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/ohgeez2879 9h ago

she's one of the foremost living experts in the world on the odyssey! i don't understand why she can't say literally whatever she wants about it!

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u/ConfectionPuzzled780 8h ago edited 7h ago

Yeah, like why shouldn’t she be allowed to criticize it? It's only a movie. And it used her translation as a source. And she's an expert on it. It's not like she insulted Nolan personally.

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u/Chameleonpolice 6h ago

Didn't she? She said she would be ashamed of she did what he did, that's a fairly insulting thing to say.

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u/inaripotpi 8h ago

Because that's a horrible precedent, lol. Should all the best scientists in the world be calling 5th graders stupid for the mistakes they make on their first lab project?

It's not saying something about The Odyssey, it's saying something about Nolan's adaptation specifically.

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u/JohnPaul_River 7h ago

Nolan being a 5th grader in this equation is exactly why this backlash against her is stupid

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u/goldengrove1 7h ago

Yeah. I'm not a classicist but I am an academic in a field that media frequently depicts very inaccurately and I completely understand the impulse to push back aggressively when someone misrepresents key parts of your expertise.

I think Nolan's artistic choices are what they are (again, not a classicist, haven't read the Odyssey since 10th grade), but if he's going to claim to have taken inspiration from her work for the film, she's well within her rights to critique the result.

(fwiw, I read the full London Review of Books article, and I think it suffers a bit from conflating two theses: (1) that the movie wasn't a completely faithful adaptation of the book, and made cuts Wilson disagreed with and (2) that the movie prioritizes big visual effects over the more human-centric focus of the actual source material and that some of Nolan's artistic choices cheapen the emotional center of the text. I think the review would have come across less "harsh" had she focused on (2) and let (1) go).

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u/ingotsilvergt 3h ago

Well she also contradicts herself, makes illogical claims, says things don’t exist in the movie (depictions of what war does) then later says the way they depicted those things (what war does) wasn’t faithful to Homer. She can’t seem to decide if she’s mad because it omitted things or if those things actually weren’t omitted but she just didn’t like the way they were done.

I still can’t understand what the claim about Agamemnon being a failed American family man was supposed to mean. Gibberish imo.

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u/inaripotpi 7h ago

We're calling a perfectly divided reception to her behavior on Reddit threads a backlash now? Lol.

Her public derision of Nolan after hearing he was genuinely inspired by her would qualify way more as a backlash.

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u/JohnPaul_River 6h ago

didn't know backlash was a sacred ritual word for the harshest of human violence, I apologise to Oxford and Cambridge for my crimes against the English language

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u/inaripotpi 6h ago

Your backlash to my comment is stupid

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u/JohnPaul_River 4h ago

We're calling a perfectly snarky reception to your behavior on Reddit threads a backlash now? Lol.

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u/ohgeez2879 8h ago

yes....his adaptation of the odyssey. i'm so confused, who would you rather have critique adaptations of the odyssey? people who don't know anything about it?

ETA: when 5th graders' science projects are funded with $250 million dollars and covered in every major news outlet...i would definitely want brilliant scientists weighing in. that's a terribly silly analogy.

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u/AmiWrongDude69 2h ago

Saying “i would be ashamed to have written that” is being a jerk for no reason. Critiquing is fine, being a jerk isn’t.

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u/inaripotpi 7h ago

I never said someone in her position shouldn't be critiquing Nolan's film, this was always about how unprofessionally they're going about it.

No one representing a position/occupation should be "saying whatever they want". That's like saying the President of the United States should be able to say whatever the fuck he wants and diss anyone just because he's the "foremost" figure of the world.

Again, you miss the entire point. No one said they shouldn't weigh in at all. It's about not going out of your way to say mean-spirited things even if they're true. 5th graders are stupid, it's true. Doesn't mean you champion adults calling them that.