ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Joyce Carol Oates Defends The Odyssey and Slams Translator for Scathing Review: ‘Speaks in the Crude Language of MAGA Folks.’
Author Joyce Carol Oates came to the defense of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” after translator Emily Wilson wrote a viral review attacking the film.
“Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers,” Carol wrote on X. “One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”
Advantage Frank J. Fleming!
It’s pretty funny to me that before The Odyssey came out, there were a bunch of people saying, “Nolan used the super woke Emily Wilson translation so you know it’s going to be woke trash!” and now you can play a really tough game of, “Was this said by Emily Wilson or Matt Walsh?”
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) July 27, 2026
I finally saw The Odyssey last night; brilliant cinematography and production design, and the nearly three hour film moves at a surprisingly brisk pace to pack all its locales and subplots in. The colorblind casting, and the small role by Elliot (nee Ellen) Page were only distracting because of how obsessed Twitter had been over them, and the resulting backlash to the backlash likely drove ticket sales, just as Nolan knew it would.
The dialogue is awfully clunky at times, but there have been previous epic films where the dialogue was off-putting, but not enough to detract from the knockout visuals. For two examples, the deliberately minimalist dialogue in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Something or Other, and George Lucas’ original Star Wars from 1977, which had loads of what even Alec Guinness called “dialogue [that] was pretty ropey,” which didn’t stop it from becoming an epoch-defining movie. (As Joseph Kahn wrote on Monday in a Hollywood Reporter article memorably headlined, “Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole!”, the movie executive’s job “is to make money. Real money. Marvel money. The kind of money Hollywood made when it threw muscular white guys named Chris into rubber suits and raked in billions in tickets, billions in toys, billions in theme parks. So much money the studio could dig another five levels down for more parking spaces.” 1977-era Star Wars money.)
In contrast, The Odyssey seems more like a throwback to the earnest biblical epics that Hollywood endlessly churned out in the 1950s through the mid-1960s. Nolan himself said its style was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which was made on a low budget for a biblical-era film, and where everyone (except for David Bowie’s Pontius Pilate) speaks in colloquial American accents, including Harvey Keitel’s “dees and does” Brooklyn-accented Judas.) “As for the other film Nolan privately screened for his cast and crew, Tom Holland recently revealed that he called Sony chief Tom Rothman to arrange a 70mm screening of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ for the cast of ‘The Odyssey’ during pre-production,” World of Reel reported a couple of weeks ago. Nolan could have definitely benefited from Robert Bolt‘s crisp screenwriting.