We can’t ask Homer what he thinks of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but we can ask someone who knows it better than most.
Emily Wilson, the British-American classicist whose 2017 translation of the epic poem was one of the director’s inspirations, was asked her opinion on The Odyssey film by the Associated Press.
“I want to celebrate the fact that so many more people are aware of The Odyssey and were brought back to the poem,” she told AP. “But at the same time, I had the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.”
Nolan has cited Wilson’s work as among his influences for the film, notably Homer’s opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man.”
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Granted, it’s nothing short of a herculean task to try and fit every last element of Homer’s 12,000-line poem into a film that runs just under three hours, despite that IMAX screen size. Nolan does hit the major plot points of The Odyssey‘s 20-year chronology — the Trojan Horse, Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) sleazy suitors, Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men running into the cyclops Polythemus (Bill Irwin), the sirens, the Scylla monster, and the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) along the way — he leaves many myths deliberately untold.
For one thing, Wilson’s translation famously reexamined the role of women in The Odyssey, like the characters of Penelope and Circe. And Nolan’s film does give women more agency than they’ve had in his previous work, as Mashable’s Belen Edwards writes in her review, “Nolan makes sure to emphasize the women of The Odyssey‘s complexities, as opposed to letting them linger on the sidelines or in dead wife montages. Most importantly, he lets them be angry.”
I’m going to leave the hand-wringing to the internet on this one (and it’s happening), but it’s interesting to hear scholars responses to The Odyssey, a text that has been reinterpreted for thousands of years through literature, art, film, video games, and myriad creative avenues.
As to what Homer would think? No one can ever know that, stop speaking for an ancient Greek poet on X.
