At the London premiere on 5 July, Zendaya stepped onto the red carpet wearing a pair of gold disc earrings dated to the first millennium BC. The pieces, set in 18k gold by the London jeweller Barron’s, belong to the so-called Ziwiye Treasure, a hoard that began surfacing on the antiquities market in the 1940s from a site near Saqqez, in what is now Iran. Within hours, an archaeologist known as Dr Z posted a video explaining that the earrings’ provenance was unknown and that they were likely looted, calling their appearance on an American actress “a fetishisation of the past” that feeds the black market for antiquities. The moment distilled the strange cultural weather surrounding the film: a $250m blockbuster built on one of the oldest stories in the Western canon, arriving in cinemas already freighted with arguments about ownership, representation and the ethics of spectacle.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which opens globally this week, is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, a technical gamble that required quieter, lighter equipment developed specifically for the production. Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, dropped to his high-school weight of 167 pounds and described the shoot as “the most challenging movie I’ve ever been a part of.” The production moved through six countries—Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and the US—constructing full-scale triremes, a 12-metre animatronic Cyclops and a ten-metre Trojan Horse half-buried in sand. Nolan told The Independent that the success of Oppenheimer gave him “the chance to do something that you wouldn’t have otherwise,” and early box-office tracking suggests a global opening weekend north of $200m, with IMAX screenings in cities from Dubai to Mumbai selling out weeks in advance.

Yet the film’s journey to the screen has been accompanied by a parallel debate over who gets to tell this story, and how. Casting choices drew fire months before anyone had seen a frame: Elon Musk accused Nolan of “profaning” Homer, while online critics objected to Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as the warrior Sinon. Greek community voices in the UAE, interviewed by Khaleej Times, expressed a more ambivalent longing—a hope that the film might honour the ache of nostos, the bittersweet yearning for home that many expatriates recognise. In India, commentators noted the deep structural echoes between Odysseus’s return and the Ramayana’s exile-and-reunion arc, with one outlet suggesting the film is “Indian at heart.” Italian tour operators, meanwhile, reported that 11 per cent of Italian travellers now choose itineraries inspired by films and myths, and the country’s tourism board has already mapped Odysseus’s supposed route from Sicily to the Peloponnese.

Early critical reaction, aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes at 99 per cent from over 60 reviews, has been overwhelmingly positive, though not without dissent. Le Monde’s critic found the characterisation “sketchy and unconvincing,” while Time called the film “an eye-glazing dud.” Most reviewers, however, described a work of immense physical scale and unexpected emotional weight, with several noting that Nolan’s Odysseus is less a wily trickster than a man haunted by the sack of Troy, his famous cunning recast as a war crime that must be expiated. The Atlantic’s critic wrote that the film “manages to be a challenging, personal work” beneath its visual extravagance, and singled out Samantha Morton’s Circe as a scene-stealing presence who moulds men’s faces into porcine snouts through practical effects.

At the New York premiere on 14 July, Zendaya appeared again, this time in a white feathered gown with sculptural wings by the French house Matières Fécales, a look that fans called “ethereal” and that her stylist Law Roach said was inspired by Athena, the goddess of wisdom she plays in the film. The image—a young woman dressed as a deity, walking past a cinema entrance where tickets were being resold for over $1,800 in India—captured the peculiar gravity of this moment: a three-millennia-old poem about a man trying to get home, now refracted through IMAX projectors, archaeological disputes and the unquenchable desire of audiences to be told, once again, that the journey matters as much as the destination.