For all its monsters, divine retribution, and shipwrecks, Odyssey has always been a poem about an ordinary human longing: The desire to go home. Which is why watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey feels strangely unfulfilling. AdvertisementIn the London Review of Books, classicist Emily Wilson, whose 2017 feminist interpretation of Odyssey has been cited by Nolan as one of his chief source materials, writes, “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. AdvertisementIt makes Odyssey a poem about narrative authority, about who gets to tell the story, whose account gets accepted as truth and whose voice is dismissed. Nolan’s film is a cinematic triumph, but in the end, it is the story of an uncomplicated man.