'Emotionally empty': the Odyssey translator renews critique of Christopher Nolan’s the Odyssey

Emily Wilson isn’t letting Christopher Nolan ’s The Odyssey sail by without a fight. The University of Pennsylvania classics professor — whose 2017 English translation of Homer’s epic helped inspire the film — has published a fresh takedown in an op-ed for The Atlantic, arguing that the blockbuster ’s beauty comes at the expense of its heart.

“These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film,” Wilson wrote.

Her core complaint: the movie talks a big game about compassion and hospitality, but what it actually lingers on are engines, siegecraft, and logistics.

“The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space, ” she wrote.

Wilson zeroes in on the film’s handling of the Trojan Horse and the repeated invocations of Zeus’ law of hospitality (the ancient code that urges generosity toward strangers). She says Nolan’s version doesn’t truly reckon with the human cost of the war or with the choices that set it in motion.

What Wilson takes issue with

• The Trojan Horse sequence, which she argues prioritizes tactical spectacle over consequences for civilians and soldiers.
• Frequent nods to Zeus’ hospitality code without, in her view, showing real warmth or ethical complexity on screen.
• A visual focus on machines of war and movement over faces, grief, and moral stakes.
• A screenplay she had already criticized — in the London Review of Books — for thin psychological, emotional, political, and ethical depth.

Wilson’s renewed critique lands as audiences continue to embrace the movie. The film holds an A CinemaScore and has drawn huge crowds worldwide, even as debates over fidelity to Homer and the story’s moral center keep bubbling up.

How Nolan reworks Homer on screen

• Sticks to the broad outline but largely sidelines the Olympian gods — Athena, Poseidon, Hermes — reframing divine forces as ideas or inner pressures.
• Centers war trauma, personal responsibility, and the psychological burden on Odysseus rather than a purely mythic quest.
• Builds in a sharper sense of guilt around the Trojan Horse strategy.
• Shifts the tale from a heroic homecoming to a more introspective drama about memory, accountability, and whether coming home can undo the past.

None of the criticism has slowed the movie’s run at the box office: after three weeks in theaters, The Odyssey has earned about $405 million domestically and $922 million worldwide.