Review: Nolan’s The Odyssey is a complicated tale of a complicated man
Once you realise the movie is not as much an adaptation of Homer as it is Nolan’s own interpretation, you'll see that The Odyssey is a brilliant film.
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.”
Wilson said Matt Damon’s Odysseus lacked the wit and artfulness of the original, citing the example of his interaction with the cyclops Polyphemus.
In one of the most iconic examples of humour in the text, Odysseus tells Polyphemus his name is Nobody, so when the monster is blinded and cries out for help, his fellows are relieved to hear “Nobody” hurt him. This does not take place in the movie, where Polyphemus is little more than a giant who rears sheep and eats people.
Scathing commentary aside, Wilson did appreciate how Nolan was raising awareness of the classics among young people and pushing them to rediscover the works of old.
“In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves… Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments.”
The professor said Nolan “is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful”.