robyn reads books

I finished Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey the same morning I went to see Christopher Nolan’s film. As someone who has admired Nolan’s work for years, I was genuinely excited. It felt like the perfect way to close out my Homer chapter. I drove away a little disappointed.

That’s a difficult thing for me to admit because, on the surface, the film has almost everything I usually love. It’s visually astonishing. The score is atmospheric and immense. The sound design is overwhelming, perhaps a little too overwhelming at times. Many of the iconic moments are there, staged with the technical ambition Nolan is known for. But the film leaned so heavily into that scale and spectacle that the small, potentially impactful moments – the ones that had come to define The Odyssey for me – were often crowded out.

What ultimately kept me at a distance, though, wasn’t the spectacle. It was the writing. It flattened the psychological complexity that Homer spends twenty four books constructing and Emily Wilson so thoughtfully bringing into English. So I wasn’t too surprised when I saw her comments on the script.

The poem earns its emotional moments through years of waiting, memory, uncertainty and relationships built over time. On screen, when many of those same moments/scenes arrived, I didn’t really feel the weight of them. 

And more than anything, I missed Odysseus himself. Not the legendary king or the weary veteran, but the contradictions that make him so compelling in the poem, both poems. Homer gives us a man capable of extraordinary tenderness and startling brutality, honesty and deception, humility and hubris. He survives because he is clever, yet that same cleverness repeatedly gets him in trouble. The film smooths many of those rough edges. So what remained was a man carrying trauma, rather than a man wrestling with his own contradictions.

The moment Matt Damon blurted, “We need to assess the situation,” I actually laughed out loud, to the dismay of the people sitting beside me. It wasn’t the modern phrasing that bothered me so much as the feeling behind it. Suddenly I wasn’t listening to Homer or Nolan. I was listening to a project manager. It punctured the world the film had been trying to build.

And I’m not saying dialogue has to be archaic, it’s why Emily Wilson’s translation is so accessible, why I’m curious to read other translations too, but it has to feel as though it belongs to the emotional and imaginative landscape of the story. That line, a few others, at least for me, didn’t.

Also, I kept waiting for humanity. That’s something Nolan has delivered on in other films, which is why the absence stood out so sharply. Instead, many scenes felt functional. He moved the story forward, yes, but often it felt like watching chess pieces advance across a board. Well… maybe it was more like checkers (please don’t come at me).

By contrast, Homer almost never does that. I love how he slows down, lets people hesitate, remember and doubt. He lets husband and wife tell stories after making love. He lets recognition unfold so slowly it hurts.

Perhaps it’s simply that Homer (and so many other authors I’ve spent time with this past year) have trained my attention toward human complexity. Once that happens, a film that prioritizes momentum over interiority ends up feeling like it was telling a different story altogether.

Walking out of the theatre, I wasn’t thinking very much about the Nolan’s interpretation. I was thinking about Homer and what he had accomplished over twenty four books.

Maybe that’s the highest compliment I can give Homer… the way I pay attention. Literature like this doesn’t just change what I think, it has changed what I notice.