Classics professor Emily Wilson has continued her criticism of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, accusing the blockbuster of using “massacres as spectacle” and being “emotionally empty”.
Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, published an acclaimed English translation of Homer’s epic poem in 2017 that Nolan has cited as an influence on his adaptation, particularly its opening line: “Tell me about a complicated man.”
However, last month she gave a scathing new review for the London Review Of Books, where she said the filmmaker had failed to capture the complexity of Homer’s characters and ideas. In a new essay for The Atlantic, the academic expanded on that opinion.
When discussing the film’s Trojan Horse design, she wrote: “The physical horror of people being trapped inside as the seawater rises is brilliantly and terrifyingly evoked. But on a narrative level, Nolan’s horse is light as air.”
She later said of the film: “It gestures at a critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”
In her conclusion, Wilson wrote: “Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the ‘apparent magic’ of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.”
Despite this criticism, The Odyssey has been a resounding success both critically and commercially, earning the best reviews of Nolan’s career and one of the biggest openings for a live-action film this year.
