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In the spirit of Zeus’ law to be generous toward guests, I’m honored to welcome classics professor Emily Wilson to the land of film criticism. As she’s recently learned, it’s an adventure that sails smack into islands of musky internet trolls and clashes with cinematic and literary titans like Christopher Nolan and Joyce Carol Oates.

Nolan credits the opening line of Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” — “Tell me about a complicated man” — as partly inspiring his adaptation of the ancient epic, which, nearly a month into its release, is soldiering toward a billion-dollar box office gross. Symbiotically, Wilson’s edition is now the No. 2 bestselling book in the country. That Wilson’s incendiary essay in the London Review of Books revealed she doesn’t think much of Nolan’s blockbuster struck some as hubris, including Oates, who took to social media to decry the scholar’s “tone of dismissal” and “haughty superiority.”

If you haven’t been following the controversy, Wilson felt that Nolan had flattened the saga by mostly erasing the Greek gods and Odysseus’ wit, lust and thorny contradictions. Oates likened the tone of Wilson’s critique to the “crude language of MAGA folks.” In short: Wilson snuck a 2,700-year-old poem through the gates of mainstream taste — and after that victory, her arrogance left her marooned.

Sounds familiar if you’ve read Homer. Less so if you’ve only seen the film. Wilson is right that Nolan’s movie lacks Odysseus’ egomaniacal brilliance.

I’m here to play peacemaker. Wilson adores Odysseus so much that she has his bow tattooed on her right leg. Frankly, Nolan doesn’t seem to like the wily, libidinous and violent trickster-veteran of the poem — half Rhett Butler, half Rambo in “First Blood” — as much as Wilson or I do. Because if he did, that Odysseus would be onscreen.

But having seen his movie twice, it’s obvious that Nolan is less interested in Wilson’s first line than her fifth: “Tell the old story for our modern times.” That, he’s done. His take on Homer is, as I wrote in my original review, “a moralistic ‘Oppenheimer’ prequel.” For the record, I like it anyway.

Film critics and translators start work in the same place. Step one: What is the artist’s intent? Wilson considered the entirety of Homer’s tale and decided the right word for polytropos was “complicated.” I weighed what Nolan chose to protect, tweak and abandon in his own version and concluded that he wanted to make an action-tragedy about societal decline.

Movies must be measured against their own ambitions. A stoner comedy can’t be graded like a Shakespearean drama (and vice versa). Here’s where Wilson runs aground. She wants to allow Nolan creative freedom, knowing that the Greek playwrights rebooted figures like Odysseus and Medea just like Marvel treats Spider-Man. There’s even a spinoff of the original poem in which Odysseus has kids with Circe.

Yet, storytellers have to protect the core of their characters. Medea must be angry, Spider-Man must be helpful and Odysseus, dang it, must have swagger. Damon doesn’t.

This is why Wilson deserves empathy even if she can’t bring herself to grant Nolan the same grace. As a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania, she’ll be on the front line of academics condemned to unteach Nolan’s heavily altered screenplay to students who will arrive quoting it chapter and verse. For decades to come, high school kids — probably even a few high school teachers — are just going to pop in his Blu-ray and call it a day.

Nolan does hit his target, eventually. Yet his script wobbles. He’s made a movie about Odysseus’ remorse for inventing the Trojan horse without a crucial scene: the moment he invents it. We see Odysseus silently stroll the beach outside Troy, but not the pride he must have felt running back to base to pitch an idea that will finish the war and let his allies go home. The emotional arc Nolan wants to trace should start there. The beat’s absence is confounding since Odysseus also needs to appear clever (and never does).

This is what it means to measure a film against its ambitions. Only after we accept that Nolan is solely interested in human mistakes can we gauge his disregard for the Greek gods. I dig that choice — it’s bold — yet still think he flubs it by not replacing the magical powers of Charlize Theron’s Calypso and Zendaya’s Athena with, say, a personality. What a waste of two terrific actors. It’s no wonder Oates stuck up for him. Her novel “Blonde” also stripped the agency from love goddess Marilyn Monroe and its own 2022 movie adaptation launched a thousand hot takes.

There will never be a faithful modern film version of “The Odyssey.” No, not even whatever AI slop Elon Musk claims he’s green-lighted, a project I’m sure will come to fruition as fast as his any-year-now claim that he’s landing on Mars.

The issue isn’t just the poem’s length. It’s that today’s audiences have zero stomach for happy endings about horrible wrongs. We can barely rationalize the slaughter of the suitors. No one wants to watch Homer’s gory scene after that, when Telemachus cruelly orders a dozen enslaved girls to clean up the mess and then executes them too.

Only a seven-and-a-half hour Italian miniseries produced by Dino de Laurentiis in 1968 dares mention that second bloodbath and even in that, the women are hung offscreen after we’ve been assured (fictitiously) that the maids tried to kill them first. (Side note: Dino’s Penelope, played by the mighty Irene Papas, is my favorite.)

Previous movie adaptations of “The Odyssey” soft-pedal or ignore the hero’s postwar PTSD. You catch a glimpse of it in the two-part NBC special from 1997 in which Armand Assante’s Odysseus rescues a Trojan toddler. But mainly, he spends more time hot-tubbing with Vanessa Williams’ Calypso.

That’s not a knock. The ’90s “Odyssey” is as tacky as Caesars Palace but Assante’s smooth-talking horndog is closer to my ideal Odysseus than Damon’s neutered mope. He sleeps with both Calypso and Circe and still earns his tender reunion with Penelope by choosing her beloved wrinkles over those gods’ immortal perfection. (For what it’s worth, Oates is a fan of it too. Wilson has yet to comment.)

Only the two most recent versions — Nolan’s and Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 “The Return,” starring a sinewy Ralph Fiennes — center on Odysseus’ culpability for the carnage of the Trojan War. Damon’s Odysseus is numbed by the massacre of Troy’s civilians; Fiennes’ hates himself for leading the best men of Ithaca to their death, gutting his own community in the heedless destruction of another. I’m tempted to diagnose the current gloom as the result of our own post-9/11 forever wars.

The 21st century has seen enough genocide for Homer to compose a hundred sequels. Only those stubbornly ignorant to the human cost of actual combat would be psyched to bring on more of it. (Just ask the veterans in my family how they feel things are going in Iran.) At the end of “The Return,” when Fiennes stands entrail-smeared before his beloved Penelope, she recoils from the horror of the battlefield brought right into their home.

That interpretation has its flaws too. The middle stretch has a concocted outdoor chase sequence that feels like a clumsy campground slasher. Wilson applauded its “stylish sparseness.” Fair enough. I’d still love to invite her and Nolan and even Oates to a banquet of wine and roasted fowl and have a blast agreeing to disagree. No weapons allowed.

In a book nerd battle that’s become so epic, even The Onion has satirized the saga, acclaimed author Susan Orlean has grabbed the mic, and Emily Wilson is admitting she has one regret in her review of “The Odyssey.”

Earlier this week, Joyce Carol Oates panned Wilson’s critique of Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation, and now acclaimed author and journalist Susan Orlean has entered the chat.

“I loved The Odyssey (saw it twice) and love any piece of art that gets people talking and reading and thinking,” she posted on Threads on Thursday. “Emily Wilson is being a bit of a jerk.”

Choice words from Orlean, but she knows a thing or two about film adaptations: her 1998 book “The Orchid Thief” inspired Spike Jonze’s 2002 film “Adaptation” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep (who played Orlean), and her 1998 article “Life’s Swell” was brought to screen as “Blue Crush,” also in 2002.

“Why can’t things be the things they are and if they’re different from their source material that’s their new form and their own thing and I SAY THIS FROM EXPERIENCE,” she added in a separate post.

The ire stems from a biting 4,200-word takedown of “The Odyssey” penned by classicist Wilson, who translated Homer’s poem in 2017.

In early interviews discussing the film, Nolan referenced Wilson’s translation, which subsequently skyrocketed in sales. A representative for Audible told The Times on Wednesday that, year over year, purchases of Wilson’s “Odyssey” translation were up by more than 600% across Audible’s U.S., U.K. and Canadian marketplaces.

Wilson’s review, published in the London Review of Books, essentially dubbed Nolan’s film a dud for academics with taste and a blockbuster hit for virgins who like special effects that go “Boom!”

“Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours,” she wrote. “It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

Pulitzer Prize finalist Oates, like Orlean, is also team Nolan. “Her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said of Wilson’s review in a post on X. Oates added that rather than Wilson disagreeing with “interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” she benefited from Nolan’s film and then attacked it.

Wilson’s review went so viral it crashed the London Review of Books website for a few hours on Monday. On the heels of the missive’s publication, Wilson posted on Bluesky that an earlier draft of the essay was actually more cutting than the version that went live.

“Was I too mean? Or not mean enough? I went through my first draft and tried to take out the snark,” she wrote. “To quote the great poet: ‘Though much is taken, much remains… That which we are, we are.’”

She added in the same thread: “The oddest thing about the response to this essay is people who say it’s ‘personal’. You can disagree about some or all of it! I may well be wrong! But it’s not ‘personal’ to analyze a film or other work of art, even negatively. Criticism is more than ‘Hurray!’ or ‘Hiss!’”

One criticism Wilson admits she regrets in retrospect is her take on Nolan’s race-neutral casting. In the review she wrote that while the casting launched a culture war, it wasn’t actually progressive. She likened the characters portrayed by Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins and Travis Scott to “versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.”

On Bluesky, she wrote, “In this piece, I regret the paragraph about the uses of the POC actors – who are all great, but IMO under-utilized (and why couldn‘t Himesh Patel be Odysseus instead?) I still think the film largely wastes its strong cast, but I framed it badly.”

Days after a classicist who translated Homer’s “The Odyssey” in 2017 eviscerated the Christopher Nolan film based on the poem, Joyce Carol Oates has entered the debate.

She’s Team Nolan.

The National Book Award-winning author is known for her (sometimes controversial) hot takes on social media, and on Wednesday, she stepped up to the plate in opposition of translator Emily Wilson’s brutal takedown of Nolan’s big-screen adaptation of “The Odyssey.” Nolan had previously said Wilson’s translation inspired him in making the film. But Wilson wrote that she would be ashamed to have written any part of the script.

“Her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said of Wilson’s review in a post on X. “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.”

Wilson’s biting missive, published in the London Review of Books this week, went so viral that it reportedly crashed the outlet’s website for a few hours Monday. The British American classicist’s take on the film was especially notable because, last fall, Nolan quoted Wilson’s translation when telling Empire magazine why he was drawn to the story. “I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man,’” he said.

Wilson’s version of “The Odyssey” subsequently spiked in sales. A representative for Audible told The Times on Wednesday that, year over year, purchases of Wilson’s “Odyssey” translation were up by more than 600% across Audible’s U.S., U.K. and Canadian marketplaces. Daily global title sales rose nearly sixfold during the week the movie premiered. And in the nine days following wide release, daily global sales averaged around 20 times more than the rate before the premiere, showing sustained demand for Wilson’s translation.

Oates, who penned the Pulitzer Prize-nominated “Blonde,” said that, within the world of translators, Wilson’s review “seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.”

“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,” Oates wrote.

In separate posts on the social platform, Oates said she highly recommended Nolan’s adaption and that she wasn’t a fan of Wilson’s translation. “What I’d read of Emily Wilson’s translation was not for me,” she wrote, adding that she assumes it was “deliberately written to appeal to an audience comfortable with YA (young adult) directness & spareness of vocabulary — that is, with the intention of being marketable, adopted by high school classes.

“With a more poetic, elevated speech, you are naturally limiting your audience,” continued the author, who further noted that there was nothing wrong with a direct, commercial approach. “Why not profit from a classic work not protected by copyright?”

In the viral review by Wilson, who also translated Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer’s “Iliad,” she likened Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic to Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones.”

Her sharpest critiques were aimed at Nolan’s rendering of Homer’s female characters, of which she said there were more than in his other films “thanks to the source material” but that, in contrast to the poem, none of them “had much to say.” Wilson said Nolan’s race-neutral casting was essentially a wash as “[m]ost of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.”

And don’t get her started on the whole point of the poem — the cost of war — of which Wilson quipped, “We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it — a very different point.”

Daryl Hall recently underwent a kidney transplant and he’s already feeling better.

The 79-year-old musician — formerly of the iconic rock duo Hall & Oates — took to social media Tuesday to share the news.

“I thought you should know that I recently received a kidney transplant from a very kind and generous living donor,” Hall wrote in an Instagram post. “It happened a couple of weeks ago, and I’m already starting to feel better. It was, according to my doctors, a complete success!”

The “Dreamtime” singer-songwriter added that he expects to be “back to normal in a few months” and promised “more music and lots of Daryl’s House shows” in the future. Hall has been hosting “Live from Daryl’s House,” a web series where he and his band perform with guest artists, on and off since 2007.

A living-donor kidney transplant is when a healthy living person donates their kidney. The recipient is usually experiencing kidney failure. According to the National Kidney Foundation, “kidneys from a living donor may last longer and are more likely to start working right away than a kidney from a deceased donor.”

Hall did not share any additional details regarding his kidney transplant.

The “Bring It On Home” singer has opened up about other health issues in the past. In 2005, Hall & Oates had to postpone a series of shows after Hall was diagnosed with Lyme disease.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection that is spread through the bite of infected black-legged ticks — also known as deer ticks. Symptoms can include fever, rash, facial paralysis, an irregular heartbeat and arthritis, according to the CDC.