A Tale as Old as Time

What is Emily Wilson’s piece on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for the London Review of Books?

The “Odyssey” translator would hardly be the first writer to bookend a text with lists of adjectives describing a piece of art and call that a review: “relatively easy to follow”, “not boring”, “family-friendly”; then “gimmicky” and “abysmal”. But unlike her, those other writers who do the same also dedicate the intervening paragraphs to the film at hand. Wilson, by contrast, spends a shocking majority of her text telling us not about the film, but about Homer’s poem instead, enumerating various episodes from it which are not in Nolan’s film. 

Every film critic is sooner or later told to avoid the temptation of writing not about the film as it actually is, but as it could have been. I disagree with this blanket ban: elaborating on the paths a film might have taken is a way to approach cinema as something ongoing, constantly searching, pushing itself towards new horizons. This perspective is what often makes average or imperfect films worthwhile, and sometimes more stimulating than flat-out masterpieces: they can open up avenues of thought and creativity for the viewer, the writer, the reader, and – hopefully – the filmmaker. 

To write in this way about a film that does not exist is to hold yourself, the reader, and the artform of cinema to a higher standard than the existing film is able to meet. But that is not what Wilson is doing here. Refusing to engage with Nolan’s The Odyssey as a film, with its own rules and organising principles, and focusing almost entirely on Homer’s text instead, she simply perpetuates the idea that cinema is inherently inferior to literature and poetry.  

Wilson’s disdain for cinema’s (foundational, lest we forget) affinity with spectacle is one of her most tiresome digs at the artform, but the least surprising. Only recently have action films begun to be discussed and theorised with as much seriousness and attention to detail as arthouse fare, and detractors who scoff at their sensorial pleasures or disregard the artistry behind fight choreography and explosions are still legion (the Academy only announced the creation of a new award for Achievement in Stunt Design last year). But just because something – an attitude, say, or a movie – is popular doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of careful critique. 

Take this section: 

Homer’s Odysseus makes it home because he is able, temporarily, to suppress his own desires – for meat and wine, for his wife, for control of his household and land, for slaughter, for victory over time and the threat of being forgotten, for a glorious eternal name. But there is no restraint in Nolan’s version of The Odyssey: every second is jam-packed with incident, lights and noise, and nothing is ever at a human scale.

Indeed, and as was to be expected, Nolan’s film is different from Homer’s text. This simple type of construction – Homer’s text is like this, but Nolan’s film isn’t – is Wilson’s main critical tool throughout her essay. “Famous scenes flash by [...]. A few notable sequences from the epic are missing”, “Damon’s grizzled Odysseus is neither a master storyteller nor a flirt”, “Homer’s Odyssey gives a clear, moving account of the feelings, histories and perspectives of several of Odysseus’ comrades and subordinates [...]. In the film, none of these subordinate characters has a personality of their own”, etc. But she does not complement these compare-and-contrast observations with actual arguments about why Homer’s version would be better than Nolan’s. The implication, then – and it is shocking to see a serious writer resort to this old argument in 2026 – is that Homer’s is better because it’s the original, because it’s a text as opposed to a film, and/or because it’s a classic. Take your pick.

In the next paragraph, Wilson compares Nolan’s film to Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024), a more humble proposition that focuses on Odysseus and his relationship with Penelope, and is therefore “at a human scale.” She adds that, by contrast, “Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story.” 

Leaving aside the fact that Nolan’s film simply isn’t “jam-packed with incident, lights and noise”, and assuming for the sake of argument that it is: how would this “drown out” the story of a man on a difficult, years-long journey? And wouldn’t Ralph Fiennes’ extraordinary muscles in The Return not distract from Pasolini’s story in a similar way? 

Wilson isn’t saying anything more in these two paragraphs than “I prefer that other film” and its “stylish spareness” (“stylish”! What does that ever mean?). More insidious and inconspicuous than her casual disdain for anything bigger than life in cinema, is the laziness of her analysis. At first glance, a sentence like “Nolan gives us an all-inclusive buffet” can pass for sass – viral on social media, the piece has been defended against the predictably angry mobs of Twitter as “funny,” as though it were an outrageously brutal takedown of Nolan’s film (if only!). But as that casual, meaningless “stylish” suggests, the sass is in fact directed at the enterprise of filmmaking at large. 

Many have rightfully decried Wilson’s assertion that “most of the non-white actors [...] play versions of the Black best friend” as a racist one. But the phrase, adding insult to injury, is also evidence of a total lack of interest in the nuances and details of cinema. Flattening these characters into one-sided stereotypes, Wilson grasps for a convenient shorthand for “bad cinema” and pays no attention to those actors’ actual performances, or to what they achieve with often limited screentime. In fact, Wilson’s language of reduction and lack in that paragraph – “only role”, “a few words”, “does not get to”, “underwritten”, “only a few minutes”, “brief tableaux” – suggests that it is this later aspect she objects to the most: the fact that some parts in the film are very small. Indeed, sometimes they are. 

Nestled in that paragraph is one more sign of Wilson’s dismissive view of cinema and her refusal to engage with Nolan’s The Odyssey as a film. Like “stylish”, “underwritten” is a meaningless word. In every context, it communicates nothing more than dislike. In a piece about a film by Christopher Nolan, whose characters have hardly ever been three-dimensional beings but rather manifestations of ideas, it is particularly egregious. In a text about The Odyssey, a film based on an allegorical poem featuring men, gods, and monsters, it feels even more out of place. It would take a longer essay than this one to go into Nolan’s relationship with realism when it comes to characters and performance. But he is not the only filmmaker to play with just how complex, full-fledged, and true-to-life to make his characters, even as they are embodied by real people in a movie. 

Speaking of “underwritten”, Wilson’s discussion of the film’s dialogue is surprisingly superficial, coming from a translator. “The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat.” Once again, the temptation is to respond: yes, and? Followed by: how does this language operate within the matrix of the film? A real review would engage with how Nolan’s dialogues interact with the film’s other components – the actors, the action scenes, the peculiar characterisation. In a film, language is part of a whole, and just as important as those other elements which are not tied to the written word. This incuriosity about Nolan’s dialogue as specifically cinematic dialogue once again betrays Wilson’s condescension towards cinema. Anyone who cares about film will find it dispiriting to witness; on a more dispassionate level, it also makes for repetitive, hollow writing. 

In one of the few paragraphs to address what the film actually does, Wilson describes the apparent “moral contradictions” which many viewers – including myself – attempted to grapple with during and after the film: mostly the ways in which Matt Damon’s Odysseus seems to obey Zeus’ Law of hospitality only opportunistically. It’s always tempting to cheer for a sentence that puts into words the frustration one feels about the year’s summer blockbuster; this is a tale as old as time (or at least as old as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)). It feels even more gratifying when such validation comes from a publication as prestigious as the LRB. But even in this paragraph – highly satisfying to those detractors who, in an ocean of 5-star reviews, can finally feel seen by Wilson’s put-down – her analysis relies on interpretations that are not backed by evidence. 

“Strangers in Ithaca are to be treated with gracious kindness, as possible gods in disguise; but strangers in foreign lands are usually monstrous, to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered.” What of the episode where the Laestrygonians attack Odysseus’ fleet even as he and his men approach in peace? “It is bad to fight and kill to accumulate wealth, as Agamemnon does; it is good to fight and kill to preserve the wealth that you have already acquired (even if by war).” It seems pretty clear that whether the latter is good or not is ambiguous by the end of the film, when Odysseus returns from his forced exile racked with guilt over what he has done. 

Wilson ends her piece by noting that, despite all of the film’s flaws, she is glad for its success, since it might lead viewers to her book or to other versions of Homer’s text. But many are now likely to come across her non-review of Nolan’s film first, which may not play entirely in her favour. Far be it from me, however, to discourage anyone from buying her book. After all, it is not a work of film criticism but of translation, something I know nothing about, and I would not want to speak about things I don’t know.