Inside all the blink-and-you-miss-it moments, subtle easter eggs and poignant takeaways from Christopher Nolan’s ancient epic

• This article contains spoilers for The Odyssey

The Odyssey looks set to be the blockbuster hit of the summer, with global opening weekend grosses of $264m, critical rave reviews including five stars from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, and reports of fans traversing continents to experience Christopher Nolan’s epic tale of gods and monsters in one of the few dozen screens worldwide with the capability to screen Imax in 70mm. It also has the potential to rule the box office for the coming weeks, with few other true blockbusters to be released this summer, with the exception of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (hence the cast’s humiliation ritual of a press tour). Read on for a spoiler-packed breakdown of the epic battles, narrative twists and out-of-nowhere cameos that bring richness to Nolan’s idiosyncratic vision of ancient life.

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‘I’m in that moment of sheer terror,” says Christopher Nolan, sitting in a suite at the Corinthia hotel in London, in a slightly rumpled suit, next to a pot of tea. Outside, crowds jostle, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the stars within – Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o. It is the day before the world premiere of Nolan’s latest film, an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, and the last day of waiting before audiences decide whether the biggest gamble of Nolan’s career has paid off. The film, which reportedly cost $250m (£185m), doesn’t just need an audience to show up. It needs the entire moviegoing world to do so.

“It never gets any easier, because I make films for audiences and the audience tells me what it likes,” he says. “They finish the film. I don’t have anything to hide behind. I can’t just be like: ‘Oh, people don’t get it.’ Those aren’t the films I make. What does the audience make of it? Do they turn up? Do they like it if they do turn up?

Doing full justice to the Homeric legend, Christopher Nolan amasses an epic cast to convey the true cost of war with film-making of thrilling ambition

• A classicist’s verdict

• Nolan interviewed

• Will women also love The Odyssey?

Christopher Nolan reinvents the Homeric legend as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion, an epic ordeal of anguish witnessed by the dead and presided over by capricious deities who participate on almost equal terms with the humans. It speaks to the generational pain of PTSD; plenty of soldiers come home in person after any war promptly enough, but arriving back to their prewar state emotionally or spiritually can take years or decades and may never happen at all. The invisible odyssey of anguish is punctuated by flashback episodes, hallucinations, confrontations with the arbitrary gods of dysfunction. And all the time the spouses and children cannot move on with their lives.

This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish. It has gasp-inducing, Imax-sized landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.

The universal themes addressed by one of humanity’s greatest storytellers more than merit Hollywood box-office treatment

The Magasphere’s endless appetite for culture wars is wearily familiar. But who could have foreseen that Greek literature would become the new casus belli? Ahead of its much-anticipated general release next week, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey has triggered Elon Musk and other supposed defenders of western civilisation. Directorial decisions such as the casting of the Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Mr Musk ranted incoherently, amounted to “pissing on Homer’s grave”.

The absurd insistence on the white skin of a mythological figure reveals nothing we didn’t already know about the owner of X. The rest of us can move on and look forward to a lavish cinematic take on a story that has inspired artists for almost 3,000 years. Homer’s account of Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home from the Trojan wars has been reworked by Virgil in the Aeneid, relocated to Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and given a feminist treatment by Margaret Atwood in her Penelopiad. Now for the 21st-century Hollywood treatment.

The world’s richest man can’t stop posting about how Lupita Nyong’o was chosen to play an imaginary woman

It was the casting choice that launched a thousand meltdowns. The Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o was confirmed as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, and the usual suspects immediately started squealing that the fall of western civilization was nigh.

Elon Musk, a man in possession of the world’s thinnest skin and fattest bank account, is obviously among the aggrieved. Musk started moaning about The Odyssey in January, when it was rumoured that Nyong’o had the role. Since a 12 May interview with Nolan in Time magazine made this casting official, Musk hasn’t stopped whining; he’s spent roughly a week attacking Nyong’o on X and amplifying other angry bigots. His main arguments appear to be that this is a historically inaccurate rendering of a mythological poem; Nyong’o, who was named People magazine’s “Most Beautiful Woman” in 2014, is not sufficiently beautiful; and the casting of a Black woman in a movie nobody is forcing him to watch is inextricably intertwined with a leftwing plot to undermine western society.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

The Oscar-winning actor’s role in the mythical drama has been attacked by Elon Musk and others on the far right

Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o has responded to far-right criticism of her role in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey.

In the big-budget film, out in July, the star plays Helen of Troy alongside cast members including Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Zendaya.

The actor says her historic 2002 best actress Oscar did not open doors in Hollywood, as studios remained wary of stories led by black performers

Halle Berry, the only black woman to have won the best actress Oscar, says her 2002 victory “didn’t necessarily change the course of my career”.

Speaking to The Cut’s Monica Corcoran Harel to promote new drama Crime 101, Berry said that she anticipated the victory, for Lee Daniels’ Monster’s Ball, would mean “there was going to be a script truck showing up outside my front door”.