Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been a hit with critics and audiences while breaking box office records for Universal, but acclaimed translator Emily Wilson isn’t impressed.
Wilson, whose celebrated English translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are considered among the finest available, had her opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man”, cited by Nolan himself while promoting the film.
Her review for the London Review of Books proved so scathing that it went viral, reportedly crashing the publication’s website on Monday.
Wilson argued the film displays Nolan’s “usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality” and lacks convincing characters or coherent things to say about war, memory or family, singling out the writing as “abysmal” and noting the complete absence of [intimate] scenes, adding that “all the food looks horrible.”
Her sharpest line: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Despite the takedown, Wilson acknowledged the film’s cultural impact, noting that translations of the Odyssey, including her own, are “flying off the shelves,” and said she hoped it might discourage college administrators from cutting literature and history departments.
“Nolan is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful,” she wrote.
Notably, her own translation drew similar criticism on release, with some readers calling her approach overly simplistic; she has defended her choices as a deliberate effort to avoid a translation that felt “flabbier than the original.”
