Tom Holland on Odyssey’s ‘Last Chance to Play a Boy’

What’s coming now is being hailed as another triumph, which is all the more impressive when you consider how hard Nolan strives to shoot as accurately as possible – real ships, real seas, real Trojan horses on real beaches.

In the early days, as news of the film broke, Elon Musk revealed the decisions on X, including the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. A post by a right-wing blogger accused Nolan of changing characters for awards-season or diversity-related reasons. Others accused Musk and the blogger of racism and that Helen was a mythical figure, the daughter of Zeus born from a swan’s egg.

I’m one of the lucky few who has already seen the film – and the way Nolan wants us all to: in an Imax cinema. Helen’s story is wonderfully told on film, with a twist, and The Odyssey is a visual feast, the first feature film shot entirely on Imax (“If you want naturalism, if you want to show someone who looks like the world, that’s the way to make a celluloid film,” says Nolan).

It pushed back my idea that he was channeling high art in the form of Homer’s story through a superhero movie.

“When you go to Homer, it’s a crowd-pleasing story. It’s a popcorn thing. I mean, that’s the joy of it and that’s why it’s lasted so long.”

Nolan’s goal, he told me, was to “bring something new to the audience.”

“Whenever Hollywood gets it wrong, it’s always the same mistake, which is forgetting how much people want something new, how much they want something they’ve never seen before.”