Matt Damon did a good job of humanizing Odysseus. Beside him is the unprepossessing Athena.

Wow. That was quite an experience, seeing “The Odyssey” last night. It’s one of the few times I’ve been at a film that the audience applauded at the end. I joined in.

Christopher Nolan really accomplished something here. I was very impressed, and not a bit disappointed — which is unusual for me, with things I’m familiar with when I go in.

I highly recommend it.

I do have one BIG complaint, which is definitely not Nolan’s fault. I went to see the movie in Imax, so it looked great. But the first thing I did when I got there was turn off my hearing aids, and that wasn’t enough to shut out the painful noise. You’d think that would be great for a guy who’s hard of hearing, but it isn’t. Loud sounds produce a tremendous buzzing distortion in my ears. I couldn’t make out dialogue; I could only understand about 20 percent of what was said. (Sometimes it helped to put my fingers in my ears.) I knew the story, so I usually knew what was going on. But I can’t wait to see it again with normal sound — and maybe subtitles.

Another thing that helped me follow and enjoy the flick was that it followed the original about as faithfully as you can in just three hours of running time. There were changes, but they were very inventive and helped move the story forward convincingly. Examples of that:

• In Homer’s verson, a priest at Ismarus gives Odysseus a supply of sweet, super-powerful wine that a normal human needed to dilute 20 to 1 before drinking. Later, our hero uses the uncut stuff to drug the Cyclops so he and his men can escape. In the movie, there’s no stop at Ismarus, so no wine, and Odysseus just waits until the Cyclops is asleep before blinding him. It works.
• He doesn’t stop in the land of the lotus-eaters, either. Instead, Calypso feeds lotus flowers to Odysseus to give him amnesia and keep him around for seven years. This works on a couple of levels. First, it sort of exonerates Calypso because she ultimately decides to let the hero go, and even helps him remember who he is and where he wants to go. First step: stop eating the flowers!
• Secondly, it exonerates Odysseus for leaving his loving wife in the lurch back in Ithaca while he spends every night in the bed of a nymph for seven years. Hey, he forgot! This is not the only thing Nolan does to make Odysseus a more sympathetic figure to a modern audience. Between all the slashing bloodshed and hanging girls who slept with the enemy and selling captive women into slavery, and lots of lying, Homer’s character wasn’t quite the thing for moderns seeking a hero. He had problems. But by skipping and soft-pedalling a lot of that, plus casting Matt Damon in the role, Nolan made Odysseus someone a 2026 audience could cheer for. It was very artfully done, and he didn’t overdo it and make him fake or too vanilla.
• He also toned down Athena. She keeps showing up, but she’s a very unprepossessing goddess, considering. People tend to think of her as the goddess of wisdom, like her Roman rip-off Minerva. But she’s also the goddess of war — a tall, strong figure who wears a soldier’s helmet. She was into bloodshed, and was always counseling Odysseus — and Telemachus — to man up and swing the sword about. In this, she wore a lovely white robe and imparted Wisdom to our man O during relatively quiet moments (as in the still you see above). I mean I think she did. Since I couldn’t hear dialogue, especially quiet dialogue, I admit she could have been saying, “Get on out there and kick some ass, ya sorry wuss!” But in a quiet, philosophical kind of way.

Anyway, all those changes worked. What were the best parts?

My son was there with his family, and in discussing it with them after, I brought up the scene with Polyphemus, the Cyclops, which I thought was very well done, as I said above.

But after I got home, I remembered the very best part — when Circe turns O’s men into swine. It was astounding, and it was done without CGI, which makes it more amazing. I won’t tell you how she does it, but it’s not your garden-variety, wave-a-wand hocus-pocus. SPOILER: It’s particularly shocking to see after the way Circe appears (and hasn’t identified herself) — not as a foxy enchantress, but like somebody’s mom, utterly terrified to find armed soldiers in her home. She looks like an everyday middle-aged lady throughout the scene, but by the end there’s no doubting her power. Earlier I quoted Jack Aubrey as saying, “… as for that tale of all his foremast-hands being turned into swine… why, he might tell that to the Marines.” He would not have doubted had he seen this.

As for least-favorite part… above, I said I was “not a bit disappointed” by anything, but I’d have been happier if I’d seen some sirens. Oh, Odysseus gets tied to the mast, and acts out the words of my fave Cream song, “How his naked ears were tortured/By the sirens sweetly singing…” But I saw nothing. I was eager to see whether they looked like this or like this. I would have preferred the former, but been happy to see anything.

Oh, about those controversies: I wish I could say Lupita Nyong’o was awesome as Helen, but I can’t. And it’s not just because, her face aside, she’s too skinny for me to think of her as the world’s most beautiful. She just wasn’t as good in the role as she needed to be to shut the complainers up. She wasn’t, say, as good as Sophie Okonedo as Queen Margaret in the recent production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays. When I first saw that, I kinda went, “Huh?” (I mean, she was supposed to be from Anjou), but was deeply impressed at what she did with the role. Not so in this latest instance. But it didn’t matter much given that Helen wasn’t as critical to this particular story, once the war was over.

I did have a “Huh?” moment early in this masterpiece early in the story, when I thought, “Why is there a girl dressed as a Greek soldier on that beach?” I finally decided it was supposed to be a very young boy, and I was right. It was supposed to be Sinon, who wasn’t actually a character in The Odyssey, but was added by Virgil in his Latin version. Nolan had added Sinon to set up something involving one of Penelope’s suitors, showing you what a bum that guy was (paying a kid to go to war in his place). Later, I learned Sinon was played by the same person who starred in that charming and witty movie “Juno” quite a few years back, who later became a trans activist. Which explained things, sort of. Maybe Nolan wanted to tick off somebody else out there besides Elon Musk. But what I don’t understand is why Odysseus would have sent this kid Sinon on essentially a suicide mission. Sinon sort of had the same question when O later looked the kid up in the realm of Hades.

As for the other casting choices I had been wondering about… I already said Matt Damon was perfect as the guy who could present O as someone who appealed to a Hollywood audience. He really made the movie work. Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland did fine as Penelope and Telemachus (the loved ones O was forgetting while shacking up with Calypso). And believe it or not, the “Twilight” guy was good as the very worst of the suitors, Antinous. I suppose he’s matured as an actor.

I said above that this was one of a very few films I’ve seen that caused the audience to applaud. There was another thing that has seldom happened in my adulthood: I came out of the theater feeling like I was still in the movie. It took awhile to shake. When I saw (and then reviewed) “Star Wars” in 1977, I was having trouble shaking the feeling that my Chevy Vega was an X-wing, and I was swooping in to finish off the Death Star (which was not the safest illusion to have while zipping East on Walnut Grove in Memphis). I had a similar experience after seeing “Apocalypse Now,” which haunted me the rest of the day.

I had that experience a lot when I was a kid living in Ecuador. My best buddy Tony Wessler and I would go to the Variedades theater near my house, pay the equivalent of two cents to get in, and sit on plain wooden benches to watch Italian (and sometimes French) movies with classical themes — gladiators or Hercules or whatever. The special effects were terrible, and if not for the Spanish subtitles we’d have understood none of the dialogue, but these shows were about the action. Afterwards, walking the six blocks or so home, we’d pass by construction sites littered with pieces of bamboo (they used it for scaffolding), and use them to swordfight constantly, all the way. We were IN the movie.

But since I’ve been grown, movies have to be something really special, do something new and different to give me that feeling. Last night, when I got to my car, I felt it strongly. Before driving away, I texted my wife, who had not come along, to say that after three hours of what I had experienced, I had this feeling it was going to take me another three to get home. She took it as a joke, but I actually felt that way.

I hope ol’ Tony has been to see it. This was everything those cheap flicks we enjoyed so much back in the day wanted to be…