There is something disorienting, and I confess also rather wonderful, about watching the wider world abruptly remember a poem that some of us never stopped thinking about. For most of my adult life, mentioning Homer in ordinary company has produced one of two reactions: a polite glaze, or a rueful confession about a high school English class that did not take. This month it produces something else entirely. People want to talk about Odysseus. They want to argue about him, in fact, and about who he was and how he sounded and what he deserved, and they are doing it in the same breath as they discuss ticket presales and IMAX screens. I have no idea how long the mood will last. I intend to enjoy it while it does.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens on July 17, and by every available sign it is going to be enormous. It is the first narrative feature shot entirely with IMAX cameras; it was made across six countries on something like a quarter of a billion dollars; it carries an R rating, which for a summer epic is its own act of confidence. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, Tom Holland plays Telemachus, and Zendaya plays Athena, which is casting I find more interesting than I expected to. Nolan has said, in explaining why he wanted the material at all, that its absence from serious large-scale cinema struck him as “an odd gap in movie history.” He is right, and the gap is odder than he perhaps realizes, because the Odyssey has been the most adaptable story in the Western inheritance for roughly twenty-eight centuries, and the one medium built for spectacle and interiority at once had somehow left it largely alone.

Before the film arrives and the arguments about it harden into positions, I want to spend some time with the man himself, because I think the poem is stranger, funnier, and considerably darker than the version of it most people carry around in their heads.

Start with the first word. Homer’s Iliad begins with mēnin, wrath; it announces its subject immediately and never really departs from it. The Odyssey begins with ándra, man. Not hero, not king, not warrior, though Odysseus is all three; simply man. And then, in the same breath, comes the epithet that has haunted every translator who has ever attempted the poem: polytropos. It is a compound, poly and tropos, and it means, roughly, “of many turns.” The trouble is that Greek allows the turning to run in both directions at once. Odysseus is the man who has been turned about, driven off his course, tossed from shore to shore by forces he did not choose; and he is also the man who does the turning, who twists and shifts and doubles back, who is never once in twenty-four books exactly what he appears to be. Samuel Butler, whose translation is old enough now to be freely available to anyone with an internet connection, rendered the opening as a request to the Muse to sing of “that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide,” which is charming and, I think, slightly too flattering. Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation Nolan has said he read and whose reading of the character he has explicitly cited, gave us instead a first line that asks the Muse to tell “about a complicated man.” I have seen that choice criticized as too plain. It seems to me exactly right, and it is the interpretive fork in the road on which everything else depends.

Because Odysseus is complicated, and not in the sanitized sense in which we now use that word to mean interesting. He is a liar. He is a liar constantly, gratuitously, and with evident pleasure; he lies to strangers, to swineherds, to his own wife, and to Athena, who catches him at it and is delighted rather than offended, since she is a liar too and recognizes a kindred spirit. He wins the greatest war in Greek memory not by force of arms but by cheating, by devising a trick that works precisely because it preys on the piety of the men it destroys. He is capable of enormous tenderness and of casual, appalling cruelty within the same afternoon. He weeps on Calypso’s beach, staring out at the water, and then goes back to her bed at night. He is offered immortality, the one thing every hero in the tradition is supposed to want, and he turns it down in order to go home to a mortal woman who is aging exactly as he is. And in the end he loses every single one of the men who sailed with him. Every one. The poem is quite clear about this and does not spare him.

Even the name is a wound. In the nineteenth book, Homer pauses the action to tell us how Odysseus was named: his grandfather Autolycus, himself a famous thief, gave the boy a name built from the verb odyssasthai, which carries the sense of causing pain and of being hated. The name works in both directions, like the epithet. He is the man who gives grief and the man who gets it, and the poem is a long demonstration of both halves.

The Greeks themselves were never entirely comfortable with him, which is worth remembering when anyone insists there is a single correct Odysseus from which a film might deviate. Athenian tragedy, three centuries after Homer, tended to see him as a politician and a sophist, a man whose facility with words made him dangerous; the Odysseus of Sophocles’ Philoctetes is a manipulator, and the one who appears in Euripides is worse. Dante put him in Hell, in the eighth circle, among the counselors of fraud, and gave him a magnificent final speech about sailing past the known world to his death. Tennyson made him a restless old man who cannot bear the smallness of the home he spent twenty years trying to reach. Joyce made him a mild-mannered advertising canvasser wandering around Dublin on a single day in June. Every age has taken this figure and remade him in the shape of its own anxieties, and it has been doing so since long before anyone thought to write any of it down.

That last point deserves more weight than it usually gets. Homer, whoever or whatever Homer was, did not compose the Odyssey the way a novelist composes a novel. The poem comes out of a tradition of oral performance in which the story existed in countless versions, each shaped by the bard, the audience, the evening, the occasion. The poem knows this about itself; it contains bards, Phemius in Ithaca and Demodocus among the Phaeacians, and it watches them work. The text we have is a snapshot of a living process, not a scripture handed down intact. When people insist today that a film must be faithful to the poem, I find myself wanting to ask, gently, faithful to which performance, on which night, in which century. The Odyssey was never a fixed thing. It was a thing that kept being made, which is precisely why it survived.

And there is a deeper trick in the poem that I have never seen a film reckon with honestly, and that I am genuinely curious to see whether this one attempts. Nearly all the monsters are in Odysseus’ own mouth. The Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the descent to the dead, the cattle of the Sun: these do not come to us from the narrator. They come to us in books nine through twelve, in the first person, told by Odysseus himself, at a banquet, to a foreign king whose help he desperately needs and whose daughter has just been thinking rather warmly about him. He is a known liar, performing for an audience he must impress, and he is describing events for which there is not one surviving witness, since he has just explained that all his men are dead. Homer, who misses nothing, builds this into the architecture. He does not tell us the stories are false. He simply arranges matters so that we cannot be certain they are true, and then moves on without comment, which is a species of sophistication we usually flatter ourselves is modern.

A film in IMAX cannot easily preserve that ambiguity. A Cyclops rendered at seventy millimeters is a fact. It is on the screen; it is enormous; you have paid to see it. I do not say this as a complaint, exactly. The impulse to make the monsters real has a long and honorable pedigree, and Nolan has been open about his debt to Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion creatures gave a whole generation their first sense that the ancient world was a place where the impossible walked around in daylight. I only note it as the price of the medium, and as one of the things worth watching for.

Set the monsters aside, though, and consider what the poem is actually about, because the answer is not adventure. The word is nostos, homecoming, and it is the root, joined to algos, pain, of our word nostalgia: the ache of the return. The Odyssey is a poem about a household. It is about whether an oikos can survive twenty years without the man at the center of it, and whether the man can survive twenty years without it, and whether the two can be fitted back together when neither is what it was. The suitors are not villains because they are rude. They are villains because they have violated xenia, the sacred obligation between host and guest that in this world stands as the basic moral architecture of civilization itself, the thing Zeus personally guarantees. They eat another man’s food in another man’s hall while courting another man’s wife, and the poem regards this as a form of slow devouring, an offense against the order of things that requires, when it finally comes, a punishment of genuinely shocking severity.

Penelope, meanwhile, is not simply waiting. She is the only character in the poem whose cunning is a fair match for her husband’s, and she gets the better of him at the end, which he has the grace to find funny. The trick of the loom, weaving by day and unraveling by night, buys her three years; the trick of the bed, in the twenty-third book, exposes him. When he finally stands before her, bathed and restored and every inch himself, she does not fall into his arms. She tests him. She orders a servant to move the marriage bed out of the chamber, knowing perfectly well that the bed cannot be moved, because Odysseus built it himself from a living olive tree still rooted in the ground beneath the house, and only the two of them know it. He erupts. And in erupting he proves who he is, and she lets herself believe. It is the most quietly devastating recognition scene in ancient literature, and it turns on a piece of furniture and a tree.

There is one more recognition, and it is the one that undoes me every time. Before the bed, before the scar that his old nurse finds on his thigh while washing his feet, Odysseus comes to his own doorstep in disguise, and an old dog lying on a dung heap lifts his head. It is Argos, the puppy he raised and never got to train, now ancient and neglected and covered in vermin. The dog knows him. He cannot rise, so he drops his ears and wags his tail, and Odysseus, who cannot break his disguise, turns his face away and wipes away a tear, and passes into the house. Argos dies. That is the whole scene; it takes perhaps twenty lines. Reports suggest Nolan has expanded the dog’s role in the film, and I will admit that when I read that detail I felt a lurch of hope, because it tells me he understands where the poem actually lives.

None of which will settle the arguments now raging, and I suppose I should say something about them. The complaints have gathered around the accents, which are American; around the costuming, which some find anachronistic; around the casting, which is broad and modern and has drawn precisely the reaction one would predict; and, in a detail I find oddly revealing, around Telemachus calling his father “dad.” Some of this is bad-faith noise and deserves to be treated as such. Some of it is not, and I would rather engage it than pretend otherwise. Register genuinely mattered in Greek; the formality of address carried real weight, and something is lost when a son’s first word for an absent father collapses into the vernacular. That is a legitimate observation about translation, and Wilson herself has argued at length that translation is always interpretation, which is an argument that cuts in every direction at once. What I cannot accept is the notion that fidelity to Homer means fidelity to a costume drama, or that a poem assembled over centuries out of countless competing performances is now to be policed for deviations by people who, in the great majority of cases, have not read it. The purists have chosen a strange hill. Homer is not on it.

And the truth of the matter is that the argument itself is the best news the field has had in a generation. Classics departments have been contracting for decades. Now museums are running programming, reading groups are hitting capacity, the Society for Classical Studies is convening a public roundtable on the film at its January meeting in Boston, and Emily Wilson, a working classicist, is fielding calls from journalists who would not have known her name six months ago. Whether Nolan’s Odyssey is a masterpiece or merely a very expensive spectacle, it is going to put the poem in front of more people at once than any event since the invention of the printing press, and some fraction of them, however small, are going to walk out of the theater and pick up the book. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the entire ballgame.

So: pick up the story. If you want speed and clarity and a line that moves, read Wilson. If you want grandeur and the sound of a voice performing aloud, read Fagles. If you want something closer to the bone of the Greek, read Lattimore, and if you want to hand something to a fourteen-year-old, the old Rieu prose in Penguin has been quietly making converts since 1946. Read whichever one you can actually finish, which is the only translation advice that has ever mattered.

I will be in a theater on the seventeenth, and I expect to be moved, and I expect also to spend part of the drive home muttering about choices I would have made differently, which is the ordinary condition of loving something and watching someone else handle it. But I have been thinking, these last few weeks, about what it means that this of all stories is the one we keep coming back to. Not the wrath of Achilles, not the founding of Rome, but the story of a man who is away too long, who is presumed dead, who comes back changed and unrecognizable to a house that has learned to live without him, and who has to prove, piece by piece and to one person at a time, that he is who he says he is. We keep telling it because we keep needing it. The oldest promise in our literature is that the man who has been gone a very long time can still come home, and be known.

I would be glad to hear which translation you read first, and whether it took.