There is a moment, somewhere around 2100 BCE, when a scribe in Mesopotamia pressed a reed into wet clay and recorded a story about a king named Gilgamesh who was afraid to die and went looking for immortality, didn't find it and came home anyway.
It is, as far as scholars can determine, the oldest surviving extended epic narrative in world literature. The work grew out of earlier Sumerian poems and Old Babylonian traditions. The version most commonly read today, the Standard Babylonian version, traditionally attributed to the scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni, dates to around 1200 BCE, though its fullest surviving form was preserved on twelve incomplete clay tablets copied for the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE. Those tablets were discovered in the nineteenth century and most are now in the British Museum, though Gilgamesh material is distributed among collections worldwide, reconstructed over decades from fragments found at several Mesopotamian sites.
The thing that strikes anyone who reads it, across the considerable distance of four thousand years, is how familiar it feels. It has a journey, a companion and tells a story about grief, about going out and the coming back changed, and realising somewhere on the road that the thing you were looking for was never quite what you thought it was. These are not ancient concerns.
Roughly a millennium or more after Gilgamesh was first composed, someone we call Homer, sang, or dictated, the exact mechanics of which remain contested, produced a poem about a man named Odysseus trying to get home from a war. Scholars place the Homeric epics somewhere in the 8th or 9th century BCE, though the poems grew out of a centuries-old oral tradition, performed by wandering bards and modified in the telling long before anyone wrote them down. The Odyssey is, in this sense, both older and younger than any single date can capture.
The Odyssey is not simply a story about a journey. It is a story about what a journey does to a person; about the particular damage and grace of being away for so long that home is no longer quite the place you left, and you are no longer quite the person who left it. Penelope weaves and unweaves her shroud. Telemachus grows up in his father's absence into a man his father won't recognise. Odysseus himself encounters gods and monsters and the dead, and the most frightening thing he faces is arguably none of them. It is the possibility that everything he suffered for will no longer be there when he arrives.
It remains, three thousand years later, in print and in active scholarly dispute, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the definition of a classic or the definition of an argument nobody wants to win.
And now, as of last month, it is also being shown on the largest screens in the world.
Christopher Nolan's adaptation opened in July, shot entirely on IMAX film cameras across locations in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland. In South Africa, IMAX screenings at Ster-Kinekor sold out within hours of tickets going on sale and have continued to do so for weeks, delivering the biggest IMAX opening the chain has seen in years. Globally, the numbers have been extraordinary. It is a remarkable thing to happen for a film based on a poem that predates most of the civilisations that have risen and fallen in the intervening years.
In early publicity for the film, Nolan cited Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of The Odyssey as a reference point, specifically her opening line. Wilson's translation was the first complete English translation of the poem by a woman, and it begins with six of the most radical words in recent literary history: Tell me about a complicated man. Her choice of that single word, complicated, rather than the heroic or ingenious or resourceful of earlier translations, signals something important about her reading of the poem and, by extension, about Nolan's approach to its central character. Odysseus in Wilson's hands is not simply a hero. He is cunning and flawed and occasionally cruel and entirely human, which is, of course, exactly why he has lasted. The poem has survived not because Odysseus is admirable in every sense we might want, but because he is recognisable. We have all been, at some point, the complicated man trying to find his way back to something.
There is a line in the poem that I have been sitting with since I first read it and have been sitting with again since seeing the film:Â "Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured."Â This is what stories do. This is, I think, what they have always done, from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia to the IMAX screens of 2026. They take the grief, the wandering, the loss, the years spent going in the wrong direction, and they hold them long enough that the joy can find them. Not because the grief wasn't real, but because the remembering is. Because someone sat down, four thousand years ago, and said: this happened, and it mattered, and I am going to tell you about it in a way that means you will still be able to feel it when everything else about this world has gone.
What moved me most, sitting in that cinema, was not the scale of it, though the scale is extraordinary, and Nolan has done something with light and sea and the particular texture of ancient stone that I am not sure I have the vocabulary for. What moved me was the room itself. A full cinema in 2026, watching a story that is nearly four thousand years old in its earliest form, collectively holding their breath at the same moments and sitting very still at the same moments. Homer composed for an audience who gathered to listen. The poem was oral before it was written, meant to be experienced collectively, in the presence of other people who were feeling the same things at the same time. There is something about seeing it this way, in the dark, with strangers, all watching the same complicated man try to find his way home, that felt less like watching a film and more like participating in something much older than cinema, something that has been going on, in one form or another, since the first fire and the first storyteller and the first group of people who needed, for a few hours, to be somewhere else.
If you haven't read The Odyssey, the film is a magnificent reason to start. If you have read it, the film is a magnificent reason to return to it, because Nolan has done what the best adaptations do: not replaced the original but sent you back to it with new questions, new images, and new things to look for in the text that you missed the first time.
I would love to know what you thought. Of the film, of the poem, of what it means that we are still telling this particular story in this particular way, to rooms full of people in the dark.
Write to me at info@thestorystation.co.za