'Odyssey' Translator Who Inspired Nolan Fillm Walks Back Parts Of Her Scathing Review

Classics professor Emily Wilson, whose translation of “The Odyssey” inspired Christopher Nolan’s film version, is walking back some parts of a scathing review she recently wrote about the movie.

Wilson, a classical studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, published a translation of the ancient Greek poem in 2017 that inspired the current blockbuster hit.

The film’s success has led to a higher profile for the professor as well as increased sales for her translation, but that didn’t stop Wilson from giving her honest and frankly brutal opinion about the film in a recent issue of the London Review of Books.

Although Wilson called the film “an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours,” she said it had the same level of “narrative and emotional depth” as “an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display.” She also said the “abysmal” writing meant that “none of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words.”

But her harshest critique may have been toward what she called “the race-neutral casting,” something that put folks like Elon Musk in a tizzy before the film’s release.

Wilson noted the casting “was inevitably deplored in some quarters,” but insisted there was “nothing progressive about it.”

She added: “Most of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.”

After the review came out, Wilson took to Bluesky and walked back some of her comments on the casting in a summary of her points for the people who didn’t “feel like reading” her entire 4,234-word review.

“In this piece, I regret the paragraph about the uses of the POC actors - who are all great, but IMO under-utilized (and why couldn‘t Himesh Patel be Odysseus instead?),” she said. “I still think the film largely wastes its strong cast, but I framed it badly.”

Although the review and her online follow-up might seem to some like Wilson has an ax to grind, she insists that’s not the case, and said she enjoyed the low-budget films Nolan made earlier in his career, such as “Memento.”

However, she called the bigger budgets he gets now “a trap” and insisted that it’s “easier to suspend disbelief if the actors are less famous,” while stressing that the “huge budget leads him to attempt grand, jam-packed epics, when he’s better at taut, very premise-y small films.”

Wilson also admitted she wished she liked the film more.

“I tried very hard to like it. I also felt it was valid to write about why it didn’t work for me - especially since so much of the coverage has been so very positive, and I’m hardly punching down,” she said.

She also conceded the film is “doing some good in the world” by “bringing new audiences to the cinema, and new readers to ancient literature,” and said she hopes “it helps save the humanities.”

Wilson then asked her followers if she had gone too far.

“Was I too mean? Or not mean enough?” she wondered. “I went through my first draft and tried to take out the snark.”