Christopher Nolan’s Hubris: Why Hollywood’s Corruption Of The Odyssey Matters

Criticisms of Nolan’s creative choices in The Odyssey aren’t limited to the political right.

William Sullivan | July 25, 2026

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has clearly become a flashpoint in the broader culture war, and this war took a strange turn after the release of the film found many conservative pundits applauding the film while expressing condescension and confusion about why some other conservatives may be extremely critical of it.  Ben Shapiro, for example, suggests that criticism of the film is often “not in good faith,” and is an example of how conservatives get too caught up in “outrage culture,” or some such.

It is worth noting, however, that the criticisms of Nolan’s creative choices in this movie aren’t limited to the political right.  One very unexpected and stinging rebuke of Nolan’s film came from Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey is admittedly predicated upon the classical poem being seen through a modern feminist lens, and hers is a translation that Nolan himself has suggested was hugely influential in the making of his film.

Wilson clearly doesn’t feel like Nolan captured the Odysseus of Homer’s story.  “The film presents an Odysseus,” she says, “who feels very bad about things that he’s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrized [sic] way.”

“I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory.  This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory,” she says, but “it is very much in tune with things that Nolan has been obsessed with his whole career, so if you’re a Nolan fan, I think you’ll like this movie [emphasis added].”

There is an irony in all of this.  Emily Wilson is suggesting, very openly, that Nolan chose to tell a different story, framed around different themes that are the “obsession” of his filmmaking, rather than telling the actual story of The Odyssey which has existed for thousands of........

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