RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. Friday, September 4, 2026. The print copy of the 13 August 2026 issue of the London Review of Books has finally arrived at my front door. And I have finally had a chance to read its lead article — Emily Wilson’s controversial review of the new movie on Homer’s ancient Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan.

I should preface my short report here by noting two earlier appearances of the brilliant University of Pennsylvania Classical Studies professor Emily Wilson on counterweights.ca.

Back in the middle of March 2019 (somewhat more than seven years ago, during the first Trump administration), my colleague and friend L.Frank Bunting posted “Taking time out from current madness to consider one woman’s brilliant writing more than 2500 years ago.”

This covered Emily Wilson’s admiring review of Anne Carson’s translation of the limited surviving work of the great ancient Greek lyric poet, If Not, Winter – Fragments of Sappho.

Then, somewhat more than three years later, in late August 2022 during what now seems the interim sanity (relatively speaking) of the Biden administration, the collective wisdom of the Counterweights Editors posted “As summer winds down there’s a Quebec election in the air (and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey on YouTube!).”

Emily Wilson — more respectful and supportive of Christopher Nolan?

There is another Quebec election in the air in the late summer of 2026. And Emily Wilson’s 2017 English translation of Homer’s original Odyssey in ancient Greek is also referred to in Ms. Wilson’s 2026 LRB review of Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie:

“As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

It is of course remarks such as this “I would be ashamed” that have made Ms. Wilson’s review of the Nolan movie so controversial.(And this particular sentence confessing her shame has been cited more than once in mass media reports on the controversy.) But I have now read her review twice, and I think the case she’s making is both more broadly respectful and ultimately supportive of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie than her critics seem to suggest.

This ultimate feeling about Emily Wilson’s review was fnally stiffened as well by my reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s almost parallel review of Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie in the August 20, 2026 issue of The New York Review of Books. (Which still more recently has arrived at my front door, pristine in its elegant American plastic wrapper.)

Daniel Mendelsohn agrees with Emily Wilson on key issues

Mr. Mendelsohn, who has also quite recently (2025) published an English translation of Homer’s original Greek Odyssey, is more polite (or even deferential?) than Ms. Wilson, toward the mass market muscle of Mr. Nolan. (Who has also directed such seriously interesting movies as Memento and Oppenheimer, along with the Dark Knight trilogy on the life of Batman.) At the height of this arc in his review Daniel Mendelsohn urges that :

“Since Nolan started dropping trailers, the Internet has been aflame with discussions of the ‘accuracy’ of the costumes, ships, armor, and diction of the movie, but the most authentic thing about this Odyssey may well be its densely braided narrative textures, which succeed in replicating Homer’s artful weaving.”

At the same time, Mendelsohn ultimately agrees with Wilson on key issues. Wilson reports, eg, that Nolan’s “Odyssey is not boring … My teenagers had a good time.” Mendelsohn complains that : “Nolan deletes” some classic stories from his Odyssey, “while retaining material that adds little … except perhaps an adrenaline rush for the eighteen-to-twenty-six crowd..” Even Wilson’s “I would be ashamed” about Nolan’s movie script is matched by Mendelsohn’s “The dialogue, alas, is pedestrian throughout.”

Wilson complains about another “muddled subplot … foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear … Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour — all perfectly fine in the world of Homer — are, in this version, very bad.” Mendelsohn alludes somewhat more broadly to “the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly archaic.”

Whatever else, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a movie worth seeing

Wilson’s deepest critique is that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie lacks “narrative and emotional depth … psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.”

Mendelsohn echoes something similar with “the only side of Odysseus—and indeed of the Odyssey—that you get in Nolan’s film is the negative one.”

Both reviewers seem to me to be saying that the Nolan movie gives us a (Matt Damon) Odysseus, who suggests the ancient world of the Mediterranean Sea was much like our own world in the 2020s global village, and has many instructive parallels to offer us today.

Both seem to be regretting that Nolan did not take on the greater challenge of pointing to the deepest truth — that this ancient world was in fact much different from our own, even in the Middle East (and even if we can still learn more constructively from the differences).

At the same time again, both reviewers leave me in no doubt that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a movie I should and no doubt will see myself, when the opportunty arises. The critical Emily Wilson’s final paragraph is worth quoting here at length :

“… the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas … may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.”