Emily Wilson’s review of Christopher Nolan’s big-budget film adaptation of The Odyssey is sharp, funny, and unsparing. Writing in the London Review of Books, the classicist and translator of Homer argues that the movie delivers plenty of spectacle—explosions, drowning sequences, giants, and shipwrecks—but almost none of the psychological or moral complexity that makes the ancient poem still matter. Nolan’s Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, emerges as something closer to a straightforward action hero than the cunning, self-contradictory figure Homer gave us.
Wilson is especially good on what the film does with the women of the epic (Penelope, Calypso, Athena, Circe) and on the missed opportunities that come from turning a richly layered, multi-voiced poem into a relentless audiovisual assault. If you’ve seen the movie, or if you’re simply interested in how modern adaptations handle—or fail to handle—Homer, her piece is well worth reading in full.
