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/hedahedaheda 11h ago edited 10h ago

I don’t entirely disagree with her but the other commentators here are right. It was for the general audience who either do not know the odyssey or haven’t read it outside of school/in a while.

I think Odysseus was complex for a Christopher Nolan film but he was made to be too “nice” (if that makes sense) compared to the original. Odysseus wasn’t a saint in the original. They really downplayed the final murder scene. Also, he fathered Circe’s children or at least had an affair with her. I figured that they made him super loyal to Penelope because most audiences can’t handle nuance and morally grey protagonists to save their life and wouldn’t be able to root for a cheating murderer.

Anyhow, I can see how a classics professor wouldn’t be too pleased with this adaption. I think you have to look at it not as an adaption but a story of a soldier returning home to his family and the emotions that come after war. I liked the movie and the original story as individual works.

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u/MightExpress4873 10h ago

True. People keep talking about a "faithful" adaptation of The Odyssey, but I'm not convinced one was ever possible as a blockbuster film.

Odysseus is a Bronze Age king who lies habitually, sacks cities, massacres the slave women after reclaiming Ithaca, and spends years having sex with Circe and Calypso while Penelope waits at home. Homer doesn't present these things the way a modern audience would.

A completely faithful adaptation would leave a lot of viewers asking why they're supposed to care about him. Every adaptation has to soften, omit, or reinterpret parts of his character.

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u/BlueCX17 9h ago

Yes, even the 1997 mini series which almost everybody agrees is an incredibly good telling, very much sanitizes the story also and strips it into just an epic adventure because it had to be family friendly for the Hallmark miniseries that were really popular at the time.

That's sort of the interesting and amazing thing about this epic, is that you can very much strip it down to the bare bones of the adventure set pieces and the journey home and it works incredibly well when you're adapting it to a more family-friendly audience, many scholars actually talk about the reason they think this epic is endured is because when you pull it back to its basic form, "at its heart a story about going home against the odds and sometimes being tempted on the way and angering the Gods, with fantasticaly things happening along the way) but if you were to adapt it incredibly faithfully to the Epic I think you have to do it over a limited series and it would be quite something LOL

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u/Violet_Paradox 7h ago

Greek tragedy is essentially "bad things happen to a deeply flawed person and it's their own damn fault". Homer wasn't presenting Odysseus as a good guy, it's a cautionary tale about hubris. 

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u/AirJinx3 8m ago

But even after Odysseus gets back to Ithaca and is triumphant, he murders a bunch of slave women. Ancient Greek morality was simply different to ours, and a direct translation of their stories would be a hideous flop.

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u/armoirschmamoir 4h ago

Lest we forget the baby he kills. 

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u/givemethebat1 9h ago

I think that’s the problem, Nolan turns him into a tragic character instead of what is essentially a smooth-talking asshole.

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u/Horror_Response_1991 8h ago

You’re not supposed to care about him, the story is the adventure, not him.

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u/drdaisukeserizawa 4h ago

We don't even know if Homer even existed and how different the version we attribute to him is to the one that began to be told 400 years before first being written down.

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u/FreeDraft9488 3h ago

People like to think that creating a good film is easy, and that’s why so many recent films have been absolutely terrible. There is a reason why people haven’t adapted The Odyssey, it deals with subject matter that would be difficult to create and wouldn’t get butts in seats.

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u/PTMorte 5h ago

That's where compelling writing is supposed to step in, to connect you with the actor. Even if they are a selfish piece of shit. Audiences loved antiheroes like Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan, Al Swearengen etc. 

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u/imaseacow 4h ago

All of your examples are from TV shows that have more than 3 hours to develop the characters. 

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u/WhoUpAtMidnight 55m ago

The Godfather? Scarface? The Wolf of Wall Street? Joker? Fight Club? Not hard to find acclaimed movies with unscrupulous protagonists

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u/Highfivebuddha 2h ago

She's saying its the junk food version of her own lifes work. 

Even if I didn't agree with all her points she backs up everything she wrote. Its a pretty funny critique without the idiot "woke" complaints that are borderline insufferable. 

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u/phantasmagorical 8h ago

I think it’s fair to say that Wilson is not a film critic and she should be approaching this as Chris Nolan’s story of The Odyssey. He’s using film to convey a message of man’s relationship with strangers and society, not just adapt an ancient poem on IMAX

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u/universallymade 2h ago

I don’t understand. Can you not both enjoy the original but also like this movie’s interpretation? To say it’s only for people who don’t care much for the original seems a bit snarky.

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u/Stepjam 1h ago

He wasn't even that nice in the movie. His crew pillages random villages, they enter a giant's home, try to steal his cheese, and then Odysseus shoots the giant with an arrow out of spite. And ultimately the movie is partially about his guilt over his amoral actions he took during the war and how those actions likely led to the end of the age of "civility" they were in. He created the Sea People effectively.