I was so keen to see this on the day of release that I rescheduled the installation of a new shower which means that the current one will have to wheeze on till mid-August. Was this gamble with my personal hygiene worth it?

Well, a little more research might have been helpful. I saw it in a central London cinema offering something call 4DX and it turns out this has nothing to do with IMAX. The X deceived me.  Someone has decided that the one thing that would really enhance the viewers’ experience is seating that recreates the experience of a Ryanair flight which is missing a window and caught in serious recurring turbulence. So, when the ship is sailing through a storm you are thrown around while being assaulted by gusts of cold air and jets of water. This does tend to cut short your ruminations on Bronze Age culture and is best avoided.

The great thing about Christopher Nolan films is that he hates CGI nearly as much as me, so this is a sweatily, muscular film which throws back to the days of cinema when three regiments of the Yugoslav army would be used to fight the battle of Waterloo. If it takes a couple of hundred strong men to pull the wooden horse into Troy that is what Nolan uses. It is as realistic a representation of the story as you can imagine, though it did leave me wondering why the Trojans didn’t ask themselves why a hollow horse was so heavy. And it must have smelt pretty rank too. The Greeks were inside it for a couple of days with all the biological necessities that involves.

Even if you haven’t read Homer, a lot of the story is familiar in a half-remembered way. Everyone knows the horse story and Helen of Troy’s face launching a thousand ships. The Cyclops is a terrifying figure who snacks on hoplites the way cinema audiences eat popcorn but is shown by Nolan as a being worthy of sympathy. So, when one of Odysseus’ men gratuitously shoots him in the eye with an arrow after they have escaped, it is the Greeks who behave like monsters.

This is the surprising aspect of Nolan’s telling of the story. Odysseus and his men might be physically brave, but he realises that by deceiving the Trojans with a false gesture of peace they have broken the law of Zeus and deserve to be punished. A theme is that their sufferings are caused by their transgressions against the laws of the gods and they are responsible for the collapse of their own civilisation. As I stepped out of the air-conditioned cinema into the thirty degree heat I had a similar thought.

Odysseus is played with great subtlety by Matt Damon, though whether 55 year old Bronze Age Greek warriors typically had the physiques of male strippers is a subject on which Homer is silent. Ann Hathaway plays his queen Penelope with a suitable iciness and even the most unsentimental viewer will be touch by the scene in which they are reunited.

There is lots of sword play to accompany the mythology and you have to be impressed by how effectively Nolan has rendered the scary, wild imaginings of the Iliad’s author or authors. Some are quite nightmarish.  

After a slow start with some exposition, the films rattles along at quite a pace and the three hours certainly do not drag. It justifies a second viewing in a cinema wear the seats do not mimic a fairground bucking bronco.