by liberal japonicus
Apologies for the radio silence, been watching lots of discussion about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I limit myself to full length youtube videos, and I avoid shorts like the plague, but here is your invitation to post anything related that you think might be interesting.
Elon Musk says Grok is making a non-woke version. FFS.
Non woke, AND in original Homeric Greek poetic form.
Sure, and Musk’s “The Boring Company” needs some work, so …
The 1968 TV version is still the one coming closest to the original in spirit by far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(1968_miniseries).
It also shows that one does not need bombastic special effects.
Polyphemus is the only exception and Mario Bava (who did those scenes) did his usual excellent job of making it believable without showing off. The series is a bit minimalist at times but this does not detract but rather enhances the general impression of being truly archaic. Not popcorn this!
The same director also later did the Eneide but imo with far less success.
Why stop at Ulysses?
We need historically accurate depictions of Paul Bunyan, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and the signifying monkey.
This is an interview in the Sunday Times with Emily Wilson, the classicist whose translation nous and many others were so keen on (I haven’t got it yet). Apart from much else, she agrees with Mary Beard about the unfortunate and un-Homeric lack of sex in the film:
What The Odyssey gets right and wrong: the scholar’s verdict
Professor Emily Wilson has dedicated decades (and tattoo space) to Homer. This is what she thinks of the film her translation inspired
Madeleine Spence
Saturday July 25 2026, 4.00pm, The Sunday Times
When Emily Wilson emerged from her local cinema in Philadelphia this month she felt oddly flat. Having first read The Odyssey aged eight, she knew well the emotional heft of the moment when its protagonist Odysseus returns home after 20 years and is reunited with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. It is the same moment Christopher Nolan has chosen to make the climax of his cinematic retelling of Homer’s poem.
“But it didn’t land emotionally for me at all,” says Wilson, 54 and chair of the classics department at Pennsylvania University. “Which I think is partly about the fact that, unlike Homer, it’s not very well written.”
An acclaimed classicist, Wilson is behind the 2017 translation of The Odyssey that was cited by Nolan as part of the inspiration for his eponymous film, which has received five-star reviews and earned £169 million on its opening weekend. She has dedicated decades of her life to Homer’s epic works. Her arms, tattooed with imagery inspired by the ancient Greek myths including a spear and bow, an octopus and the horses of Achilles, are a testament to that. But she is less than convinced by Nolan’s rendering.
“The characters don’t have the kind of depth the Homeric characters have,” she says. “I felt, ‘Do I really care if this guy gets back to his wife?’ You haven’t given me any reason to.”
For many, Nolan’s Odyssey will be their introduction to the story of the war hero who sacks the city of Troy and spends two decades journeying back to his homeland of Ithaca. On the way he is distracted by beautiful sirens, a giant cyclops, deviant goddesses and a hungry whirlpool monster named Charybdis. Whilst Nolan’s film (which Wilson describes as a “very clever piece of cinematic storytelling”) might be the blockbuster of the summer, speaking to Wilson is a true education in why The Odyssey has endured since around the 7th century BC.
“It’s a very simple human story of, how does a person get back to their home, and what does it mean to get there? How is it intertwined with identity and relationships? How do we relate to strangers and friends?” Wilson says.
A word repeatedly used in the beginning of the epic poem is nostos, which refers to a journey home from war, for which there is no direct translation in modern English. What truly elevates this story of homecoming is the richness of its characters; “Everyone, even the gods, have their own histories, motivations, desires,” Wilson says. Unfortunately, this is exactly where she felt the film was lacking: “The Trojans are faceless robots with masks”, Robert Pattinson as Antinous (who tries to seduce Penelope and kill Telemachus) was “fantastic, but a cartoon villain”, and Polyphemus the cyclops is “a puppet”.
Wilson says: “They’re all so thinly characterised, which contributes to a sense of, ‘Do I really care’?”
Homer’s Odysseus is famously layered. The first epithet used to describe him is polytropos, meaning “much turning”, Wilson explains. He constantly reinvents himself, using disguise and deception, and is also hungry for recognition and glory. “He’s cunning, crafty, devising and is excellent at solving problems.”
In one passage, Odysseus’s men must fight the cyclops Polyphemus to escape from his cave, which they’ve inadvertently wandered into. In the poem, Odysseus contrives a cunning plan to trick his adversary by telling him his name is “noman”. When Odysseus’s men attack, Polyphemus shouts for help from his neighbours, saying “no man is hurting me”. Naturally, they shrug and get on with their day. An approximately 2,600-year-old joke; but one that’s left out of the film. “It’s really funny,” says Wilson, “and speaks to the fact that Odysseus is constantly in disguise, or wearing some other name.”
Nolan’s Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, “is not clever, he’s not funny, he’s just wracked by guilt and anxiety”. He is constructed around his shame over what he has done to the people of Troy.
In the poem, one of the diversions Odysseus encounters on his long journey home is the goddess Calypso, who falls in love with him and refuses to let him leave her island for seven years. Played by Charlize Theron, Nolan’s Calypso feeds Odysseus lotus flowers to help him forget his psychological pain.
“The Odysseus of the poem doesn’t need to take psychiatric drugs to get over his PTSD or have Charlize Theron as his therapist,” Wilson jokes. It’s not antithetical to think that Odysseus is struggling with a legacy of “multiple pains”, she argues, but there is nothing explicit about trauma or guilt in Homer’s verse, which pays much more attention to notions of glory.
What Nolan gets right, says Wilson, is The Odyssey’s exploration of space, time and memory: “Homer is interested in time and memory, and how one story is embedded inside another. Nolan is picking up on the narrative sophistication of the original.” In that regard, it is tailor made for the director whose most acclaimed films, such as Memento and Inception, play on these themes, often messing with the chronology of the plot. She was similarly impressed by his ability to plait the Trojan horse sequence from Virgil’s Aeneid into The Odyssey.
Nolan provides battles aplenty but has spared viewers some of the other violence depicted by Homer. An episode where Telemachus (played by a gentle Tom Holland) hangs 12 enslaved women and dismembers an enslaved man for betraying his father doesn’t feature. Including it would have required some “moral courage” says Wilson, whose own translation of it partly reads: “their heads all in a row, / were strung up with the noose around their necks”.
“It’s also weird there’s no sex and none of the food looks very nice. The Odyssey is all about eating and it’s all about a man getting back to his marriage bed to have sex with his wife,” she says.
Wilson is daughter to the late Katherine Duncan-Jones, a professor of English literature at Oxford, and the writer and critic AN Wilson. She discovered The Odyssey after being cast as Athena in her primary school play. When she moved to Oxford High School for girls and took up ancient Greek and Latin she fell in love. “In French we learnt how to ask where the bus stop is; in Greek we learnt how it feels when your children are slaughtered in front of your eyes.” After reading Classics at Oxford she did an MPhil in early modern English literature, a PhD at Yale and started teaching in 2002.
Wilson’s translation, which took five years to complete, made waves with traditionalists for ditching the “ornate” and elevated language typical of Homeric translations. Others, she says, “make it sound more difficult than the original is”. Her first line is a perfect example: “Tell me about a complicated man.” The word “complicated”, in this context, uses all its modern subtext to illustrate a possibly problematic and multifaceted man. It is quick and punchy compared to, for instance, Richmond Lattimore’s 1965 version: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.”
Writing in iambic pentameter to try to replicate the rhythmic nature of the original poem makes Wilson’s translation ripe for being read aloud — her dramatic readings in both English and ancient Greek have made her something of a superstar in her field. Hers is also the first full translation in English by a woman. When I raise this, however, she is diplomatically dismissive, saying that is irrelevant to the work: “Nobody says to men, ‘You really understood that male character so well because you are a man’.”
She does, however, have views on the women of The Odyssey. “By Nolan standards this was great for women characters. By Homer standards it was a bit disappointing.”
Homer’s Calypso, argues Wilson, is “much more interesting” than Theron’s; she possesses “her own fury” and divine power which allows her to detain Odysseus on her island. In one speech left out of the film, she laments how male gods, in Wilson’s words, “get to rape and kidnap people all the time and female gods don’t get to”.
Helen of Troy, played by Lupita Nyong’o, is far more versatile and capable than her limited screen time allows, Wilson says. Nolan’s Athena, played by Zendaya, serves as little more than “Matt Damon’s conscience”, whereas she is actually a war goddess constantly tussling with Poseidon over Odysseus’s future.
Anne Hathaway does a formidable job of playing Odysseus’s wife, says Wilson, but Nolan’s script fails to reach the depths of Homer’s Penelope. With considerable grit she presides over her missing husband’s house, keeping a brigade of rowdy suitors baying for her hand in marriage at bay for 20 years. It is ripe material for a tearjerking reunion which Nolan includes in the final half hour of the film, centred around Penelope’s unfailing loyalty. However, in the poem this moment is more bittersweet: “In mythical ancient Greece, when a woman is between the house of her father and of her husband it is a moment of relative power.” In this moment a woman has choices, but once she’s made the choice she loses that power. Penelope is “frozen in that moment” and when Odysseus returns, in Homer’s telling, she is also losing something and grieving this loss. “In Homer, she gets to be a character that has all of this emotional complexity.”
As the film approached, Wilson found herself swept up in the torrent of an argument stoked by people arguing Nolan was too progressive with his approach, particularly with the blind casting of characters. People grasped at Wilson’s 2017 work as more evidence the film was “woke”. Last week Elon Musk said he would use his Grok AI to create an “anti-woke Odyssey”.
Wilson thinks one of the reasons it has become such a lightning rod is because some “modern ideologies” associate the ancient Greeks with ideals of masculinity and a past greatness when “women shut up and it was just about the guys”. As publicity for the film grew she was receiving so much abuse that she installed a button on her website that reads “contact form: misogynistic trolling”. (People have used it.) It was her partner’s idea — “his name is noman”, she winks, preferring to keep his identity private.
It hasn’t put Wilson off her next project, which is another translation of The Odyssey that will also be in iambic pentameter, but this time she’s not going to limit herself to the same number of lines as the original, meaning she will have “more syllables to play with”. It follows her 2023 translation of The Iliad, which followed a similar form and comes after her most recent book: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature, a collection of essays about ancient literature and translation.
Something the film has served to do is to drive a renewed interest in what Wilson calls the “original IP”, or intellectual property, of Homer. This, according to her, can only be a good thing. She saw it with her three teenage daughters who finally admitted, says Wilson, that what she does is “kind of cool”. “I’ve been trying to get them to let me read it out loud to them since they were little,” she jokes. Maybe now they’ll finally let her.
I think that there is an unfortunate flattening when Wilson’s translation is cited as Nolan’s inspiration. Nolan was initially going to do Troy, and his whole career has been connected telling non-linear stories (Inception, Tenet) so I imagine the Homeric in medias res was something that attracted him. Daniel Mendelsohn noted that classicists are either Iliad people or Odyssey people. I’m with Mendelsohn in the former category while Wilson is pretty clearly in the latter and I suspect that Nolan is an Iliad person, but there was no way he could do an Iliad.
The thing about the Iliad, the characters themselves are locked into their own fates and how they follow that fate is the attraction, at least to me. The Odyssey is about Odysseus trying to eke out a happy ending despite the best efforts of gods and men. I’m also, given the mechanics of shooting with an Imax camera, wondering how one would shoot those sex scenes.
I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion about a lot of this. But I do know enough to feel utter contempt for anyone whose concern is the melanin content of the skin of the actress playing Helen and Clytemnestra.