Emily Wilson beating a Trojan Horse with second essay panning Nolan's Odyssey
Classics professor Emily Wilson has published a second, highly critical essay in The Atlantic regarding Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey. Wilson argues the film is emotionally empty and fails to meaningfully engage with the source material's themes of deception and technology.
Why it matters
The critique highlights the ongoing cultural debate regarding the adaptation of classical literature into modern blockbuster cinema.
A couple of days ago, celebrated translator and classics professor Emily Wilson made a portentous declaration : She was going to go watch The Odyssey again. Given that Wilson—whose translation of the Homer epic reportedly served as at least the partial bedrock of Christopher Nolan’s new movie version—had already managed to crack the London Review Of Books web site in half with her pan of the film last week , her sitting through another screening (as part of a Q&A presentation at New York’s Jacob Burns Film Center) seemed destined to bring even more of Zeus’ wrath down on the ongoing discourse. Now that reckoning has arrived, in the form of a new highly critical essay on Nolan’s movie that landed on the shores of The Atlantic this week .
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