At Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel, Tom Holland stepped out of a car in a crisp white shirt and beige trousers, paused, and waved to the photographers gathered behind the barricades. Hours later, inside a packed IMAX auditorium, Christopher Nolan took the stage for the first dedicated India premiere of his career. “You are among the first audiences in the world to see this film,” he told the crowd, calling Indian moviegoers “some of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable cinematic audiences in the world.” The moment was a long way from a windswept beach in the director’s imagination, where a giant wooden horse lay half-buried in sand, about to be destroyed by the waves.

That image of the Trojan Horse, Nolan has said, first came to him more than two decades ago, when he was briefly attached to direct Troy. It stayed with him through the Batman trilogy, Inception, and Oppenheimer, resurfacing when he finally decided to adapt Homer’s other epic. The Odyssey, shot across six countries with a budget near $250 million, follows Odysseus (Matt Damon) on his decade-long struggle to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Nolan’s mantra for his heads of department was “give moviegoers a reason to believe” — a creative challenge that meant rendering a Cyclops, the sorceress Circe turning men into pigs, and the interventions of gods in a way that felt grounded. To do so, he leaned on newly developed IMAX film technology, making The Odyssey the first feature shot entirely with the heavy cameras, each weighing over 130 kilos and requiring a six-person crew to manoeuvre through the mud of Favignana’s Castello di Santa Caterina, which stood in for the palace of Ithaca.

Before anyone had seen the finished work, a vocal online movement had already condemned it. The casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as a young warrior drew accusations of “woke garbage” and complaints that Greek actors had been overlooked. Nolan, who does not own a smartphone, addressed the backlash with a shrug: “These conversations that happen before people see the film — they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.” He also pushed back against what he called “cultural prejudice” about the ancient world, arguing that Homer’s poem is “earthy and grounded and accessible,” and that he wanted to do away with assumptions “that aren’t based on anything logical.” Costume choices, including the use of blackened bronze, were defended with reference to fragmentary archaeological records.

When the first audiences did see the film, the tone shifted. Critics in the United States and Indonesia described it as a “spectacular epic full of triumph” and a “feast for cinema lovers.” Simon Thompson, a film journalist, called Matt Damon’s performance as Odysseus “one of the best of his career,” while Robert Pattinson’s Antinous and John Leguizamo’s Eumaeus drew particular praise. On set, Samantha Morton’s turn as Circe reportedly earned a standing ovation from cast and crew — something that, according to those present, had not happened on a Nolan set since Heath Ledger’s work on The Dark Knight. The India premiere, attended by Damon and producer Emma Thomas alongside Holland and Nolan, extended a promotional tour that had already touched down in Europe and would soon reach other markets, a global rollout calibrated for a film that, in Nolan’s words, was made “for a theatrical audience.”

As the Mumbai event wound down, Nolan returned to a note of uncertainty that has accompanied the project from its earliest days. “The audience tells you what it is,” he had told the Associated Press. “This is an exciting moment, but a very frightening moment, because it’s real.” Twenty years after that first image of the Trojan Horse, half-swallowed by sand and sea, the director had finally placed it before the public, waiting to learn what they would make of it.