Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal walk into a bar. Is this an Odyssey joke or a Spider-Man joke? Probably the latter, as the three don’t share any scenes in the former. Nevertheless, it was an odd experience to see two films sharing so many actors in common over one weekend.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, to breeze quickly over it, is something of an unusual success for a Marvel release these days. With a solid emotional core and its themes carefully threaded throughout its plot, it didn’t even need a surprise cameo to spice things up. Though it may have done so anyway. Or not. (Spoilers) Two thumbs up from this occasional reviewer of all things Marvel, and I’m at least 5% less despondent than I was about the prospect of Avengers: Doomsday later this year.

As for the meat of the matter and the subject of this article, let’s get on to it. In the blue corner we have Homer’s Odyssey, one half of a tag team with The Iliad standing at the base of Western literature and culture, hailing from parts unknown or at least heavily obscured by the passage of centuries and the death of the oral tradition it arose from. In the red corner we have Christopher Nolan, perhaps the most consistently successful blockbuster filmmaker of recent times, and one whose oeuvre has held onto an intellectual edge that has elevated both it and him above the spangly lights of most contemporary CGI-heavy cinematic fare.

Having had a go at black holes, dreamscapes, time travel, atom bombs, magic, and Batman, Nolan has at last come around to the the sword and sandal epic, albeit in the form of the aforementioned foundational myth, which Nolan seems to have been thinking about for years. It shows. This is a film into which Nolan has poured a great deal of thought, both in terms of what the story means and how it relates to the modern world. That effort and engagement with the text has been amply rewarded, both in terms of the box office and the response of the rest of the world to his film, even if some of that response has been a bit tetchy at times.

Within the confines of a three hour film, Nolan has been impressively faithful to his subject material. While removing some sections and simplifying others, the structure remains the same: Odysseus (Matt Damon), hero of the Trojan War, has been absent from his kingdom of Ithaca for almost two decades. In that time, his hall has become infested with parasitic guests that his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), must keep at bay. His son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), aspires to find his missing father, even as Odysseus languishes in the arms of Calypso. And the gods … well, the gods in this version of the story mostly keep their own counsel.

I’m not an academic, let alone a Homeric expert in the mould of Emily Wilson, and this isn’t going to be a thorough analysis of The Odyssey with regards to where it stands among other adaptations of Homer’s original (I’d put it behind James Joyce’s Ulysses and Jean Chalopin’s Ulysses 31, myself.) For a true appreciation of Nolan’s efforts, the best solution is to go see the film itself—I’d consider it well worth the price of admission, especially so if you see it on the biggest screen you can. My first viewing was via a 70mm projector, and I hope to grab an IMAX screening to compare, contrast, and solidify my thoughts. In the meantime, this will be a few quick thoughts on Nolan as a filmmaker and what he brings to this ancient tale, for good and for ill.

From hereon, there will be SPOILERS. Consider yourself warned.

If Nolan is anything, he is a filmmaker with a preference for realism in all things. His superheroes are rendered realistically, his science fiction has science fact gilding, his time travel is planned with precision, and even his dreams are slotted into a carefully designed scheme. He wants the audience to believe in the veracity of what they’re seeing, and he will not venture into a field he can’t think his way through. Yet here he takes on a tale of gods and monsters and does so by focusing on the mortal man (and supporting cast) at the centre of it all.

Homer’s deities are active participants in The Iliad, sometimes getting their asses kicked as a result, and only marginally less up front in the Odyssey. Nolan, by contrast, reduces them to a cast of one: Zendaya’s Athena, who serves as a quiet companion to Damon’s Odysseus (the only person able to perceive her). Others may regularly profess their belief in the gods, most notably in the oft-repeated refrain of “Zeus’s Law” (an injunction to treat guests well, lest they turn out to be gods in disguise), but only Odysseus engages with their existence, and the film suggests that even that engagement is tenuous. Is this truly Athena or a guilt-conjured phantom of a slain priestess? Nolan might ask what the difference is, and within the bounds of the film he’s making, he has a point.

The strongest parts of Nolan’s film, as with much of his work, are the thematic and the human. As writer and director, he retains a strong grip throughout on the point he is seeking to make with this adaptation: that Odysseus travels through a world in collapse, a world that he helped collapse through the war and violence he aided and abetted. You don’t have to look too deep into the mirror that Nolan holds up to spot the very present dangers of allowing greedy men to seize whatever they wish, to break all bounds of common decency, and to treat guests with cruelty and disdain. If it’s a point that’s hammered home a few times too often and too thuddingly (we too are the peoples from the sea), it retains its weight because how could it not in the world that Nolan wrote for?

Whether worlds beyond this present moment (assuming we’re graced with the luck to enjoy such) will connect quite so well with Nolan’s work is harder to say. There’s certainly plenty of strong work done by the central cast in Ithaca, and the film picked up strongly for me in the final quarter as Odysseus joins them (though for my money, the recent The Return did the final action sequence better). The human yearning and suffering that Nolan has depicted well since Memento a quarter of a century ago serves him well here, and the relief of alleviating the plague of suitors at Penelope’s court elevates whatever awkwardness there might be in the execution(s).

The Odyssey doesn’t suffer from a lack of humanity, even if the lion’s share of it comes in the form of Damon’s Odysseus, who is a man of the people to a fault. There’s precious little that is kingly about this Odysseus, and even less of a trickster about him. Instead, his portrayal is more that of the war-traumatised veteran that a “realistic” Odysseus might have been, having endured a decade of war on foreign shores, ending in the brutal sack of a suffering city. Damon is well cast as an actor for this kind of Odysseus: stoic, thoughtful, suffering. Yet even more so than the rest of the cast, this Odysseus is concerned with the practicalities of myth: the keeping of traditions and the consequences of sin. While not an atheist, he is at the least questioning, and that makes him a tricky figure to have in the centre of a story that’s all about encountering the supernatural and the mythic.

Both in the original and in Nolan’s adaptation, Odysseus’s encounters are told mostly in flashback, by the main character. The famous episodes of the cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis, are related by a man who has passed through those and other trials. There’s an argument to be made that they’re his embellishment of the tribulations of the preceding years, though oddly that’s easier to make of the original, where Odysseus is recounting his story before an eager audience, rather than trying to recover his memory from the grasp of Calypso’s drug-like lotus flower. I mentioned that I feel the film picks up in the latter part, when Odysseus finally returns home, reunites with his son, and sets about a plan to get rid of the suitors (with what is at least implied to be Penelope’s insightful assistance). That’s at least partly because while Nolan includes many of the encounters between Odysseus, his crew, and creatures of myth, he doesn’t seem entirely sure what to do with them.

The encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, at least as famous for its banter as its violence, is reduced to a terrifying encounter in a cave with a … bad host? Who violates Zeus’s law by eating “guests” who intruded and made themselves comfortable in his absence? The giant Laestrygonians are similarly terrifying, if rendered somewhat incongruous by the giant child the crew meet first. Perhaps this is the message of the myth: that by venturing out beyond the civilised world, there is no guest-right to protect you, no expectation that whoever you meet will see you as anything other than a snack.

If so, this message is best rendered by one of the film’s strongest sequences: Odysseus’s encounter with Samantha Morton’s Circe. Here a middle aged woman living on her own, she’s suitably terrified by a band of armed men intruding on her solitude, but she proves well able to deal with them (as she has with others before) by transforming them into docile beasts. Odysseus wins back their freedom and their humanity, but Circe’s own spell of unmaking (a reverse of her pleasantly nasty and fleshy pig-making sorcery) insists that the form of the pig is their true form regardless. In Circe, the thematic, the human, and the mythic come powerfully together, if only for an instant.

The gods might agree with Circe, were they to venture an opinion. A detour to the shores of the underworld (was I the only one annoyed to hear it called “Hell” when Hades was right there and had already been used?) implies that fate is not to be denied: for their sins at Troy, Odysseus’s men will die, no matter what he does. Some will be taken by the monster Scylla, and the rest will feast on Helios’s cattle, dooming themselves to death at sea. Only Odysseus will live, though he will fall into Calypso’s clutches and be lost to forgetfulness.

This proclamation of fate and its inevitability is a powerful moment, but it never really seems to register with Damon’s Odysseus. He keeps on fighting and arguing anyway—the closest he comes to being a trickster (other than in the flashback images of the Wooden Horse) is when he sort of uses reverse psychology to get his men to sail beneath Scylla’s gaping maws. For this Odysseus, encounters with the mythical are less about confronting a world greater than his understanding than they are expressions of his frustration with and guilt about the world he finds himself in. Even when he finally succeeds in reuniting with Penelope, it is still with a sense of guilt and obligation: he chooses exile and another quest to honour the restless dead over retaking his throne, as Homer’s king does.

Nolan’s The Odyssey is a coherent tale, well told and full of both spectacle and brain food. It’s a director working at the height of his craft, taking the time to think carefully both about the work he’s making and the world he’s introducing it to. (As a writer, I still think he was stronger working with his brother, but that’s another matter.) As a cinematic outing, it’s an undoubted success, marking what might well turn out to be the highpoint of this year’s summer blockbuster season (Spider-Man does have a chance to unseat it). However, it might be that as the years go on it will be seen much more as another work in Nolan’s portfolio than as partaking in the Odyssey‘s timeless march. It speaks to the moment, and to the human, but to the gods it is silent.