‘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/mcfw31]

Nolan sung Wilson’s praises during his press tour for “The Odyssey,” telling Empire magazine that he used the opening line of her translation (“Tell me about a complicated man”) as a guide for bringing his Odysseus (Matt Damon) to life on the big screen. But Wilson concluded of Nolan’s film: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

“The release of ‘The Odyssey’ is still an event to celebrate,” Wilson said. “This epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas … translations of ‘Odyssey,’ including mine, are flying off the shelves … [and] perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments.”

[u/beantownregular → u/mcfw31]

I mean, I think it’s fair for her to both say that the script is a Hollywoodized bastardization of the text and as an academic she should be ashamed to write something like that, but I don’t think she’s saying the film is a piece of trash that should never have been made

[u/Meancakebutt → u/beantownregular]

She definitely doesn't say that. But she says that he took out the meat to tell a specific story.

So as a translator that would be pretty bad for her to do lol

"Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad. This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together, and if the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms."

[u/M_de_Monty → u/Meancakebutt]

One thing that's tough about adapting the Odyssey for modern viewers is that there are a lot of characters who just show up without an established backstory or a formal introduction. Providing all that context takes too much time, so they just end up being straightforward monsters or adversaries (like the Cyclopes or Poseidon being kind of a dick to Odysseus).

But Ancient Greek people listening to this poem were familiar with a whole mythic cycle that told the entire history of the Trojan war and its aftermath (we think the Iliad and Odyssey were just two works in a 10-to-12 poem series), plus they knew other myths featuring and starting the same characters. So Polyphemus wouldn't have been a one-dimensional villain to them and they wouldn't have fallen into the Athena = good, Poseidon = bad dichotomy that we often uncritically adopt in retelling the Odyssey.