The Odyssey Expert Who Spent 6 Years on Homer Says Nolan Shouldn't Have Written His Own Script

Matt Damon Is Just Standing There Being Anxious

Wilson published a critical review of the film in the London Review of Books, and she did not come to make friends. Her core complaint, as she told NPR's Fresh Air, is that Nolan's version of Odysseus has been surgically emptied of the qualities that make the character worth spending three hours with.

"We need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation," Wilson told NPR. "These desires seem stripped from Odysseus. He doesn't seem to want food. He doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?"

What he apparently wants, per Wilson, is to stand around feeling bad about the Trojan Horse. That's it. That's the whole character. The man who outwitted a Cyclops, built a giant wooden horse filled with soldiers, and sweet-talked his way past goddesses for ten years has been reduced, in Wilson's telling, to a guy with a guilt complex. "The movie gives us a version of Matt Damon as Odysseus, who is not required to be smart," Wilson said. "Instead he's just constantly troubled by anxiety about his role in the Trojan Horse and the Trojan War. That's a shame."

To be clear, this is not some crank with a blog. Wilson spent six years on her 2017 translation of the Odyssey, constrained herself to the exact same number of lines as Homer's original Greek, and produced a version that was widely praised for its vibrancy and fidelity to the text. She has tattoos of a spear on one leg and a bow on the other, representing Achilles and Odysseus respectively. She is, by any reasonable measure, the person you call when you want to know if you got Odysseus right. Nolan did not call her.

He Should Have Hired Someone Else to Write It

Nolan wrote the script himself. Wilson thinks that was the problem.

"I do think that it would have been better if Nolan had hired a scriptwriter, because that would have solved a lot of the issues," she told NPR, with the diplomatic restraint of someone who has spent decades studying ancient texts and therefore understands that sometimes the most devastating thing you can say is the plainest.

This is a remarkable statement if you sit with it for a second. Christopher Nolan, one of the most celebrated directors working today, made a film based on one of the most analyzed and taught pieces of literature in human history, and the world's foremost expert on that literature is saying the movie's core problem is that he wrote it himself. That's not a minor quibble about mythology. That's a structural diagnosis.

Nolan has cited Wilson's translation in interviews discussing his approach to the film. So he was aware of her work. He just, apparently, decided he had it from here.

The Gods Are Vibes, the Sirens Have No Clothes, the Food Is Bad

Wilson's critiques get more specific from there, and honestly more entertaining. On the film's handling of the gods, she told NPR they're "kind of missing." There's a moment where Zendaya, playing something like Athena but maybe not exactly Athena, tells Matt Damon's Odysseus that the gods speak through thunder, fire, and a baby's cry. Wilson found this ambiguity frustrating. "I would have liked a little bit more of the divine," she said.

The Sirens fared differently from their classical counterparts. In ancient Greek art and literature, Sirens are bird-women with women's faces who lure sailors to their deaths while Odysseus, tied to the mast, listens to their song with his crew's ears plugged with wax. In Nolan's film, according to Wilson, they are surrounded by seals and appear to be unclothed. Not birds. Just women. Near seals. This is apparently the creative choice that was made.

And the food. Wilson mentioned that the food looks horrible. In a film adapting an epic poem where feasting, hospitality, and the pleasures of eating are recurring and significant themes, the food looks horrible. These details matter more than they might seem. Homer's Odyssey is, among other things, a poem about appetite. Physical desire, hunger, the pull of home, the temptation to stay. Stripping that from the story doesn't streamline it. It guts it.

She Still Thinks You Should See It

Here is where Wilson, to her credit, refuses to be the person who tells you to skip a movie she spent an entire London Review of Books essay criticizing. "It's absolutely still worth seeing," she told NPR. "There's a lot to think about, both in terms of what is this film saying about war, violence and deception in our times, and also what it's doing with the source material. The actors are amazing. It's a star-studded cast and they're doing their absolute best with the script they were given."

That last sentence is doing a lot of work. The actors are doing their absolute best with the script they were given. It is a generous framing for what is functionally a polite indictment of the script.

For her part, Wilson is not done with Homer. She's working on a second translation of the Odyssey, this one without the line-for-line constraint she imposed on herself last time. She told NPR she's over halfway through and "never wants it to end." She also has a collection of essays coming out in September called Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, which includes, among other things, a comparison between Aristophanes' comedies in 5th-century BCE Athens and the work of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. That's a book. That's a real book that is coming out.