Sir Christopher Nolan’s latest film, “The Odyssey”, has received both thunderous applause and confrontational criticism.
While the film achieved box‑office success and earned rave reviews from mainstream press, Emily Wilson—an academic who translated Homer’s epic in 2017 and whose work the director cited as an influence—has released a scathing critique in the London Review of Books.
Wilson lambasted the movie as “gimmicky” and “abysmal”, arguing that its characters lack motivation, it omits key elements such as sex scenes, and the food presented look dreadful. She further claimed the film’s narrative is shallow, lacking psychological, emotional, political, and ethical depth.
Despite her criticisms, Wilson conceded that Nolan’s approach reignited interest in Homer's text, noting that sales of translated versions of the epic have surged. She praised the movie’s capacity to lure younger audiences back into cinemas and saw it as a potential safeguard against cuts to literature departments.
Wilson’s review was written with a note of disappointment at the film’s three‑hour epic scope, seeing the director’s blend of grandiosity and superficiality as a failure to deliver on the narrative and emotional promises embedded in the source material. She appreciated the presence of more female characters than typical Nolan films, but found them under‑developed compared to the original poem.
During the film’s press tour, Nolan revealed he used Wilson’s opening line “Tell me about a complicated man” as a guiding motif for Odysseus, portrayed by Matt Damon.
Contrasting the review, many critics have hailed the film as a blockbuster masterpiece. The Telegraph dubbed it "the film of the year", the Times described it "a masterpiece in every way", and the Standard called it a "colossal piece of cinema". The production boasts an ensemble cast including Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, and Lupita Nyong’o, depicting Odysseus’s perilous journey home from the Trojan War to rescue his family.
