Did We Watch the Same Film?

When I read Emily Wilson’s comments about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I genuinely paused for a moment and wondered whether we’d watched the same film.

Not because I think she’s wrong.

Not because I think I’m right.

But because many of the things she felt were missing from the film were exactly the things that stayed with me long after I left the cinema.

She described the screenplay as lacking psychological, emotional, ethical and political depth. I walked home discussing the burden of leadership, the cost of war, memory, grief, identity, family and what it really means to find your way home after everything you’ve been through.

How could two people come away with such fundamentally different experiences?

The more I’ve thought about it, the less I think this is really about Christopher Nolan or Emily Wilson.

I think it’s about how we experience stories.

Meeting a story halfway

Over the years I’ve realised that I’m perfectly happy to meet a story halfway.

Whether it’s Christopher Nolan, Tablo, SUGA, a beautifully sequenced album or even a DJ set, I actually enjoy doing some of the work myself.

I don’t necessarily want every emotion explained or every motivation neatly labelled.

I like connecting the dots.

I like sitting with ambiguity.

I like walking home still turning scenes over in my head.

As I thought about it, I realised this isn’t unique to film. It’s how I listen to music too. I rarely shuffle albums because I want to experience them as the artist intended. I love lyricists like Tablo and SUGA because they trust the listener to connect the dots rather than explain every thought. Even live, I’m often as interested in the story a DJ tells across an entire set as I am in any individual song. Perhaps that’s why Nolan’s film landed so differently for me. I wasn’t waiting for every theme to be stated outright. I was happy to find them between the lines.

Perhaps that’s why Nolan’s film resonated with me so strongly. I never felt it was withholding emotion. I felt it trusted me to find it.

That distinction matters.

We never arrive empty-handed

Emily Wilson has spent years living with Homer’s Odyssey. She has translated it, studied it and undoubtedly understands its language and nuances in ways I never will.

I didn’t walk into the cinema carrying that knowledge.

I walked in as someone who loves film, storytelling and adaptation.

Those are different starting points.

Neither is inherently better.

They’re simply different lenses.

If you’ve spent years immersed in every nuance of a text, perhaps an adaptation is always in conversation with the original.

If you haven’t, perhaps you’re more willing to judge the film on its own terms.

What do we ask of an adaptation?

It’s a question I’ve found myself returning to again and again.

Do I want an adaptation to faithfully reproduce the original?

Or do I want it to become something new while remaining true to its spirit?

I’ve found myself asking this with Chinese drama remakes, musicals based on films, different translations of the same novel and even cover versions of songs.

I’m rarely looking for a photocopy.

I’m interested in interpretation.

What does this creator see in the original?

What are they trying to say?

What choices have they made, and why?

Sometimes those choices work for me.

Sometimes they don’t.

But I don’t think different automatically means lesser.

Perhaps we were asking different questions

The longer I’ve sat with Emily Wilson’s review, the less interested I’ve become in deciding who is “right”.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I wonder if we weren’t actually watching different films at all.

Perhaps we were simply asking different questions of the same one.

She was watching a dialogue with Homer.

I was watching Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of Homer.

Those are not quite the same thing.

And perhaps that’s one of the joys of art.

Two thoughtful people can sit in the same cinema, watch the same film and leave believing they experienced something entirely different.

Neither has to be mistaken.

Sometimes they were simply looking for different things.

For me, that’s not a weakness of storytelling.

It’s one of its greatest strengths.

If that idea sounds familiar, it also explains why I haven’t fallen out of love with K-dramas despite spending the last year immersed in Chinese dramas. I’ve realised I’m following storytellers, not countries.