The Odyssey (2026) is guilty of everything Emily Wilson was wrongly accused of

I like most of Christopher Nolan’s films. I couldn’t be happier that a big-name Hollywood director is using his immense cultural cachet to bring one of the founding stories of Western literature to the big screen. Unlike the seething nerds and rightoids, I could not give a shit that the armour is the wrong colour or that he’s doing woke stunt casting. In fact it brings me joy that Nolan has trolled so many literal-minded little freaks.

And yet now I find myself reduced to screaming, crying, throwing up, etc after discovering that The Odyssey (2026) butchers the particular thing that I happen to care about.

That is: Nolan has stripped the ambiguity that makes Homer’s characters so interesting, sanitised all that is alien and bizarre about the Bronze Age, and served up a cosy morality play with all the depth of warmed-over Marvel slop.

To avoid giving modern audiences a funny feeling in their tummies, the first thing you must do is ensure that every single character is clearly categorised as either a Goodie or a Baddie.

Take Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops, which is described thusly in the poem:

He reached his hands towards my men, seized two, and knocked them hard against the ground like puppies, and the floor was wet with brains. He ripped them limb by limb to make his meal, then ate them like a lion on the mountains, devouring flesh and entrails and marrow bones.

It’s repulsive stuff and Nolan does an amazing job here. But his Polyphemus is a deformed freak who doesn’t say a word before he begins his gruesome meal. By contrast, Homer actually makes you feel some tiny sliver of sympathy for the ‘uncivilised’ savage: Odysseus has invaded his home with a bunch of armed men, helped himself to food, and is now demanding gifts, i.e. he is a pirate who is cynically exploiting the guest hospitality norms.

OK so a monster wasn’t portrayed in a nuanced way, boo-hoo. How about the human characters?

In the poem, Telemachus is a whiny do-nothing who learns to build a strong sense of self-confidence and agency…maybe even too much. By the end he ruthlessly hangs a bunch of servant girls who were sleeping with the suitors. In Nolan’s version, Telemachus remains bland and inoffensive from start to finish; just your friendly neighbourhood spiderman.

Then there’s Agamemnon, who gets his just desserts for murdering his beautiful mixed-race child. You can tell he’s a Baddie because of some very subtle costume design. And so on: every complex character is flattened into a single note.

The constraints of a movie runtime forces compression of some kind or another. OK, fair enough.

But I would argue that the one thing that is essential to the Odyssey is that it tells the story of Odysseus. Which is a huge problem, because the character of Odysseus does not make an appearance in this movie!

Instead there’s just Matt Damon, playing a generic musclebound action hero who’s always saving the day and taking the weight of the world on his shoulders, who can’t wait to get home to his beloved wife—who he would never cheat on with various nymphs or suspect of infidelity—and his son, who he definitely hasn’t abandoned since birth to go romping around the Mediterranean.

In mythology, Odysseus was a skilled warrior, but it was his devious, rat-bastard cunning—his metis—that elevated him to greatness. Instead of facing his enemies head-on, he used sneaky tricks to outwit them at every turn. Hence the Trojan horse, outsmarting the cyclops, having his men tie him to the mast, and so on. He is quite happy to cheat and steal and bend the rules to achieve his ends. He does not lie awake fretting about this; he is proud of it! It is this very quality that the gods love in him! They, too, are creatures of alien morality, full of whimsy and caprice.

But the Matt Damon character is a Goodie. His tummy hurts when he thinks about the mean trick he played on those Trojans. He believes very strongly in fairness, to the point that when he goes hunting, he loudly plucks the string of his bow to give his quarry a fair chance, including when he and his men desperately need food (?).

The Matt Damon character is a Ken doll with a perfectly smooth crotch. He would never spend eight years dilly-dallying his way home while getting strange from multiple demi-goddesses. There is zero sexual tension with Circe: he recognises she is an abused woman driven to madness, and respectfully gives her the space she needs to heal. He is an Ally. After all, he himself is the victim of repeated date-rape drugging at the hands of Charlize Theron Calypso. Or is he? For all we know, their relationship was entirely chaste. Perhaps they rubbed their perfectly smooth plastic crotches together.

As a Goodie, the Matt Damon character must show just the right amount of manly stoicism, while being in touch with his feelings at appropriate times. Meanwhile, Homer’s Odysseus is a messy bitch who spends half the poem asking someone to pass him another Kleenex. This is surely a dream role for a serious actor, running the gamut from blinding rage and bloodlust, manic hubris, prickling paranoia and madness, bitter regret. I feel sorry for Matt Damon, who is forced to give such a flat and affectless performance. When his men consign themselves to death, he looks mildly annoyed. Guyyys! Even when he is slaughtering the suitors, he stops the battle halfway through to take a deep breath and find it in his heart to forgive them. Then he cheerfully leaves Ithaca in exile so that Telemachus can be king (this after just getting home after 10 years??)

Odysseus is one of the greatest figures in literature precisely because he is ‘complicated’, in the infamous words of Emily Wilson. There is so much texture to his character that you could examine it forever. The closest modern equivalent is a Tony Soprano type: alternately charming, magnetic, intoxicating, with all his petty rages and insecurities. Instead we get a generic comic-book superhero transported into the Bronze Age. For fucks sake.

Last year we and my book club bros read EMILY WILSON’s translation of The Odyssey, and in doing so, investigated the claims from Twitter statue avatars that she’s a shrill feminist imposing her modern sensibilities onto the text. We found those accusations to be more or less total horseshit: in the words of my based friend, “I have to admit I loved it”.

Book club discussion here, or our short-lived foray into YouTube below:

It occurs to me that Nolan is guilty of very nearly the exact same sin Wilson was wrongfully accused of. Not because he cast a black actor as Helen of Troy, although I suppose, OK, yeah, that too, but because he did in fact sterilise and sanitise the text in order to make it completely unchallenging to modern audiences.

I understand that this is an adaptation, and Nolan is welcome to take the story in whatever direction he wants. My criticism isn’t that he hasn’t stayed true to the poem. It’s that he takes it in such an uninspired direction: Odysseus is deeply traumatised by the sack of Troy, wracked by guilt, and realises that war is Bad, actually (but also, he has do one last epic mass killing of defenceless civilians, which definitely doesn’t totally undermine the whole plot).

Booooring. We’ve heard this one before. It’s crazy to think that at this point in the culture, merely re-telling one of the oldest stories in history would have been a shockingly original and revolutionary act. But no, we mustn’t Scare the Hoes. The Marvel slopification of everything continues apace.

On the relentless pacing and claustrophobic soundtrack

I saw Benny Safdie under that mask (for the record: I think it’s cool) and wondered if Nolan also let him into the editing suite, cos this movie felt like a nonstop anxiety attack.

That would be fine—I like the Safdie schtick in small doses—except that it doesn’t make sense for the genre. This is an epic about a journey spanning 10 years, not a fucking crime caper. There’s hardly a single scene that gets to breathe, which means none of the plot events have any weight to them. The first 20 minutes of rapid-fire exposition is so bad that it feels like a movie trailer. Actors rush to get their lines out one after another, babbling like Gilmore Girls. The first time we get anything resembling an actual coherent scene is the cave of the cyclops, which is an incredible set-piece, but even here, we’re in a hurry. The cyclops is mid-attack. Without any transition, he’s asleep, and we’re poking his eye out. Find a monster; poke a monster; run back to the ships.

Then there’s the soundtrack. I enjoy being emotionally manipulated by movie scores: the opening bars of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar theme instantly make me tear up. But the only thing Ludwig Göransson’s soundtrack made me feel was ‘annoyed’. I am a midwit so I don’t have the vocab to describe this, but it felt like being told exactly what to feel at every single moment, like the musical equivalent of a laugh track turned up way too loud. When it wasn’t cloying, it was just…noise? Atmospheric anxiety-inducing clanging that might have worked in a thriller, but doesn’t fit the genre at all. Someone help me out here.

I absolutely do not envy Nolan having to squeeze an epic poem like this into a feature film. It would have been so much better broken into two or three parts, or perhaps even a ‘Monster of the Week’-style TV show (this week: Circe! next week: Hades!). That way you could give the characters a chance to show some actual development, instead of dashing madly from one shitshow to the next. I guess I would have preferred he just cut more of the plot out, or refrained from adding new material.¹

On casting choices

The thing that we’re all meant to be mad about is how Nolan has cast his Odyssey full of black Greeks, and Asian Greeks, and everyone apart from actual Mediterranean people. This does at least give us the only funny line in the entire movie, in which an Indian or Pakistani guy says ‘We’re Greeks! From Ithaca!’

Personally that didn’t take me out of it too much. I think I first had this realisation with the Rings of Power series, where they cast a bunch of non-white actors as hobbits and dwarves and elves. I thought it would be annoying, but it wasn’t. The show sucked for totally unrelated reasons.

What does take me out of it is the accents. It’s not that the characters have American accents. It’s that there’s no uniformity. Every cast member is doing their own thing, to the point where I often just felt like I was watching the actor. Zendaya appeared as… Zendaya. Jon Bernthal appeared as… Jon Bernthal.

These are mostly good actors, so I have to assume it’s Nolan’s fault for miscasting them, or otherwise neutering their performances. R Patz and Anne Hathaway were the best of the main cast. Tom Holland probably the biggest squib.

The perils of trying to get some Culture

Finishing on a positive note, some of the individual scenes and set-pieces were incredible. I wasn’t expecting it to have such a strong ‘body horror’ vibe, almost Cronenberg-esque at times. Kudos to Nolan for taking such a big swing here. The Circe scene with the pigs was one of the most disgusting and creative things I’ve ever seen.²

Unfortunately I was so mad throughout the viewing that I couldn’t bring myself to properly appreciate all of this cool stuff. He’s a wonderful technical director, blah blah. Yes, I saw it on Imax and had my eardrums permanently damaged and my eyes shot full of lasers on the Biggest Screen, etc etc. Didn’t help.

Now as I start cooling off as towards this end of this rant, I have to accept that this is mostly my own fault. One of my most rewarding projects in recent years has been joining a book club dedicated to reading the classics and serious lit-fic, in an attempt to get a bit of Culture. While we don’t always like what we read, we absolutely loved The Odyssey, and it’s only my deranged and disproportionate reaction to this movie that made me realise how much.

Put another way: an unwelcome side effect of reading the best shit that’s ever been written is that it raises the bar for what you consider to be interesting storytelling.³

Meanwhile, the friends who I went to see the movie with were not familiar with the source material, and so they were able to take The Odyssey (2026) on its own terms: a big, fun, dumb summer blockbuster.

“It was great!” they said.

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Notes: