The Odyssey, After Everyone Else Has a Say

By Andy — 2026-07-26 — Literary News

Nolan released his Odyssey film a week ago. Everyone else released their hot takes days before that.

There's a strange moment when a story so old it's basically public property gets remade for IMAX. The ink isn't even dry on the reviews, but the cultural pile-on has already started: feminists saying the tale was built on silencing women, directors saying it's finally worth filming properly, critics asking what a Homerist even thinks anymore.

The film itself—all $250 million of it, shot entirely on new IMAX cameras—exists as something more or less separate from all this noise now.

Rebecca Solnit just argued that classical culture is, literally, rape culture, using the Odyssey as her prime example. She's right that the text contains material people have spent centuries glossing over. But that observation, which should sting, has already been absorbed into the marketing. The film is being sold partly on the promise that it asks new questions about Penelope, about what women do while men sail.

Actually, that's not quite fair to the film. Nolan drew his approach from Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of the Odyssey, which is itself a careful reckoning with the original Greek text. The choices were already being made before the cameras rolled. There's something more intelligent happening there than simple reclamation.

What troubles me is the speed.

Meanwhile, Fanny Howe's posthumous This Poor Book arrived quietly this month, assembled in her final months from thirty years of earlier poems. No hype cycle. No film deal. The work reconfigures her scattered poems into one long continuous piece—something approaching what you might call a summation, except she wasn't trying to sum anything up. She was trying to stay confused and faithful and alive in the confusion until the end.

The book is austere. It won't sell tickets.

No one's fighting over what it means yet because almost no one's read it. Which seems, for a work about bewilderment and mystery, more or less appropriate.