I don't like Christopher Nolan.

There, I said it. Inception drove me mad. Interstellar was fine, but so determined to make me feel something that I almost refused on principle. As for Tenet and Oppenheimer — please, let's not begin unless everyone has cleared their afternoon.

My problem isn't simply Nolan’s famously questionable feminist record, although we will return to the women later. It is his lack of what I would call a pro-human perspective. I rarely feel that he knows his characters as people: complicated, contradictory creatures with private embarrassments, irrational impulses and the capacity to ruin an otherwise perfectly good plan simply because they are having a bad day. They often feel more like elegant pieces in an intellectual machine, moving exactly where the Big Idea requires them to go.

Yes, the actors are brilliant. We are talking about Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Cillian Murphy and now Matt Damon. But I rarely find their characters as alive as they are in other directors’ films. Nolan gives them magnificent architecture to occupy. I am not always sure he gives them somewhere to live.

So the fact that I loved The Odyssey came as a genuine surprise.

This isn't hate speech against Christopher Nolan, by the way. It is merely a personal incompatibility, like discovering that a perfectly respectable person chews loudly. Nolan remains one of the most important directors working today. I don't believe that he is a genius, but I am beginning to think that might be beside the point. He is certainly a great director. More importantly, he is a great trickster — which, considering the hero he has just adapted, feels extremely appropriate.

Nolan may be the biggest auteur still making blockbusters at this scale. James Cameron and Steven Spielberg belong somewhere in the same conversation, but Nolan’s films are unmistakably his: the stern men, the moral puzzles, the collapsing timelines, the apocalyptic bass and the general feeling that someone will soon explain theoretical physics to you beside a very large machine.

That consistency matters. At a time when many blockbusters seem engineered by committee until every identifying feature has been professionally sanded away, Nolan makes films that couldn't plausibly have come from anybody else. Millions of people recognise his visual language and willingly buy tickets for it. That isn't a small achievement. It is a form of authorship powerful enough to survive inside the Hollywood system.

He is also the undisputed master of making format part of the story. The Odyssey was the first feature filmed entirely with IMAX cameras, and its 70mm presentation was available at only 41 IMAX locations worldwide. Those 41 screens alone generated around $6 million during the opening weekend, while IMAX screenings contributed $51.8 million to the film’s $263.8 million global debut. In other words, audiences didn't merely want to see the film. They wanted to see it in the exact enormous, logistically inconvenient way Nolan intended.

Naturally, TikTok responded by watching it on an Apple Watch. This may be the most culturally accurate summary of 2026: one man redesigns film technology to capture the sea with unprecedented scale; someone else compresses it onto a screen the size of a postage stamp.

The reported numbers were equally Homeric. The film cost approximately $250 million to produce, with Universal reportedly spending another $125 million on marketing. It has since passed $1.2 billion worldwide, proving once again that Nolan can turn an ancient Greek poem, a three-hour running time and a limited number of bathroom opportunities into mass entertainment.

Nolan is also not afraid of controversy — or, perhaps more accurately, understands how to transform controversy into free publicity.

The Odyssey caused arguments in almost every available corner of the internet. Some viewers thought it was too woke. Others accused it of misogyny. Some classicists objected to its departures from Homer, while other critics praised the way Nolan combined material from The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid and later traditions. There were complaints about the casting, the language, the gods, the women, the running time and, inevitably, historical accuracy in a story featuring a cyclops and a tentacled sea monster.

The disagreements weren't minor. Emily Wilson, whose celebrated translation helped introduce Homer to a new generation of readers, attacked the film’s emotional and ethical shallowness. Classicist Emily Hauser argued that Nolan had softened Odysseus into a modern, remorseful hero while stripping nuance from several of the poem’s women. Other critics called the film a masterpiece and praised precisely its moral complexity, ambition and depiction of the cost of war.

This, to me, is one of the film’s greatest successes. The controversy is what pushes a movie beyond content and towards art. It creates space for competing readings instead of giving us a single approved message to repost with the correct emoji.

You can dislike The Odyssey. You can think Homer would have asked for his name to be removed. But indifference is difficult — and indifference is the real enemy of a three-hour epic.

The central idea of Nolan’s Odyssey is simple, painfully contemporary and distinctly anti-war: every great military victory contains the beginning of another disaster.

The Trojan Horse initially appears to be the ultimate triumph of intelligence. Odysseus thinks beyond the conventions of battle, invents a strategy nobody else has imagined and ends a ten-year war. Then Troy burns. Civilians die. A civilisation disappears. The clever solution works — and that is precisely the problem.

In Homer’s world, Odysseus’ suffering can't be reduced to one violation of “Zeus’s law”. The epic repeatedly invokes xenia, the sacred obligation of hospitality protected by Zeus, but his journey is also shaped by his own pride, the mistakes of his crew and Poseidon’s revenge after the blinding of Polyphemus. Nolan rearranges these forces into something more psychologically modern: a man trying to live after discovering that his greatest achievement was also an atrocity.

This is where The Odyssey begins to resemble Oppenheimer. Odysseus and J. Robert Oppenheimer are brilliant men who solve impossible problems in the name of a greater cause. Both succeed. Both then realise that success has destroyed the world they understood.

The fall of Troy marks the end of an age. The atomic bomb creates a world in which human extinction is no longer divine punishment or mythological metaphor, but a technical possibility. Neither man can undo what he has made. Both must learn to live inside the consequences of their ingenuity.

It isn't a particularly complicated message. Apparently, however, we still need it. Perhaps screenings of Oppenheimer and The Odyssey should be compulsory before anyone is allowed to become a head of state. There could be a short test afterwards. Anyone who identifies the burning city as “a strong strategic outcome” would be asked to try again.

Then we come to the women.

I understand the criticism. Nolan has a long history of writing women as wives, memories, moral anchors and beautifully lit sources of male trauma. The Odyssey doesn't suddenly turn him into a pro-feminist. Some of Homer’s women lose complexity in the adaptation, and Hauser has persuasively pointed to what disappears: Nausicaa is removed, Calypso becomes a more conventional obstacle, and Penelope loses the famous bed test that proves she is every bit as perceptive and cunning as her husband.

And yet I don't agree that Nolan simply diminishes the women here. If anything, the film seems to trust them more than it trusts its men.

Circe’s episode shows us where the masculine world of conquest ultimately leads: appetite, cruelty and transformation into beasts. Helen exposes the obscenity of a war supposedly fought in her name, as if thousands of men dying could ever restore a woman’s honour without asking what she wanted. Penelope understands power more clearly than the men occupying her home. Athena remains a voice of intelligence and direction. Even Calypso, who is very far from saintly, represents an alternative to the endless cycle of ambition, violence and return.

Yes, these women function as ideas. But that is true of nearly everyone in a Nolan film. His men are also extensions of concepts: ambition, guilt, obsession, sacrifice, time. If the characters are pieces on a board, the women in The Odyssey are often the only pieces that can see the whole game.

They don't always control the story, but they understand it. In Nolan’s universe, this may be the highest compliment available.

One of the loveliest consequences of The Odyssey has happened away from the cinema.

According to Circana BookScan figures reported by Publishers Weekly, US print sales across editions of Homer’s Odyssey rose by 42 per cent in 2025, following the film’s announcement, and were up another 76 per cent year-on-year in 2026. Emily Wilson’s translation became the bestselling edition, followed by Robert Fagles’ version and Gareth Hinds’ graphic-novel adaptation.

The effect is visible in libraries too. In San Diego, readers placed 278 holds on The Odyssey in July 2026 alone, compared with 74 during the entirety of 2025.

This is why we need ambitious adaptations more than we need the ninth reboot of a superhero whose parents have already died in several cinematic universes. Nolan’s film doesn't replace Homer, nor should it. It opens a door. Some viewers will leave the cinema and buy the poem. Others will discover Circe, The Penelopiad, Ithaca or one of the many retellings that challenge the masculine centre of the original.

A blockbuster has made people argue about Bronze Age ethics and compare translations of ancient Greek poetry. This is objectively more exciting than another week of debating a celebrity’s lip filler.

It is also still entertainment. Spending 173 minutes watching ships break against the sea is not inherently nobler than scrolling TikTok, but at least you emerge with one continuous memory rather than 400 unrelated fragments and the inexplicable desire to buy a portable blender.

The final lesson of The Odyssey has less to do with Homer, war or gender than with Nolan himself.

He reminds us that genuine passion can still produce enormous results. You shouldn't be afraid to think too big, care too much about the details or build something that requires audiences to meet it on unfamiliar terms. You shouldn't be afraid to take a 2,500-year-old poem, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on it and assume that people will show up.

Some will hate it. Some will remain sceptical. Some will watch it on a watch. But Nolan has said exactly what he wanted to say, at the scale at which he wanted to say it.

I still don't believe that Christopher Nolan is a genius. His people remain slightly too schematic for me, his emotions too architectural, his seriousness occasionally so intense that I want to offer it a chair and a glass of water.

But The Odyssey taught me that genius may be the least interesting measure of an artist. Conviction, ambition and the courage to risk looking ridiculous can matter just as much.

Nolan made a film about a trickster and proved himself to be one. He persuaded a studio to finance an ancient epic, audiences to sit through almost three hours of it and sceptics like me to leave the cinema moved.

Honestly, Odysseus would be proud.