Emily Wilson's Odyssey pan sparks a classicist debate
Emily Wilson's blistering London Review of Books critique of Christopher Nolan's blockbuster The Odyssey has ignited a fierce debate among classicists and online commenters, after novelist Joyce Carol Oates accused the celebrated translator of using "the crude language of Maga folks" in her attack. The clash—sharper than a polite PBS culture hour—matters because Nolan publicly cited Wilson's 2017 Homer translation, even as she calls his writing "abysmal."
Key Takeaways
- Wilson's roughly 4,000-word London Review of Books essay slammed Nolan's film for lacking "psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth" and for "abysmal" writing.
- Joyce Carol Oates argued on X that Wilson should have been "a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful," claiming the translator had "benefited enormously" from the movie.
- A Slate classicist who has defended Wilson's Odyssey translation said her film review misreads Nolan's gods, characters, and hospitality theme.
- Nolan told Empire he used Wilson's opening line—"Tell me about a complicated man"—as a reference for Matt Damon's Odysseus, while Universal disputed claims he was simply "inspired" by her book.
- The film, made for about $250 million, has taken roughly $683 million globally, and Homeric translations have seen a sharp search and sales surge.
For readers who follow how old stories keep getting remade, this fight belongs with other Nostalgia: Then & Now flashpoints: a classroom classic colliding with a modern tentpole.
What did Emily Wilson actually say about Nolan's Odyssey?
Wilson, whose 2017 verse translation of Homer's epic was celebrated as the first by a woman into English and has sold over a million copies, did not offer a polite shrug. In the LRB piece, she wrote that she had hoped Nolan's affinity with Homeric themes might push him "to new creative heights."
Instead, she argued, The Odyssey shows his "usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality." The film's vision, she said, is "too confused," its characters "too underdeveloped," even if it is "very good at conveying big bangs and big giants."
Her most-circulated lines are blunt: the movie "lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth," has a "gimmicky" narrative structure, and features writing she calls "abysmal." "None of the characters has a convincing motivation for their actions or words," she added. "There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible."
According to Slate, Wilson also wrote that she "would be ashamed to have written any part of this script," while noting she was "humbled" that Nolan had read at least her famous first line. She framed the movie as a way to hide from the heat and said her teenagers liked it—damning by degrees.
The review's traffic was itself news: the roughly 4,000-word essay briefly crashed the LRB website, underscoring how tightly Wilson's name was already tied to the film's publicity cycle.
Why did Joyce Carol Oates attack Wilson's tone?
As The Guardian reported, Oates objected less to disagreement than to manner. On X, she said Wilson was not "disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner," but speaking "in the crude language of Maga folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers."
"One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful of others who are acting in good faith," Oates wrote, suggesting Wilson had "benefited enormously from Nolan's film."
The irony is hard to miss. Oates herself had implied criticism of Nolan's movie only a week earlier, comparing it with Andrei Konchalovsky's 1997 Hallmark Channel Odyssey and finding the older TV film's Circe–Odysseus dynamic "much more interesting." She praised that version's Odysseus as "so manly, so fully human," and called its Hades interlude "mesmerising."
So the Oates–Wilson skirmish is not a simple fan-versus-critic split. It is a fight over how harshly a prestigious translator may speak when a widely applauded $250 million adaptation enters the same cultural lane as her life's work.
Are classicists split over Wilson's film review?
Yes—at least in public. In Slate, a classicist who says they have spent too much time on X defending Wilson's translation against right-wing pile-ons drew a bright line: the book can be defended; this review, they argue, cannot.
The Slate critique says Wilson is strongest on Homer, but too often faults Nolan merely for departing from the poem. On the gods, Wilson claimed Nolan effectively left them out; Slate counters that he renders them as elemental forces—thunder, storms—with Zendaya's Athena as a visible exception, closer to Sophocles than to a literal Homeric cameo reel.
Wilson's take on Anne Hathaway's Penelope—yearning for Matt Damon "for reasons unknown"—is rejected by Slate, which calls Hathaway's performance one of the film's strongest and reads Penelope as a prisoner venting rage privately to Tom Holland's Telemachus. Benny Safdie's Agamemnon in the "weird Darth Vader outfit," Elliot Page's Sinon, and Nolan's broken xenia (hospitality) theme are, in this view, coherent choices Wilson under-reads.
Wilson has also walked back one flourish. Slate notes she posted on Bluesky that she regrets reducing the movie's nonwhite characters to "versions of the Black best friend," despite the mismatch with casting and roles. That correction shows how quickly a viral pan becomes a referendum on the critic as well as the film.
What does this then-and-now fight say about Homer on screen?
Nolan's production is not a dusty seminar. It cost around $250 million to make and about $100 million to promote, and it has taken roughly $683 million worldwide—trailing his Oppenheimer, which made about $975 million and won seven Oscars. Awards handicappers already tip another March run.
Yet the prestige loop still runs through Wilson's page. Nolan told Empire that her opening—"Tell me about a complicated man"—helped him build Damon's Odysseus. Universal has stressed that Nolan was linked to an Odyssey adaptation long before her 2017 book and disputed "inspired" claims. No film royalties, The Guardian notes, go to any writer other than Nolan.
Meanwhile, the poem is booming again. UK bookseller TGJones reported a 1,560% rise in searches for the Iliad this month, and sales of Wilson's translation—and others—have jumped. That is the nostalgia twist: Hollywood returns audiences to an ancient text, then the text's most famous modern steward says the giant got Homer wrong.
Whether you side with Wilson's severity, Oates's etiquette lecture, or Slate's rebuttal, the argument is larger than one bad dinner plate on screen. It is about who gets to translate "complicated" for a mass audience—and whether fidelity means matching the poem's lines, or answering the film on its own terms.