Nolan’s megahit got the writers on edge

Director Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is has only been in theaters for a couple of weeks, but there is already such a war of words going on around it that even Odysseus might turn his ship back to sea.

The latest round started when the renowned translator of Homer’s Odyssey Emily Wilson made the film. His review has been awaited like a ship arriving, because Nolan himself has said that he is a fan of that 2017 translation and especially its opening.

“Tell me about a complicated man” reportedly helped him in making the movie spectacle.

The translator didn’t really return a compliment with a compliment. Wilson’s text published in the prestigious London Review of Books is not the usual “the book was better than the movie” grumble, but a public gutting of almost 4,000 words.

Wilson acknowledges that he is humbled by the fact that the director has apparently read at least the first line of his translation. Then he states that he would be ashamed if he had written any part of the script himself.

“A simple man”, the title of the review could be translated into Finnish.

According to Wilson, Nolan has turned Homer’s conflicted, seductive and cunning hero into a simple man of action who mostly feels bad about being a man of action. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is not inventive, talkative or deceptively charming. He is a serious-looking war veteran who carries his guilt from one landscape to another while expensive explosions happen around him.

According to Wilson, the vision of the film is confused, the charactersremain sketches and the big themes – time, memory, history, war and the price of returning home – are buried under handsome pictures. There is hardly any psychological, emotional, political or ethical depth.

The narration is gimmicky, the motives implausible and the writing frankly lousy, WIlson is boring.

Matt Damon, Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas and Anne Hathaway at the film’s premiere in New York in mid-July.

Women too slouch in the director’s handling. Penelope, who in the original work holds the kingdom together, mostly has to dig Matt Damon for “unknown reasons”. Calypso shrinks from a dangerous goddess to Odysseus’ unpaid therapist.

At the same time, eroticism and pleasure disappear from the story.

“There is no sex and all the food looks terrible”, the translator writes.

By Editor

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