The Odyssey’s ‘ashamed’ translator is right – it’s not perfect

Just as our Epic hero Odysseus is divinely doomed to a treacherous voyage home, it was also inevitable that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey would be subjected to an outpouring of backlash – for better or worse.

Since it first landed on July 17, the Oscar-winning director’s blank cheque movie has faced the triumphs of back-to-back five-star reviews and eye-watering box office numbers.

But, in the same breath, it is battling right-wing nuts like Elon Musk accusing it of being too woke and, on the flip side, those who believe it doesn’t do justice to the female characters or people of colour in the cast.

Renowned classicist Emily Wilson has stirred up the furore once more with her own scathing takedown of Nolan’s movie, which goes straight for the jugular – tearing apart his interpretation of the characters, the dialogue and how he uses war and its consequences in the movie.

In short: This money-spinning adaptation of one of the world’s oldest stories truly is the blockbuster that launched a thousand discourses.

I have long loved the Odyssey, from the moment I first read it in school through to studying it during my degree at Nolan’s alma mater, UCL, and now as I watch it on the big screen.

The war-heavy, wrath-fuelled desperation of the Iliad and Aeneid never appealed to me as much as the fantastical tales of the Odyssey that lead us from island to island, as we follow this ‘complicated man’ through to his bloody homecoming in Ithaca to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) after 20 years apart.

I was endlessly endeared by the spats between the gods on Mount Olympus, Athena’s fierce loyalty to her favourite soldier and the fearsome trials Odysseus faced at every stage of his journey.

Nolan’s interpretation of this 2,700-year-old tale is a compelling one and has every right to exist among the many ways we can revisit this age-old story. 

Although not entirely to my taste, his spin leans into the realism and horrors of Odysseus’ (Matt Damon) life as a Trojan war veteran, especially as the mastermind behind the famed trick that saw Troy’s destructive fall.

Athena (played by Zendaya) is less Goddess than figment of Odysseus’ guilt, and the gods, with all their squabbling, become the ominous men in the sky and the sea we never put a face to. 

As a 21st-century perspective on the story, in a world where the West is reckoning with the havoc it’s wreaked on civilisations far from its shores, it makes perfect sense. But in doing so, it has come at the cost of some of the Odyssey’s finest elements.

This is the argument Wilson lays out in a brutal read of Nolan’s work, despite the director at one point crediting Wilson’s groundbreaking 2017 translation as one of the inspirations for his script. She says she would be ‘ashamed’ to have written any part of it.

She pokes holes in his contradictions, criticises the flattening out of our hero as a veteran racked with guilt and nothing more and the loss of so much of the whimsical thread in this story – of Odysseus’ flirting and cavorting and wily schemes.

Calypso (Charlize Theron) may as well be an entirely new character; nowhere is the true sequence of the lotus flower nor the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa who discovers a shipwrecked Odysseus. 

And his year having sex with Circe (Samantha Morton) after rescuing his men from their pig-shaped fate is notably missing.

I don’t agree with everything the academic argues, but there’s one scene in Nolan’s adaptation that especially let me down – and I feel proves Wilson’s point of Odysseus’ character becoming lost in the fray of Nolan’s overarching narrative.

In the original text, the scene with the Cyclops (Polyphemus) plays out very differently. Not only does Odysseus initially follow Zeus’ law (the central thread of Nolan’s movie) by offering wine and food, but he also gets to show off his cunning, wit and Homer’s humour.

He tells Polyphemus his name is No-one so that, when the men attack, the giant calls to his friends to tell them ‘No-one is attacking’ – and naturally they do not come to his aid. A silly trick I’ll admit, and Nolan himself felt it wouldn’t translate well to dialogue in the movie, which I wholeheartedly disagree with.

The ridiculousness, yet genius, of the plan is half the fun, but more than that, it sets the events of Odysseus’ curse in motion. When he and his men safely escape to the ship, in a final act of hubris, he reveals his true name to Polyphemus to mock him.

It is then that we discover the Cyclops is the son of Poseidon, and he hails a curse down on his head.

Nolan’s rewriting of this scene is a shoddy mimicry, with subpar trickery when they put hay on their backs to escape the Cyclops, Odysseus nonsensically shoots a final arrow at the beast, and we get a confusing bit of exposition afterwards that maybe the Cyclops was the son of Poseidon. 

By stripping that scene of all its twists and turns, we’ve lost Odysseus’ wile and the main thrust of the movie. It almost ruined the entire experience for me, but I decided to grit my teeth and bear it.

Telling us that Odysseus is the smartest man, rather than showing us, was unfortunately a regular motif in this version of the story.

My worries were confirmed when, after watching the film for a second time, my sister told me Odysseus seemed like an idiot. 

All this to say that I can’t help but agree with Wilson that this is not the Odysseus I know and love, despite and because of his flaws.

Yet, Nolan’s portrayal offers a whole new take that deserves applause in its own right. It’s a magnificent feat of filmmaking with poignant commentary on the cost of war and sequences that sent a chill up my spine 

I’d go as far as to say the ‘perfect’ adaptation can never exist. I can only hope it is just one of many more to come.