The Odyssey: what Nolan’s film is missing, according to Homer’s translator

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has crossed $300 million at the global box office, but not everyone is celebrating. Emily Wilson, the classicist whose 2017 translation of Homer’s epic Nolan himself cited as an inspiration, has published a scathing review of the film — and the gap she describes between the original poem and what ended up on screen is significant.

FRANCE 24 spoke to Wilson just days before her review went public. What she shared was pointed, measured, and a little devastating.

The woman problem

Wilson’s central complaint isn’t about special effects or pacing. It’s about women. In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope is not simply a patient wife waiting at a loom. She’s cunning, politically aware, and arguably running a household under siege for twenty years. Wilson’s translation made that agency impossible to ignore. Nolan’s film, she told us, largely doesn’t.

“Penelope in the poem is someone who has real power and exercises real judgment,” Wilson said. “What I saw on screen felt much more decorative.” She was careful, but the critique was clear. The female characters — Penelope, Circe, Calypso — had been flattened. Their complexity, which takes up a surprising amount of the original 12,000-line poem, had been trimmed down to serve the hero’s journey. Odysseus’s journey, specifically.

The poem isn’t really about Odysseus

That’s the thing most people miss. Homer’s epic opens not with Odysseus but with the gods debating his fate, and then cuts to Telemachus, his son, bumbling toward adulthood in his father’s absence. Wilson spent years arguing that the poem is as much about the people Odysseus leaves behind — and leaves damaged — as it is about the man himself.

Nolan’s version, she suggested, leans hard into the adventure. The cyclops, the sirens, the shipwrecks. But the moral ambiguity that Wilson worked so carefully to preserve in her translation — Odysseus as charming, yes, but also ruthless, self-serving, occasionally monstrous — doesn’t come through with the same force.

Still, Wilson wasn’t entirely dismissive. She acknowledged that adapting a 2,700-year-old poem for a mass audience involves real tradeoffs. “I understand the constraints,” she said. “Film is not epic poetry.”

Why the translation credit matters

Here’s where it gets complicated. Nolan name-dropped Wilson’s translation in early press materials, positioning her work as a direct influence. That made the critical response to his film land differently for her than it might have otherwise. She wasn’t just commenting on a movie. She was, in some sense, responding to the use of her name.

A spokesperson for the film’s distributor declined to comment on Wilson’s review specifically, saying only that the production team “deeply respected the source material.”

What comes next

Wilson’s review has already sparked a wider debate in classics departments and literary circles online. Whether that conversation reaches the multiplex crowds who’ve made The Odyssey one of 2025’s biggest films is another question entirely. But it won’t go away. These arguments about whose story gets told — and how — rarely do.