For many viewers, The Odyssey is likely a familiar story. After all, Christopher Nolan’s latest great film is adapted from a nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, one often taught in school curricula, and which has been adapted into different versions many times over, perhaps the most recent straightforward adaptation being the 1997 TV miniseries starring Armand Assante. This familiarity lends extra weight to Nolan’s filmmaking and storytelling choices, allowing us to better see them as choices, and to understand how he’s imbued the epic with his own viewpoint. This viewpoint comes through most clearly in his rendition of Odysseus. Like many Nolan protagonists, his Odysseus is a man plagued by a guilty conscience, here courtesy of the death and destruction he enabled Agamemnon and the Greeks to unleash on Troy through the ruse of the Trojan horse. One of the more unique features of Nolan’s adaptation – and what really makes the film come alive – is the slow revelation of this guilty conscience. Along the way, the film also addresses larger themes about the consequences of violating the sanctity of home and basic human decency, perhaps speaking to our contemporary cultural/political moment as well.