July 27, 2026
Aegean rage in the comments
An Uncomplicated Man
Nolan’s Greek epic sparks a comment war over spectacle, depth, and very ugly food
TLDR: Emily Wilson’s review says Nolan’s big-screen *Odyssey* is entertaining but shallow, more spectacle than soul. Commenters are split between calling that the perfect Nolan diagnosis and defending the film as beautiful, rewatchable, and unfairly slammed over bizarre details like bad-looking food.
Christopher Nolan’s giant, expensive take on The Odyssey was supposed to be a thunderous trip through monsters, shipwrecks and heroic homecoming. Instead, the real action may be in the replies. Emily Wilson’s review in the London Review of Books praised the movie as watchable, family-friendly and easy enough to follow, but absolutely torched it for being emotionally thin — basically a very fancy fireworks show with louder swords. She says Nolan once again delivers big noise, big flames and big male angst, but not much heart.
And wow, readers had thoughts. One camp instantly turned Wilson’s line about Nolan’s “grandiosity and superficiality” into a full-blown career summary, which is the kind of drive-by insult that launches a thousand nodding heads. But others pushed back hard. One commenter said, in plain non-scholar language, that the movie was simply good enough to recommend, beautiful to look at, and deeper than the review allowed — though they also dragged the armor for looking like “low budget sci-fi TV,” which is honestly its own side quest. Another reader went full fan mode with a 10/10 and a mission to rewatch it in IMAX, preferably without being condemned to front-row neck pain.
Then came the funniest mini-drama: outrage over the review’s complaint that there are no sex scenes and the food looks bad. That sparked immediate “you can’t win” energy, with commenters joking that if Nolan had added sex, he’d be accused of turning Homer into softcore nonsense. And in perhaps the most brutally relatable reaction of all, one person admitted they gave up reading the review two-thirds in and wanted to know what everyone else was getting from it. In other words: the movie may be about Odysseus, but the comments are about Team Nolan vs Team Overrated.
Key Points
- •The article reviews Christopher Nolan’s $250 million adaptation of *The Odyssey* as an accessible but emotionally limited spectacle.
- •It says the film continues themes and motifs associated with Nolan’s prior work, including fractured time, survival, memory and large-scale destruction.
- •The review cites Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus and Matt Damon’s Odysseus when discussing the Sirens sequence and the film’s treatment of character.
- •The article contextualizes Homer’s *Odyssey* as an earlier adaptation shaped by the written alphabet and by social and political conditions in archaic Greek society.
- •It argues that while Nolan’s film hints at major themes from the poem, it does not fully realize them because of underdeveloped characters and a scattered vision.