The cyclops Polyphemus snacks on a few of Odysseus’s men.
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures
Odysseus and his crew encounter the giant Laestrygonians on the island of Aeaea.
Universal Pictures
The cyclops Polyphemus snacks on a few of Odysseus’s men.
Universal Pictures
Odysseus and his crew encounter the giant Laestrygonians on the island of Aeaea.
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures
Samantha Morton’s Circe is one of the film’s most memorable performances
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures
Caught between the Scylla and the Charybdis.
Universal Pictures
Samantha Morton’s Circe is one of the film’s most memorable performances
Universal Pictures
Caught between the Scylla and the Charybdis.
Universal Pictures
Is the dialogue a bit clunky? Sometimes, but if bad dialogue were enough to sink a film, Star Wars: A New Hope would have bombed at the box office and fallen into oblivion, instead of becoming the cultural touchstone it is today. It’s true that there are a lot of untethered big ideas wafting about Nolan’s dreamily impressionistic take on Homer, but Wilson is simply incorrect that the film lacks “solid specific human experience.” And while Nolan clumsily tries to shoehorn a Message For Our Times in at the end, his Odyssey nonetheless provides a fresh take on the core myth and reminds us anew why Homer’s epic deserves its place in the literary pantheon.
Ultimately that’s what every translator does, Wilson included, whose translation uses iambic pentameter rather than Greek dactylic hexameter, among other innovations. They put their personal stamp on it. Every translation requires its own tradeoffs, reflecting the unique choices of the individual, which in turn are driven by their own values and perspective. (As I was writing this, both novelist Joyce Carl Oates and Wilson’s fellow classicist, Theo Nash, made a similar point, which merely demonstrates how patently obvious it is.) Wilson claims to understand this, but her essay undercuts it repeatedly.
It’s abundantly clear that Wilson simply doesn’t like Nolan’s style as a director, specifically calling out his “usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality.” That’s fair enough. At the end of the day, Nolan’s gonna be Nolan, and if you disliked Oppenheimer, Tenet, Inception, etc., this probably isn’t The Odyssey for you.
There is no such thing as the One True Take on Homer’s Odyssey. The core myth transcends any specific place and time. So each incarnation finds its own imperfect truth in this enduring tale, yielding different insights into the characters, their choices, their motivations. One can appreciate one without diminishing the others—and ideally find something to savor in all. Nolan’s The Odyssey very much deserves to take its place among them.
The Odyssey is now playing in theaters. It’s definitely worth seeing in IMAX if you can.