Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Script Slammed By Homer Translator: "I Would Be Ashamed"

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Matt Damon screams in agony in The Odyssey

Published Jul 27, 2026, 2:05 PM EDT

Adam Bentz is a senior news writer at ScreenRant, where he has authored nearly 5,000 articles, including features and lists. He studied creative writing and English with a concentration in screenwriting at Southern New Hampshire University and interned as a writer/journalist for The Borgen Project, an influential organization that fights global poverty.

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Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has drawn a sharp rebuke from a prominent Homer translator, who says, "I would be ashamed to have written any part of this."

Nolan's latest blockbuster is based on Homer's epic ancient Greek poem, specifically a 2017 translation by Emily Wilson, following Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca, as he encounters many mythical beings on his long and perilous journey home after the Trojan War. While Nolan has praised Wilson's work translating Homer's epic, the admiration isn't exactly mutual.

In a blistering piece for the London Review of Books, Emily Wilson delivered a withering critique of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, arguing that his epic adaptation looks huge but feels hollow. She says that its characters lack depth and the movie misses Homer's emotional and philosophical power. Read her full comments below:

I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality … the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

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