Novelist Joyce Carol Oates has waded into a literary firefight over Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey, calling the classicist Emily Wilson "classless" and "haughty" after Wilson published a withering essay in the London Review of Books attacking the blockbuster.

Wilson, who published a landmark English translation of Homer's Odyssey in 2017, did not hold back. She wrote that Nolan's script was "abysmal," that no character had convincing motivation, and that the film lacked "psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth" with "nothing convincing to say" (The Guardian, 30 July 2026). She described the film as showcasing Nolan's "usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality," its vision "too confused, its characters too underdeveloped." She even said she "would be ashamed to have written any part of" it (The Guardian, 27 July 2026). Yet she concluded on a gracious note, calling the film's release "still an event to celebrate" (Los Angeles Times, 27 July 2026).

Oates was having none of it. On X, formerly Twitter, she said Wilson "speaks in the crude language of Maga folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers" rather than disagreeing collegially, and suggested a translator ought to be "just a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful of others who are acting in good faith" (The Guardian, 30 July 2026). She called Wilson's review "haughty" (TheWrap, 30 July 2026) and labelled Wilson herself "classless" (X, 28 July 2026).

The irony is layered. Oates had previously tweeted her own unfavourable comparison of Nolan's Odyssey to a 1997 Hallmark Channel television adaptation by Andrei Konchalovsky (The Guardian, 30 July 2026). She also weighed in on translations themselves, calling Daniel Mendelsohn's version of The Odyssey "poetic" and the most elegant, while dismissing Wilson's translation as "not for me" (X, 28 July 2026; X, 29 July 2026). She mused that "a graphic novel of The Odyssey could be terrific, too" (X, 29 July 2026).

Nolan himself had praised Wilson's translation before her critique appeared (The Guardian, 27 July 2026), adding an extra twist: the film-maker whose work she dismantled had publicly admired the very scholarship from which the attack came.

The exchange has drawn attention partly because of who these two figures are — Oates, one of America's most prolific and decorated novelists, and Wilson, a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania and the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English — but also because the argument quickly moved beyond the film itself and into questions of tone, professionalism and who gets to weigh in on a 3,000-year-old text.

Whether the film deserves the heat is a question for critics and audiences. What is already clear is that Homer's epic still has the power to start a very modern fight.