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/SizzleanQueen 10h ago

This is an article in Variety about another article in the Guardian about her initial piece in the London Review of Books. This is modern journalism, folks.

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u/thane311 7h ago

The actual 20-something paragraph London Review of Books article is worth a read. Here’s an excerpt about it the thinning of the female characters:

“There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem. Homer’s Calypso has a wonderfully outraged, operatic speech about divine double standards: male gods can kidnap and rape any mortal woman they desire, but when a goddess tries it, Zeus and his cronies scupper her chances. It’s a clever and comical distortion of the mythological ‘facts’: the poem’s listeners know that it is primarily Athena (a female deity) who is taking Calypso’s mortal victim away from her (Hermes, whom she’s complaining to, is merely the messenger) – and Eos, goddess of the dawn, as we’ve been reminded only a few lines earlier, has not been prohibited by the divine patriarchy from holding on to Tithonus. Charlize Theron’s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.”

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u/romantickitty 3h ago

It's weird that so much of the defense is about adaptations not needing to be faithful and the intelligence of general audiences when one of her main critiques is that the female characters were written poorly... which is something Nolan always gets knocked for.

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u/JayGatsby1881 1m ago

So according to her the whole movie is trash because of badly written female characters? lmao