This is not a review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. I haven't seen it yet and from where I stand it'll be a while before I do. But I've read and listened to some of the praise and criticism of his adaptation and I've read the translation upon which some of the film is based. Reportedly, Nolan was imspired by an Emily Wilson translation. To what extent, I don't know. What I do know is that I wasn't. A poet she is not. She is a drab writer and quick to note that with the advent of the film, copies of her book are "flying off the shelves" which is a good thing for her academic pocketbook. There have been far more enchanting translations of the so-called Homeric poem, far richer in the use of the English language, far more visual.

The question is and to date unanswered: Was there ever a Homer who wrote this "Homeric" masterpiece? Ah the mystery of history. Some scholars have posed that the earliest known version of The Odyssey is not a single surviving original text, because it began as an oral poem long before it was written down. The oldest surviving written evidence is some fragments on papyrus from Egypt dating to the 3rd century BCE, while the poem itself is generally thought to have been composed in the 7th or 8th century BCE. Since then? Many versions in many languages. A free-for-all if you will.

More important to regard in this case is the question of adaptation. The salient word here is adaptation: the process of making a work of art upon the basis of elements provided by another work. If you take a work of literature and adapt it to another medium, such as cinema,  you have two choices: a faithful documentary or a new version. My understanding is that Nolan did not create a documentary. He took the core of the "Homeric" poem and its infrastructure, envisioned the imagery he wanted to create, and created it. One historian has noted “that there is no historically accurate interpretation of Odysseus because he is a mythical figure, and an impressionist interpretation of ancient history was an improvement over a painstaking attempt to get every historical detail right, because it's impossible.”

If you follow the myriad adaptations from BC to AD through the Middle Ages and the 19th century you’ll come face to face with an adaptation of The Odyssey into one of the most heralded novels of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Not a re-telling, an adaptation. Joyce embraced the core of the ancient poem and spun it like a top, and spread the infrastructure over it to encompass the spin.

Like Joyce, Nolan did not create a re-telling.

Christopher Nolan has emerged to that elevated level of master filmmakers that includes Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, and Ridley Scott. Does this film keep him there? When I finally see it, I'll know. And if so, I hope he has begun scratching the itch of The Iliad. If only he can find a vibrant and useful translation.