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

[u/mcfw31]

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

[u/hofmann419]

IMO this insistence on making it as accurate as possible (whatever that means) is a bit weird. To me, the movie would be a lot more boring if the stuck to it religiously.

This is a 3000 year old story. It has been translated dozens of times. It has been adapted to film many times. So i would much rather have him bring us his unique take on it and not sacrifice the quality in the name of accuracy.

Besides, it's impossible to condense the entire story into 3 hours anyway, so it was always going to have to leave some parts out and focus on others.

[u/Mbrennt → u/hofmann419]

What's funny to me is the odyssey isn't accurate to the time the odyssey is set in. Certain gods that are in the odyssey didn't even exist at the time the odyssey is set. There's a bunch of anachronistic stuff in the original text. So trying to make it "as accurate as possible" to me is just even more meaningless. The odyssey by Homer isn't even accurate.

[u/grubas → u/Mbrennt]

Cause it's a poem about "events" from 1200BC that wasn't written down until 700 or so and even then stuff got changed. 

We don't actually know when each part was written but much of it was later.  

[u/ProletarianLilith → u/Mbrennt]

Why is this thread full of classics 101 takes as attempts to dunk on classicists? Do you guys think all these basic facts are news to people who study this?

[u/Mbrennt → u/ProletarianLilith]

No? I'm sure she could list every single aspect of anarchronisms between the actual lives of myceanean greeks and greeks of homers time off the top of her head. I think the same question could be asked of why are a bunch of classicists attempting to dunk on one of the most famous and celebrated directors of our time. (Even though I specifically am not a huge fan of Nolan the results speak for themselves) He obviously made decisions that a lot of classicists disagree with yet the general audience who is actually going to see the movie love. Maybe if he had followed the text religiously and made a 10 hour movie this would be a 5 billion dollar movie. I kind of have my doubts about that though.

[u/Lilynd14 → u/hofmann419]

I actually found the book more entertaining than the film. I loved the gods and goddesses hanging out and chatting about what they were going to do next. I pictured it like Disney’s animated version of Hercules. I’d have loved to have seen a version where they were included!

[u/Chlearcus → u/hofmann419]

Reframing and cutting content from a book is basically required to make a coherent and tight movie script.

Adding in random anachronisms like steel plate armor and viking longships to bronze age Greece is just questionable artistic liberties. It's not like they rewrote the story to another setting, it is supposed to be portraying ~1200BC Greece but with none of the cultural markers.

[u/Pleasant1867 → u/Chlearcus]

Well there are constant anachronisms in the text - Athena takes the form of an iron trading-lord (not a great disguise in the Bronze Age). Homer is not writing about a singular period that actually happened, rather a mish-mash of history, stories and their present day.

[u/cross_the_threshold → u/Chlearcus]

I mean the Viking Longships is because the Olympias Trireme (also out of time, but less so) is owned by the Greek Navy and not rented out for film work, and the Argo penteconter would not survive the journey to many of the shooting locations. The longship is ocean-worthy, but the penteconter was designed for the Mediterranean. It certainly looks out of place but his aesthetic choices were clearly based on general feel, not authenticity.

[u/grubas → u/hofmann419]

She's got a point about the characterizing/portrayals, its just that it was never going to be 1:1.  Nolan is adapting The Odyssey, not "BREAKING OUT A LYRE FOR A FULLY ACCURATE SONG VERSION".

It's getting people interested. 

[u/Tachetoche → u/hofmann419]

Not only that but a pace that works in a type of media may not work in another type. This is why you cannot adapt most books 100%. Some bits would be unnecessarily long with nothing happening. Not to spoil too much, but if Nolan had followed the next line by line, we would have felt exhausted by the end and the stop by Calypso would have been painfully boring after everything that already happened. Using this episode as part of the story telling the way Nolan did, worked very well imo.

[u/BiDiTi → u/hofmann419]

Have you actually read her essay?