Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been a lightning rod for controversy since the first casting reveals, and the debates between classicists and the general public continue to rage - all over a poem that's been around since roughly the 8th century BCE. The film has earned accolades and over $700 million at the box office, but that hasn't stopped the argument.
My take: the IMAX scale is epic, but Nolan gives the story an intimate feel, weaving a captivating, nearly three-hour cinematic spell. The magic dissipates once you leave the theater, but the imagery lingers. And it gave me a fresh perspective on Odysseus himself.
You know the story: Odysseus (Matt Damon), king of Ithaca, journeys home after 10 years of Trojan War fighting, encountering the cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), the Sirens, and Circe (Samantha Morton). Meanwhile, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off suitors, and Telemachus (Tom Holland) goes looking for dad. Nolan opens with a bard (Travis Scott) telling the tale, and he preserves Homer's nonlinear structure, with tales within tales. His Odysseus is a broken man regaining fractured memories of the war, after years with Calypso (Charlize Theron) on Ogygia. What has he tried to forget? What truth must he face?
The approach gives us Odysseus's experience, but it also drew complaints that Nolan wasted his star-studded cast. Theron gets minutes; Lupita Nyong'o (Helen/Clytemnestra), Jon Bernthal (Menelaus), and Benny Safdie (Agamemnon) get even less. But screentime isn't everything. Zendaya's Athena appears in brief dream-like sequences, but they're critical, shifting from calm to horrified grief as the Greeks chop off her statue's head. Elliot Page's Sinon, a character from Virgil's Aeneid, is an innocent victim of Odysseus's scheme, and his accusatory shadow appears in the underworld. Samantha Morton's Circe is a standout, not the seductress of the poem, but a traumatized woman who turns men into pigs because they are swine wearing human masks.
The film has topped $700 million, surpassing Oppenheimer's haul, and will likely win Oscars. So of course there's a backlash. The manufactured online trolling isn't worth rebutting, but classicist Emily Wilson - author of a praised and maligned translation - wrote a harsh critique in the London Review of Books. Nolan quoted her translation's opening line, "Tell me about a complicated man," so she felt compelled to weigh in.
Wilson's essay is a death by a thousand withering cuts. She's bothered that the film centers Odysseus's point of view (it's called The Odyssey, after all), dismisses race-neutral casting as "Black best friend" variations (she walked that back on BlueSky), criticizes the implicit values as inconsistent with Homer, and dings Nolan for not showing war's victims. She's disappointed by the lack of sex scenes, sidelined female roles, and the gods' reduced role - though Nolan deliberately humanized the gods through natural phenomena. She hates the dialogue ("I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script") and calls filming in Western Sahara "unethical." The best she can say is it's "not boring" and a "family-friendly audiovisual spectacle." She seems to think it's an escapist action movie with exploding vehicles - maybe she wandered into Motor City by mistake.
If the film is so shallow, why are we still arguing? Wilson is a foremost scholar, but Nolan is a creator, not a scholar. He created a contemporary remix of a foundational text, and he succeeded, even if it's not a masterpiece. The dialogue is clunky sometimes, but bad dialogue didn't sink Star Wars: A New Hope. Wilson is wrong that the film lacks "solid specific human experience," and while Nolan clumsily tacks on a Message For Our Times, his Odyssey offers a fresh take on the core myth.
Every translator puts a personal stamp on Homer - Wilson uses iambic pentameter instead of dactylic hexameter. She claims to understand this, but her essay undercuts it. She simply doesn't like Nolan's "grandiosity and superficiality," which is fair. But there's no One True Take on The Odyssey. Each incarnation finds its own imperfect truth. Nolan's deserves its place.
The Odyssey is now playing in theaters. Worth seeing in IMAX.