Christopher Nolan spent months promoting Emily Wilson's acclaimed translation of The Odyssey during the press tour for his film adaptation, but Wilson has now delivered a scathing review of the finished film. Writing in the London Review of Books, she criticised Nolan's work as combining "grandiosity and superficiality" and said she would be "ashamed" to have written any part of the script, despite being flattered that he had read at least her opening line.

Wilson's review, pointedly titled "An Uncomplicated Man" (a jab at Nolan's fondness for quoting her line "Tell me about a complicated man"), praised the film's battle scenes but faulted Nolan for simplifying Odysseus into a more likeable modern hero and stripping away much of the moral complexity of Homer's original. While she acknowledged he could be forgiven for cutting most of the gods, she argued the adaptation lacks anything meaningful to say about time, memory, history or war, calling his vision of the world "not quite big enough" for either real gods or people unlike ourselves.