Not Greek to them. Scholars question Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

NEW YORK (AP) — For Greek translator Emily Wilson, the release of director Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has been gratifying in various ways. Her acclaimed 2017 edition of Homer’s epic has reached the top five on Amazon.com, leading a wave of similar books boosted by the movie. Nolan has even cited her translation, notably the opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” as inspiration.

But the film itself, which opened this weekend and has received raves from many critics, left her unsatisfied.

“I want to celebrate the fact that so many more people are aware of ‘The Odyssey’ and were brought back to the poem,” she told The Associated Press. “But at the same time, I had the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.”

One of the year’s most anticipated releases, “The Odyssey” stars Matt Damon as the returning warrior Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope, and Tom Holland as their son, Telemachus. Reviewers have praised the acting and the narrative drive, the grand scale of a movie shot entirely on IMAX film, and how it weds the sensibilities of ancient Greece and the modern world, at least as Nolan perceives it.

The divide between scholars and critics seems, in part, a matter of whether the balance should tilt toward Nolan or Homer. Wilson and fellow translator Daniel Mendelsohn both expressed admiration for Nolan’s cinematic flair and ambition, what Mendelsohn calls his “great visual panache.” Both speculated that his desire to make a “Christopher Nolan” movie led to unfortunate decisions.

Mendelsohn is an author, critic, and translator, and his assessment appeared Friday in The New York Review of Books, where he is an editor-at-large.

Mendelsohn had previously defended Nolan’s controversial decision to cast a Black actor, Lupita Nyong’o, as Helen of Troy, calling it a worthy way to “provoke, challenge, and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity.” But he faulted the director for giving us an Odysseus with “no cleverness, no humor, no wily charm.” One of the Western canon’s formative tricksters has been transformed, he contended, into the kind of haunted protagonist featured in such previous Nolan movies as “Oppenheimer” and “Memento.”

“This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways,” wrote Mendelsohn, whose “Odyssey” translation came out in 2025. “Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image.”

Wilson, a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said she did not want to come across as a “snobby,” nitpicking expert at odds with any deviation from the original text.

But she questioned a range of omissions and other choices, from the absence on screen of the gods Zeus and Poseidon (Athena is played by Zendaya) to the “incoherent” messaging that condemns both war and physical cowardice. She found Penelope’s role so thinned out that it endangered “any possibility of believing in this marriage.” Wilson also thought that parts of the movie, notably the scenes with Odysseus’ dog, Argos, “catered towards modern sentimentality.”

“Everybody’s a sucker for a dog,” she said.

A spokesperson for Nolan did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Wilson declined to offer a grade or ranking for the movie, but said she would recommend it for others, as long as they see it in a theater.

“It was fun to be there with my kids. I didn’t feel it was pulling teeth to engage with it,” she said. “If you can see it on a big screen, you should absolutely go.”

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