If I disappear without a trace someday, start the search in the Aegean Sea. Christopher Nolan’s new take on The Odyssey tugs at my lifelong hunger to sail the Greek isles. It is a grand epic, a reminder of what Hollywood can be at its best, telling humanity’s greatest stories in luscious beauty and filling cinemas. This is the point of a good mass market movie, the genre delivering what it is best designed to do.

This Odyssey is about as faithful to the key plot moments as a three-hour film can be to a long oral tale. It artfully follows the jumps in time in Odysseus’ story: from Ithaca to Troy to his various stops on the long way home. Here is a horrifying cyclops, leering at the invaders of his cave; there are the Laestrygonians, faceless giants who carve up Odysseus’ crew. The victors of the Trojan War meander stark Mediterranean islands, some deceptively welcoming, some desolate and foreboding, all with the air of mystery they would have had for lost seafarers in an age when the maps contained great blank spaces. CGI takes a back seat to old-school discovery, and this film is so much the better for it. Nolan’s effort is a triumph if for no other reason, and if clearing that modest bar is a statement on the decline of the movies, well, so be it. The audience response tells us all we need to know about whether something has been lost or not.

No one performance steals the screen, but they all fit the parts written for them. Matt Damon is a disciplined soldier, fulfilling Odysseus’ role as he must. Tom Holland is a bit old to convincingly capture Telemachus’ coming of age, but the performance does have some heart, and Anne Hathaway as Penelope is at turns striking in her grief and bitterness. Robert Pattinson makes a decent scheming suitor, though Zendaya seemed an overly soft Athena, more melancholy than a shrewd warrior goddess should be. Jon Bernthal is a strong Menelaus, prideful but heartfelt in his care for his lost comrade. Darth Vader, however, makes for a rather one-dimensional Agamemnon. I have nothing at all to add to the debates about the racial accuracy of various actors.

Nolan’s Odysseus is a modern man, war-weary and scarred by what he has seen, haunted by the destruction his horse scheme wrought upon Troy. He is skeptical of the gods, save the light touch of Athena floating in his conscience; indeed the rest of the Olympians do not appear to us, their actions portended but distant. They are deist gods, not the vain and impulsive figures who consume daily life in Bronze Age Greece. Odysseus is not a man of great passions but instead one of duty, devoted to his wife and to his men, possessed of the bullheaded determination of a good soldier. Homer’s Odysseus has little regret for his exploits, but Matt Damon here is motivated to atone for his sins in a society that predates the concept of sin.

The motivations that drive Nolan’s other characters are also often circumscribed. Paris’ theft of Helen is a ruse for Agamemnon to destroy Troy’s economic power, not a pursuit to reclaim his brother’s passionate love for the most beautiful woman on earth. Antinous, the chief antagonist suitor, gets a backstory of cowardliness going back to the initial Ithacan draft into service in the Trojan War. Telemachus and Penelope debate some court intrigue but mostly just want their hero back. They are all clear-eyed rationalists, acting in calculated self-interest rather than out of love or the honor that makes Odysseus unique in this world.

Giving all of these characters modern sensibilities of course helps make them real to a 21^st century audience, and in turn furthers its message. Nolan is making a statement about civilization and the risks it faces: the Achaeans’ victory at Troy breaks “Zeus’s law” of hospitality and just war. He knowingly nods to the late Bronze Age collapse that followed this early peak of Greek civilization, one that saw their horizons constrained before an eventual classical era that mined Homeric myths to tell tales of how societies could move beyond some of the most barbaric actions of the Achaeans. Mysterious people from the sea are said to be coming for the Greeks, but knowing viewers today are aware that the barbarians are within, already tearing down the noble culture of myth.

“Song will be all they have to remember those of us who could write,” Odysseus tells Penelope as they sail off into the west like a bunch of elves at the end of The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, the use of the Greeks’ early written script, Linear B, fell away not long after the Homeric age, and the written word would not rise again for centuries. This is a particularly interesting line in a moment when some astute commentators have suggested we are sliding into a post-literate era, one dominated by the short-form video and the meandering podcast conversation. Perhaps our forthcoming AI machine gods are the omnipresent Homeric deities who will intervene in our daily lives and subject us all to the flighty whims of our wannabe tech overlords. Part of me wants to see an Odyssey reinterpretation that goes all-in on that society that rejects the West’s Classical and Christian inheritances, just to show the extremity of the difference, and the value of what we’ve built.

Seen in this light, Odysseus’ modernism takes on a different flavor. It is a defense of an older order, one in which the values of honor and duty hold true, and in which the Hollywood epic tells a powerful and moralizing tale. It knows the horror of war, the psychological toll of violence and loss, and it upholds the honor of the pining wife. It fights back against an adolescent neo-paganism and avoids the camp of the Hollywood epics of yore. Its ethos is a cynical realism, ready to make a clear statement on how we live now, wrestling with inner psychology instead of capricious gods. This, Nolan seems to say, is an Odysseus for our times, a man who knows the struggle but perseveres.

At the same time, this Odysseus reveals why some people can get bored of this era, and why they may seek their fantastical or virtual escapes. For one, there is a distinct lack of real intimacy. We get a little snippet of Odysseus and Penelope in love, but it seems fairly one-directional, the stoic soldier holding his own as tears roll cinematically down his wife’s face. Helen, one of history’s most consequential women, is just bitter and done with her old husband, Menelaus. Circe, as Maureen Dowd acidly notes, is a “vindictive feminist hippie making ceramic pots in Vermont,” taking her revenge on the patriarchy instead of seducing Odysseus and keeping him around for a year. Charlize Theron’s Calypso, while at least hotter than dumpy Circe, is a drug-dealing New Age therapist. Nolan’s women are objects of intrigue but never quite take command, perhaps in part because his men lack the appetites that would let them do so.

This boils down to my biggest critique of the film: Homer’s Odysseus is clever, horny, and swaggering, a powerful but flawed great man. Damon’s is, well, kind of a bore. Telemachus follows in his father’s footsteps, his life all mission-driven. I admire these men, just as I admire the scope of Nolan’s work. Insofar as the point is resistance to the Brave New World lotus peddled by some of our tech wannabe overlords, I am on board with this celebration of honor and duty and psychological depth. But if we want an epic that bridges eras, one that stays true to the enduring power of myth and offers something to kids set dreaming by one of the greatest human adventure tales, we will need an Odysseus willing to chase intimacy and commune with the gods. Duty alone is not enough.