If you’ve been following the culture war surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, you’ll have found that many of the commenters don’t understand The Odyssey as a piece of literature, a process of adaptation or the concept of a fictional work. Well, the latest voice rallying against the director definitely does.
Emily Wilson, a professor of classics whose translation of the Homeric text Nolan cited as an inspiration last year, hates how the filmmaker has treated her work.
In an extensive and oft-disparaging review of the film for the London Review of Books, Wilson said the film had as much narrative and emotional depth as an “elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display”.
“I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality… the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants,” she wrote.
Acknowledging that she had in some way inspired the work, the professor said, “As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
