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. You may be wondering, weary traveler, if a second viewing has softened Wilson’s stance on Nolan’s efforts; between the title (“A Trojan Horse Is Supposed To Have Humans Inside It”) and its closing line (which calls the movie a “visually stunning, emotionally empty film”) you may rest assured that it has not.
It’s an interesting piece overall: Part response to the criticism of her earlier review, part deepening of thoughts she’s clearly been mulling over ever since, and part obvious second-draft effort. In portions of the essay, Wilson is clearly delving deeper into discussions and thoughts she’s been thinking about over her two viewings of the movie—notably its often-muddled stances on attitudes that have changed toward technological development and deception in the millennia since The Odyssey was first written. (Hence, presumably, why she takes as the more scholarly focus of the new piece historical depictions of the Trojan Horse, which Nolan’s film posits as the Iron Age equivalent of Robert Oppenheimer’s nuke.) Other thrusts feel like a more deliberate effort to filter out many of the more glib, easily dismissed swipes in the earlier review, notably scrubbing the majority of commentary on the movie’s cast, and most of her droll asides about Nolan’s specific filmmaking quirks. (Although Wilson still can’t resist a genuinely funny swing in which she compares the director’s blockbuster mindset to the Die Hard films, “also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife.”)
What remains is a genuinely interesting takedown of the film’s attempts to build an often ill-fitting moral framework around Odysseus’ story, including a point, repeated from the LRB piece, where Wilson notes that Nolan shot parts of the movie in “the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people.” As she writes it, “The choice underlines the lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.”
It’s clear, from a perusal of her social media, that Wilson has had a lot of intellectually stimulating fun wrestling with the response that her first piece elicited. (Including writing of an Onion headline mocking the whole situation that “No professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this.”) It’s interesting to note, then, that in so far as it exists as a response to that discourse, the Atlantic piece isn’t a counterswing so much as a tightening of her initial arguments. By resisting the urge to backlash or refute, she produces a response that’s more thoughtful, if less spicy, than her initial takedown of Nolan’s filmmaking; that being said, if she wants a third essay in her budding film review career to go viral, it might be time to pivot and see if she has any historical touchstones to bring to bear on Spider-Man: Brand New Day, instead.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.