In an IMAX auditorium in Uppsala, Sweden, the screen froze with only an hour of the film remaining. The audience, who had sat through nearly two hours of Christopher Nolan’s three-hour adaptation of Homer, were asked to leave without knowing how the story ended. It was not an isolated incident. At a multiplex in Stockholm, the image seized up with fifteen minutes to go; in Malmö, a 70mm projector fan failed and the screening could not be resumed. The cinema chain’s press office described the disruptions as unrelated technical faults, but on social media, a different narrative took hold: that the projectors were simply not built to withstand a film of such length and ambition.

That the screenings collapsed under the weight of the material is a fitting metaphor for a project that has, from its inception, strained against the limits of the medium. Nolan shot the entire picture on IMAX 70mm film, a first for a feature, using cameras that had to be redesigned to be quieter and lighter—though they still weighed 130 kilograms and emitted a noise the cast compared to an industrial blender. The production spanned six countries, employed over five thousand extras for the battle scenes, and required Matt Damon to drop nine kilograms and grow a beard for a year. The result, according to critics from New York to London, is a work of immense visual scale that recasts the ancient poem as a meditation on the moral cost of war, stripping away the gods and focusing on a Odysseus haunted by the deception of the Trojan Horse.

Yet the film’s journey into the cultural mainstream has been shaped less by its artistic choices than by a parallel odyssey of online outrage. Months before the premiere, conservative commentators in the United States, amplified by Elon Musk, seized on the casting of Lupita Nyong’o, a Black actress, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, a transgender actor, as the soldier Sinon. Musk called Nolan a “racist anti-white” and accused him of desecrating Homer to win awards. The backlash, which included a wave of review-bombing, did not dent the box office: the film opened to $264 million globally, Nolan’s biggest debut ever, and earned a 95% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. In Greece, where the poem is a national epic, reactions were more nuanced. Some viewers praised the fresh perspective; others, including right-wing groups, protested what they saw as a deviation from classical heritage. The culture minister declined to intervene, stating that the government had no authority over artistic interpretation.

Musk’s response to the film’s success was to announce his own version. In a post on X, he declared that his AI tool, Grok Imagine, would produce a “historically accurate” full-length Odyssey before the end of the year, and he endorsed a suggestion to give Mel Gibson $100 million to shoot an adaptation with dialogue in Homeric Greek. The claim to historical accuracy was met with bemusement by classicists, who pointed out that the poem is a work of myth, not history, and that the ancient Greeks had no modern concept of race. The AI-generated clip Musk shared featured an all-white cast, a vision that seemed to answer a question the film itself had left open: whose past is being defended, and from whom?

In the end, the most resonant image may be the one that never made it to the screen in Uppsala. Audiences there, and in Stockholm and Malmö, were left suspended in the middle of a story about a man trying to get home, a journey that, in the poem, takes ten years. For those who had travelled to one of the mere 41 screens worldwide capable of showing the film in its intended 70mm IMAX format, the interrupted screening was a reminder that even the most meticulously planned returns can be undone by a faulty fan or a frozen frame. The Odyssey, it seems, is not just a tale of arrival, but of the fragility of the voyage itself.