Against that time-honoured backdrop, Nolan’s script weaves a tale of the worn and weary Odysseus, played by previous collaborator Matt Damon. A veteran of the Trojan War and the brains behind the infamous wooden horse that brought the city to its knees, Odysseus seeks to get home to his seat as King of Ithaca.

However, as we all know, his return journey proves so difficult that we got a whole new word out of it. Still, his endeavour across the Aegean Sea and beyond sees him encounter all manner of obstacles after the crucial blunder of angering Poseidon early on in his quest. 

‘A face. A fleet. A war. A man. A thought. A trick. A trick to break the walls of Troy…’

Homer’s Odyssey is one of the oldest stories ever told. Some three-thousand years since it first passed into our culture, its only real rival in terms of longevity is The Bible. The influence inherent in that – its place as a story that has echoed on for millennia – is almost bewilderingly nebulous. Any story we’ve ever heard has been inspired by The Odyssey in some way; it’s the original epic. 

It’s no surprise, then, that Nolan has answered the call of adapting the poem by bringing us the first ever film in history to be shot entirely with IMAX cameras (which are, famously, as cumbersome and unwieldy as any historical tome). He’s a fantastically capable director whose work has led the charge in terms of IMAX innovation for some time (Anne Hathaway’s stunt double managed to crash a Batpod into one extremely expensive IMAX camera on the set of The Dark Knight Rises) and it feels only right that his take on this grand yarn would (quite literally) be his biggest movie yet. 

While I’ll always be an advocate for just getting into whichever cinema screen you can manage to, this feels like the film since Denis Villeneuve’s last Dune film that genuinely demands to be seen in IMAX. Plenty of movies get a nice little leg up from the bigger screen and grander sound system but this is a rare case of a film being built from the ground up with the premium format in mind. Nolan’s stalwart cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, returns here, delivering vast desert islands and ominous seascapes that fill every each of the scene, Odysseus’ ramshackle raft just a drop in the ocean. 

Together, he and Nolan deliver a sense of scale to the film’s battles and monsters alike, with ocasional masterstrokes of genuine brilliance that had me grinning from ear to ear as I cowered in my cinema seat. As ever with Nolan, there’s a sense of relative realism underpinning every beat, indicative in the grittier look of the film, which eschews sun-drenched sandy beaches for darker shores.

At one point, the crew genuinely look as if they’ve landed in Cornwall rather than somewhere in the Mediterranean, which really ought not to work in a movie set in Ancient Greece, but he somehow manages to pull off the trick all the same. 

He’s a director with a clear vision that is distinctly his own (a refreshing departure from the technicolour of, say, 1981’s Clash of the Titans) and, as usual, is remarkably determined to have us meet him on his terms rather than ours, for better or for worse (as we saw with the rather divisive Tenet). This man, of course, brought his Batmobile to life as a miniature tank, the hulking Tumbler, amidst a slew of sleek predecessors.

Given that reputation, I had my doubts as to whether The Odyssey was really the right fit for him – the story’s monsters had the potential to come out as really boring, and I like myself some camp – but the director has managed to get one step ahead of us once again with his creatures here. 

It’s tricky to know quite what to tell you and what to leave for yourself, as while the story is literally legend, some cinemagoers may well less familiar with some of the beasts in the book. To that end, I think it best to reassure you that while Nolan has defied the gods (Zendaya’s Athena plays a much smaller role than you’d expect) he has sensibly paid homage to the work of Ray Harryhausen, whose monster designs are inseparable from depictions of Ancient Greece on film.

One feels like a spiritual successor to the claustrophobic encounter with the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth; another seems to give a nod to the rural horror of a Robert Eggers movie (for my money, delivering on the grotesque better than the man himself). The sound design, also, felt downright spine-tingling in the IMAX, with one creature’s roar rivalling that of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park (a high compliment from this Spielberg nut). 

For all the film’s ambitions, Nolan manages to keep a level head and lead us through the narrative at a steady pace. Episodic by its very nature – hopping from island to island; flashback to flashback – the story is a hard one to crack and the history of cinematic Odyssey adaptations is, as such, as turbulent as the ocean itself. From a slow start, though, this take tees up its payoffs nicely before moving us along on the journey, passing from character to character in a way that manages to toe a fine line, feeling surreal and transportive yet never outright confusing or disjointed, as could easily have been the case. 

As good as the film is, its litany of constituent elements don’t always sing in Greek choral harmony. While his family ties were absolutely there, I wanted more development in the relationship between Odysseus and his crew, especially given how good Himesh Patel is as his first mate, Eurylochus. He’s determined to defy the greater powers at play by saving not only himself but his men, too, something that we hear time and time again, but that connection to the suffering soldiers that he’s brought all this way rang a little hollow. 

BBFC: Rated 15 for strong violence.

The Odyssey is in cinemas now.