The Odyssey translator who inspired Nolan's movie has now trashed it twice
Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey Nolan cited as inspiration, called his film “emotionally empty” in a second published takedown. Critics and audiences love the movie, which is closing on $1 billion. Even Joyce Carol Oates defended Nolan.
Christopher Nolan cited Emily Wilson‘s translation of The Odyssey as a key inspiration for his film. Wilson has now publicly trashed that film twice.
Wilson, an Oxford-trained classicist and the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, published a second takedown in The Atlantic, calling Nolan’s adaptation “emotionally empty.” It follows her first review in the London Review of Books, where she wrote she’d “be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
She’s not a random critic. Nolan built part of his movie on her work, which makes this the rare case of an adaptation getting savaged by its own source of inspiration.
What Emily Wilson actually said
Her core argument is that the film looks like The Odyssey but isn’t about what The Odyssey is about.
In The Atlantic, Wilson called Nolan’s film a kind of Trojan horse: “The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values.” Her read is that the movie is obsessed with the mechanical spectacle of moving objects through space, while claiming to care about people.
Her first review was blunter. She said the film lacks “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth,” called its structure “gimmicky” and its writing “abysmal,” and, in a line that traveled, complained there are “no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
The complication: almost everyone else loves it
Here’s what keeps this from being a simple “expert dunks on blockbuster” story.
Wilson is, so far, a minority of one among the loud voices. Nolan’s Odyssey has near-unanimous positive reviews from film critics, earned an “A“ CinemaScore from opening-weekend audiences, and is racing toward $1 billion worldwide. The people who study Homer and the people buying tickets are, on this one, not in the same place.
And Wilson has taken friendly fire from a fellow literary heavyweight. Author Joyce Carol Oates defended Nolan on X, arguing Wilson’s criticism lacked collegial spirit and, pointedly, that Wilson “has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film.” That’s a real tension: the movie drove huge new interest in Wilson’s translation even as she tears the movie apart.
Why this fight is actually interesting
Strip away the star power and there’s a genuine question underneath.
The debate isn’t really “is Nolan’s movie good.”
It’s whether an adaptation owes anything to the moral and emotional core of the thing it adapts, or whether a filmmaker is free to keep the plot and swap the values.
Wilson says the film “elides” the compassion that makes Homer endure. Nolan’s defenders say a movie is allowed to be its own work.
Nolan, for his part, previously called pre-release criticism “irrelevant.” Wilson’s is harder to wave off, because she’s not guessing at the film, she’s seen it, and she knows the source better than almost anyone alive.
That doesn’t make her right that it’s empty. It makes her impossible to dismiss as not understanding the material.
Two things are true at once. Nolan made a movie people love, and the world’s foremost Odyssey scholar thinks he missed the point of the poem. Both of those can stand, and the argument between them is more interesting than either verdict alone.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
TheWrap (August 5, 2026), verified for Wilson’s Atlantic op-ed, the “Trojan horse” and “human kindness / entirely different set of values” quotes, the timing after her London Review of Books review, and Nolan citing her translation and its opening line
Variety (August 2026), verified for the “emotionally empty” characterization, the “abysmal” and “ashamed to have written any part of this script” quotes, the “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth” line, the “A” CinemaScore, and Joyce Carol Oates’s defense of Nolan
BroBible (August 2026), verified for this being Wilson’s second published criticism, her Oxford and University of Pennsylvania background, the Matt Damon Odysseus comment, and Nolan calling pre-release criticism “irrelevant”
The Independent (via AOL) (August 2026), verified for the “visually stunning but emotionally empty” framing, the “we need art that is truthful about... compassion” quote, and the Western Sahara filming-location criticism
Open Magazine (August 2026), verified for the film approaching $1 billion, Wilson being the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, and the broader adaptation-fidelity debate