MARK JUDGE: Emily Wilson’s Odyssey Review and the Snowflake Entertainment Press.

Christopher Nolan‘s new film The Odyssey is a box-office hit. But University of Pennsylvania classics scholar Emily Wilson, who published her own translation of Homer’s epic in 2017, says Nolan’s script is poorly written and lacking in emotional depth and character development. And, she adds, there are no sex scenes — and all the food looks horrible.

“We need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation,” Wilson says. “[But] these desires seem stripped from Odysseus. He doesn’t seem to want food. He doesn’t seem to want sex. What does he want?”

“He’s clever … and smart and therefore a fascinating character,” Wilson says. But, she adds, “the movie gives us a version of Matt Damon as Odysseus, who is not required to be smart, instead he’s just constantly troubled by anxiety about his role in the Trojan Horse and the Trojan War. … That’s a shame.”

Nolan wrote the script for The Odyssey himself, which Wilson feels may have been a mistake: “I do think that it would have been better if Nolan had hired a scriptwriter, because that would have solved a lot of the issues.”

It’s a good film and well worth seeing on the biggest screen near you – but it could have been so much more.