New Delhi, July 15 -- As someone who studied both The Iliad and The Odyssey during my Master's in English Literature, I walked into Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey expecting another grand spectacle built around myth.

Instead, I found something far more intimate. While The Iliad is, at its heart, a poem fuelled by the pride, rage and ego of men, The Odyssey becomes the painful process of unlearning all of that.

Nolan understands this distinction, and rather than merely adapting Homer's epic, he explores what remains of a man after glory has already destroyed him.

The film opens not in Ithaca or Troy, but on Calypso's island.

Odysseus (Matt Damon) has no memory of who he is. Yet his body remembers what his mind cannot. Day after day, he...