Emily Wilson Doubles Down, Says Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is “Visually Stunning, Emotionally Empty”

Emily Wilson. The classicist and professor best known for her acclaimed 2017 English translation of Homer’s The Odyssey—the same translation that Christopher Nolan has cited as an influence on his new film — caused a firestorm a few weeks ago when she absolutely savaged Nolan’s “The Odyssey” after seeing it.

Wilson’s argument was that the film reduced Homer’s psychologically and emotionally complex Odysseus into a much thinner, guilt-ridden figure, and criticized the screenplay as shallow, gimmicky, and lacking much of the poem’s depth around war, memory, family, sex, and desire. 

That, of course, hit a nerve with Nolan fans because Wilson wasn’t just some random reviewer—her translation helped inform the very adaptation she was now attacking.

Apparently, Wilson isn’t done attacking Nolan’s The Odyssey. In fact, she seems outright pissed, publishing a new The Atlantic op-ed, she points to the film’s spectacular Trojan horse set piece—and even its $69.99 popcorn bucket—as evidence of a disconnect between the movie’s visual spectacle and its supposed moral concerns.

Her biggest complaint is that the film talks about “values and civilizational decline” while offering little emotional or narrative coherence. Nolan’s movie gestures toward the horrors of violence and humanity’s capacity for cruelty, but Wilson argues that its imagery ultimately sends the opposite message: “Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”

Wilson also argues that Nolan radically simplifies Homer’s characters and moral complexities. She says Sinon becomes an innocent moral figure while deception itself becomes the central violation of “Zeus’s law.” At the same time, she describes Sinon as “a luminous, heartbreaking presence,” while portraying the Trojans as largely “masked nonentities.”

Her sharpest criticism is perhaps the simplest: “We see inside the horse, but we do not see inside the characters or their world.” Wilson argues that Nolan’s camera is fascinated by burning buildings, gates, weapons, and battle mechanics, while the human beings suffering within those spectacles become secondary.

Ultimately, Wilson calls Nolan’s film “itself a kind of Trojan horse”—a visually magnificent blockbuster that claims to champion human kindness while communicating something darker through its imagery. Her conclusion is blunt: “We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion.” In her view, Homer and Virgil understood that complexity; Nolan’s “visually stunning, emotionally empty film” does not. Yikes.