00:00Your reaction to the new adaptation of Odyssey has caused such a stir that it reportedly
00:05crashed the London Review of Books website.
00:09You know, I was told that's fake news, but who knows?
00:11Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at the public response to classicist Emily
00:16Wilson's critique of the 2026 film The Odyssey, inspired by her work.
00:21I thought it was a fun time at the movies. I think, you know, I think there are many ways
00:26in which the book is better, but I would say that.
00:29Universal Pictures released The Odyssey to sweeping acclaim on July 17th, 2026.
00:36No one could stand between me and home.
00:41Now these are the gods.
00:43This big-budget, star-studded revival of a Western cultural touchstone was already a pop-cultural
00:48phenomenon. A record $50 million just in IMAX pre-sales was grossed after tickets went live
00:54a year before the film's release. Within the month afterward, it crossed $1 billion worldwide
00:59to become the highest-grossing film in writer-director Christopher Nolan's career.
01:03You're a man who needs to control his fate.
01:07His esteem is undoubtedly the main factor in this baffling success for a three-hour-long,
01:13darkly philosophical take on an ancient Greek poem.
01:15But Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer's Odyssey was a key source for Nolan's script,
01:20wasn't particularly impressed. Her essay in the London Review of Books underscores public
01:26discussions about the quality of the Odyssey, the nature of Nolan's interpretation, and the
01:30validity of its success. You certainly can't argue Wilson's qualifications with the subject.
01:35Everyone has the right to remake The Odyssey in their own image, and Nolan has certainly
01:39done that.
01:49I try and tease out the ways that ancient texts, such as The Odyssey, The Iliad, Ancient
01:55Tragedy, has all this wonderful richness, complexity of ideas and of language.
02:00She soon landed a position at the University of Pennsylvania, home to one of the most respected
02:05classical studies departments in the world. Her writing on European cultural artifacts and their
02:09context culminated in the first-ever English publication of Homer's Odyssey to be written
02:14by a woman.
02:14We need new translations because we need constantly to be reassessing what exactly might this text
02:20be doing. Might there be ways that an earlier generation of scholarship might have missed
02:25certain things because of their cultural blind spots.
02:28Wilson's 2017 version was praised for its authentic style and accessible drama, earning her MacArthur
02:34and Guggenheim grants that supported her 2023 translation of The Iliad. As her, the Odyssey
02:39became an academic standard for one of the defining fables in Western civilization, Christopher
02:44Nolan explicitly referenced it for his film adaptation. It's just one of many honors in
02:49Wilson's career, at least by commercial measures. Then, she stunned the world with another publication
02:56The poem is very much interested in what does it mean to be a warrior poet and how are those
03:04two roles related to each other?
03:06Facing a giant, Wilson's review. Wilson's The Odyssey famously opens with the line,
03:12tell me about A Complicated Man.
03:14I think I know in some ways what complicated means, but it also has a gesture towards,
03:19I don't know exactly in which way this character or this poem or this journey will be complicated.
03:25She similarly hooked readers into her review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey by titling it
03:30An Uncomplicated Man. The essay gained so much traffic so quickly that the London Review of
03:35Books website crashed. Wilson accused Nolan of falling into old tropes of convoluted storytelling
03:40and gaudy production values. I think it's a quite simple action hero movie about an action hero who
03:48feels bad about being an action hero. She called the script, quote, abysmal for its largely utilitarian
03:53development of the characters, particularly the female ones. Wilson also dismissed the much-discussed
03:58multiracial casting as tokenism, a point she would later walk back as too harsh. But even Odysseus is
04:05said to be so entrenched in anachronistic commentary that he lacks the charisma and cunning that made him
04:09legendary. I thought there were, there was something quite, in a way quite stylish about doing Odysseus
04:15but don't make him too smart. As Wilson popularized the humbler characterization, her review received an
04:21unusual amount of media attention. So too did her follow-up for The Atlantic, titled, A Trojan Horse
04:26is Supposed to Have Humans Inside It. Some critics have echoed Wilson's dissent from the greater reception,
04:32but few boast her credentials. And the Odyssey is constantly reminding us that in most cases,
04:37people are not just one thing or the other. Angering the gods, Nolan's interpretation. One of the most
04:43heavily debated aspects of this new The Odyssey is how it handles supernatural elements. The existence of
04:49the gods who walk among us is one of the things I love most about Homer in general. Homer's pious
04:54poem
04:55presented Olympian gods as literal beings with direct influence on the world. Christopher Nolan downplays
05:00that element to focus philosophical themes more on the ways of men who build the world around
05:05belief. Emily Wilson noted how Nolan was much less reluctant to play up the fantastical obstacles
05:10that the gods threw at Odysseus. There's a sort of absence of the gods and yet the gods are
05:14constantly mentioned. She criticized his journey for streamlining Homer's episodes to serve specific
05:20themes, only to lose sight of them in action set pieces. Nolan explores wartime ethics, trauma,
05:26and patriarchal principle with a deliberately anachronistic lens that most felt was thematically
05:30justified. Wilson takes particular issue with how he mixes classical fantasy and modern reality.
05:36Others take particular issue with her on this matter.
05:39I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. I think it's a film
05:45that has some
05:46interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory. Are you interested in hearing more
05:51about our interpretations of film, literature, and so much more? Scan the QR code to venture into the
05:5624-7 WatchMojo pop culture live stream.
05:59You're pining for a daddy you didn't even know.
06:03Lost in translation. Academic responses.
06:06Note that Nolan claimed to reference a number of translations of Homer while crafting his screenplay.
06:11It's just one of the great adventure stories and I really wanted to see it done justice,
06:15so we just sort of dove in.
06:17Wilson just earned the spotlight for her similar balance of Homeric nonlinear structure and modern
06:22humanism. The suspicion is that some of her criticism stems from how Nolan interpreted her
06:27storytelling. I don't think the movie has that sense of finia is about forming lasting multi-generational
06:33relationships. Classical archaeologist Dr. Theo Nash responded in Slate to praise the film for
06:38tackling the consequences of defying Zeus's law rather than Zeus himself. Emily Austin, Joel
06:44Christensen, Gregory Nagy, and other academics championed the Odyssey as both entertaining and
06:48complex. But before Wilson, classicist and New York Review editor Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that Nolan
06:54betrayed Homer's characterizations for his own conventional morality play. While scholarly
06:59interpretations clash more loudly than usual for a mainstream movie, some outsiders see bias as a factor
07:05all around. I felt a little bit disappointed that Nolan was going for the easy idealization
07:10narrative as opposed to things that I think are very much available to a modern viewer if you trust the
07:16viewer to be a little bit, you know, to be open to just tiny notch more complexity than this movie
07:23was
07:23allowing us to have. Going to war, defense, and backlash. Rarely has a non-professional film review gone as
07:31viral as an uncomplicated man. I don't really know why this somehow blew up the way it did. I think
07:37it's
07:37quite weird. Considering the popularity of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson's own critics are at least more
07:42visible than her defenders. Author Jeff Vandermeer called the controversy, quote, ridiculous, while other
07:48public figures have affirmed Wilson's credentials, articulation, and right to express personal opinion.
07:53But authors Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Orlean found the essay to be arrogant, even ungrateful,
07:59to a film that raised interest in her work and discipline. Never mind the masses on social media
08:03who've weighed in on Wilson's opinion and whether she was right to share it. She has expressly dismissed
08:08allegations of being personally offended by this interpretation of her book. The question then is
08:13if she has the authority to talk about the merits of tentpole filmmaking just because of her authority
08:17on its basis? For many, the upside is that people are talking about these things at all.
08:23There's so much to say about the film. I think you guys are going to have so much to talk
08:27about
08:27with your friends and loved ones after you see it.
08:31Ecclesia, an ongoing discussion. No one associated with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has directly
08:37responded to Emily Wilson's criticisms. People have this idea that because I can understand why the
08:42story affects me the way it is, therefore it didn't work. That's not how storytelling works.
08:46Nolan did challenge critics in a viral interview with Yi Yang Zhuge, believing that some use personal
08:52reaction to measure art's objective function. Even if a classicist knows more about Homer's lore,
08:58detractors say that what's most important is individual objective and impact with art.
09:02Nolan's vision is clearly having an impact as the most commercially accomplished adaptation of Homer ever.
09:07In some ways, I want to try to celebrate. People are coming together over this movie and over this
09:12poem, even if they're coming together in ways that sometimes involve, in my opinion, pretty simplistic
09:18kinds of conversations. At least there's a common cultural ground for people to talk about.
09:23Wilson herself closed an uncomplicated man by praising The Odyssey for emboldening the movie-going
09:28experience and popular interest in the humanities. She couldn't help but acknowledge that her book was
09:33quote, flying off the shelves. Book sales for the almost 3,000-year-old story rose by more than 70
09:38%
09:39in the United States alone around the film's release. Wilson's backlash and the backlash against her
09:44can be taken as a dated lesson in what constitutes respectful discourse. Or it can be taken as a
09:50timeless lesson embodied by the poem in question, the importance of art and how it's discussed.
09:55I mean, I like that he's trying something new. I'm just not 100% convinced that for me it totally
10:01worked.
10:01What's your take on Nolan's The Odyssey as well as the scholarly takes on it?
10:06Sail toward the comment section.
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