I like The Odyssey well enough, but I love movies. And it's zero percent surprising that Tumblr would love Emily Wilson's LBR piece, because it's just premiere posting. Her prose fucking crushes, so many lines are absolutely killer. But I do just need to mention that it's really not film criticism. It's hardly speaking to or about the movie at all, and when it is, it's predominantly her positing that because she is not interested in what it's saying, then it's not saying anything.
I mean if you just want to take, "There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible." This line makes me laugh every time I see it, it rules. And it has nothing to do with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026).
Presumably it's coming from the same complaint well as the majority of Wilson's piece: that while the Homeric poem is a celebration of fucking around and feasting, this movie is not. But in just saying, "it's not this" and nothing more, she's not discussing or even acknowledging how sex and food are actually used in this retelling. Both are tied together in what has been widely praised among audiences as one of the most indelible sequences: Samantha Morton's scene as the witch Circe. In it, the threat of sexual violence and act of eating are linked in a commentary on warmongering rapaciousness writ large, as a part of Nolan's intently laid out thesis of the Trojan horse as a kind of atomic bomb xenia violation whose nuclear winter the whole Mediterranean is now living under. And yes the food does look horrible, because it's horror food! It's difficult to describe in words, but it's like the stew Odysseus's men are eating is turning into gristly tentacles in their mouths, the sounds of their eating ghastly and so disgusting, while Morton transforms them through....something I will not even try to describe, I've just never seen anything quite like it onscreen. Largely practical effects too, astonishing.
Not a bit of that is in that line, of course. Great line, but isn't about the movie, it's about the author.
And honestly, the author is a bit out on a limb with much of how she has actually interpreted The Odyssey (film) itself, must also be said! And not just by me, or by film critics naturally, but also other classics scholars:
Emily Wilson used baffling arguments to flay Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem.
I mean when early on she summarily defined the work of cinema as "light and noise" and moved on, it was pretty clear that Wilson just doesn't have a ton of respect or feeling for epic scale movies in general. Which is fine! Everyone has types of art that they don't jibe with. But you don't go to the person who's not keen on dance for a good assessment of the new ballet, negative or positive.
And if one of the things someone claims about a movie is that casting actors of color flattened all of those roles into the stereotypical "Black best friend," but not by anything that can be seen in the script or their performances, so seemingly suggesting 'we', to use her skeptical punctuation motif, should read them that way merely because they aren't white, worth a pause to consider that while haterism can be a rush to read (or write), it can also mask any number of deeply iffy assertions that could definitely stand to be questioned!
