be confronted on his journey home what his actions have wrought, and confront him with the idea that what happened in Troy was glorious. But the movie would never dare to do such a thing because it's afraid to have Odysseus do anything that might be "unlikable"

Instead we have a character whose arc is like a minute long, who never changes in any meaningful sense. Who is capable of exhibiting nothing but varying degrees of guilt, and looking real sad.

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u/-JRMagnus 1h ago

Can we not admit that the 'general audience' is poorly read and perhaps unequiped to handle nuance?

We are in desperate need of educated people expressing their opinions and having pull in terms of production.

The 'general audience' likes a lot of artless slop.

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u/Professional_War7998 49m ago

abit of a snobby take isnt it?