Warning: this review contains spoilers for The Odyssey.

Christopher Nolan’s US$250m (£187m), three-hour epic starring Matt Damon as the Greek king fighting his way home from Troy took more than $264m on its opening weekend – comfortably tripling the opening take of his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer in 2023.

It has earned Nolan the best reviews of his career. But crucially, it is the most ambitious attempt in a generation to put Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem back at the centre of popular culture. The heroism Nolan’s film depicts is far darker and far less triumphant than audiences might expect. It is also a film built for the biggest screen.

Nolan shot the film entirely on IMAX’s 70mm cameras, a first for any feature, carrying cast and crew across Morocco, Greece, Sicily, Iceland and the northeast of Scotland.

The result swings between extreme long shots of sea, stone and sky and extreme close-ups of faces, between monumental sets and claustrophobic caves and courtyards. It is unmistakably, a film in conversation with Nolan’s previous work. But also with a century of screen epics, from the blood and grandeur of Gladiator (2000) and Troy (2004), back to the forgotten silent versions of the Trojan story that German and Italian studios made more than a century ago.

Nolan borrows from other genres too: horror creeps into the Cyclops’ cave,........

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