New Delhi, July 28 -- she would be ashamed, she told Variety, to have written a single line of it.

Wilson is the classicist whose 2017 W.W. Norton translation of Homer's Odyssey Nolan publicly credited as a central reference during the film's development. She spent years of close scholarly work restoring moral weight to Odysseus, a figure Homer himself had rendered as complicated and morally suspect. What arrived in theaters this month, in her assessment, was an "abysmal" and "gimmicky" version that stripped the ancient hero down to a "simple action hero." The screenplay had nothing convincing to say.

The criticism lands with specific force because of Nolan's own promotional strategy. Throughout the campaign for his adaptation, the dire...