The piece under discussion is a long, scathing review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the classicist whose recent English translation is widely seen as one of the film’s main sources. Her core charge is not just that the movie cuts material. It is that Nolan strips out what makes Homer unsettling and alive. In the poem, Odysseus is cunning, violent, selfish, sexually compromised, and fully at home in a brutal warrior culture. In the film, he becomes a familiar modern protagonist. He kills for the right reasons, feels bad afterward, and moves through a world whose gods, appetites, and moral assumptions have been thinned down into prestige-blockbuster psychology. That landed as the central point people kept returning to. The problem is not adaptation as such. It is that the movie translates Bronze Age values into 21st-century Hollywood ones and calls the result Homer.
A lot of readers found that diagnosis persuasive even when they liked the movie. The strongest consensus was that Nolan made Odysseus easier to root for by sanding off the very traits that define him, then replaced the poem’s strange ethical world with a more legible one about trauma, guilt, and redemption. Several comments pushed this further by noting that Homer can be harsh without being morally numb. The poem gives victims presence and consequence. The film, in their view, mostly gives us perpetrators who feel haunted. That distinction mattered more than arguments over omitted scenes or textual fidelity.
The rest of the conversation split along two lines. One camp said this is simply what big-budget adaptation does. A three-hour studio movie cannot ask mass audiences to inhabit the mindset of a city-sacking Bronze Age raider, and some sanitizing is the price of getting the story onto an
IMAX screen at all. The other camp said that is exactly the artistic failure. Plenty of people can make a handsome action epic. The hard part was to carry over the alien values, sensuality, violence, and scale of belief that make The Odyssey more than a plot machine. Even many defenders conceded that Nolan’s usual weaknesses showed up again: clunky exposition, muddied dialogue, washed-out visuals despite the IMAX format, and action craft that felt oddly generic or technically sloppy in details like archery.
There was also a smaller but real defense of the film on its own terms. Some viewers thought the review overreached, missed obvious signs that Nolan does treat the Greeks as morally compromised, or mistook a deliberate focus on Odysseus for indifference to Trojan victims. Others said the movie succeeded at the most basic commercial and cultural level. Families watched it, teenagers sat through three hours of Greek myth, and it sent some viewers to buy or read the poem. Even critics of the film admitted that part has value. The discussion ended up treating Nolan’s Odyssey as competent spectacle with major blind spots, and Wilson’s review as sharpest when it explained why a movie can preserve the skeleton of a classic while losing the thing that made the classic worth adapting.
lrb.co.uk