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The summer is just warming up, and it is already safe to call Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey the film event of the year. The first feature film shot entirely in 70 mm IMAX, it sold out IMAX screenings in major cities across the country a full year in advance. While the three-hour R-rated movie may fall to bigger box-office receipts raked in by competing Marvel movies coming later in the year, the epic literary subject and the rapturous reviews make it the early awards front-runner.

Indeed, the idea that Nolan was specifically gunning for Oscars (despite the fact that he already won Best Picture and Best Director with his previous film) is one of the many accusations leveled in the intense culture war that has been raging around this film for more than a year, and that has drawn in belligerents high and low, from right-leaning classicists like Alex Petkas to autodidacts like Roman Helmet Guy to prominent journalists like Matthew Yglesias. Elon Musk, one of the most powerful men on earth, called celebrated historian Tom Holland (not the actor who plays Telemachus in the film) a “cuck” for having the temerity to like the movie. The arguments embroiling the film have centered on Nolan’s casting choices (particularly the selection of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and the inclusion of trans actor Elliot Page as anyone at all), assuming an intent to make a “woke” version of the story as awards bait; his admitting to being influenced by Emily Wilson’s revolutionary feminist translation of the story; and rampant criticism of departing from the historical reality of the period, particularly in his depictions of arms and armor.

Like all culture-war imbroglios, these arguments generate a lot more heat than light. Accusations of a woke agenda collapse under the weight of history when you consider that the diversity of Nolan’s casting choices much more closely reflects both the ethnic and gender diversity of the period. (Herodotus’ detailed description of the Persian army shows a polyglot force as varied as the crowd in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and he tells of Artemisia I of Caria, a woman admiral who commanded at the Battle of Salamis.)

On the matter of historical accuracy, the detractors are right, and they miss the point entirely. When it comes to accurately depicting how the Greeks of the period armed themselves and fought, Nolan isn’t even trying. His rendition is about as rooted in the historical record as the weapons and armor in The Lord of the Rings. The multiple performers we call “Homer” were building on an oral tradition that produced the version of the story we call the Odyssey probably around the 700s B.C., and they were using the kit and tactics of that era to imagine events that happened long ago (much as the famous Crusader Bible of the 13^th century illustrates the time of Christ using medieval weapons and armor). Professor John Ma of Columbia University rightly points out that the Odyssey can be said to represent three different historical contexts spanning more than seven centuries: It takes place during the late Bronze Age (circa 1400–1200 B.C.), incorporates elements of the early Iron Age (circa 1000 B.C.) Greeks who passed it down orally, and was reworked in the image of the circa–700 B.C. Greeks who first organized the many threads of oral tradition into a single, monumental form.

So when detractors complain of ahistorical armor, which armor would they prefer? The boar’s-tusk helmets and massive bronze cuirass found at Dendra? The “dipylon” shields of the Bronze Age or the round aspides of the early Iron? The classical “Corinthian”-pattern bronze helmets so easily recognized as “ancient Greek armor” in the popular imagination? Should we see loosely organized war bands surrounding heroic leaders or the more disciplined and organized blocks of spearmen we call the phalanx?

Indeed, in Nolan’s mob-rule battle scenes, he could be accused of trying to represent the preclassical war bands of Bronze Age Greece, but that would be to accuse him of historical intention at all. It’s clear Nolan didn’t care. He’s making a movie about a myth, not a YouTube video about military history. In selecting the Odyssey, he is clearly focused on rendering one of humanity’s great stories relevant for the widest audience possible, not with gratifying the niche concerns of purist military historians like me, a vanishingly small fraction of viewers. In the screaming over historical inaccuracy, these critics reveal the truth—the loneliness that nerdy obsessives like us feel when we are forced to confront the fact that most folks don’t care about minutiae like we do.

The one complaint I will indulge is that Nolan made the same mistake in his representation of the ancient Greek warriors as Zack Snyder made in his hit 2006 film 300. Nolan and Snyder share a vision of warfare in the ancient world as dirty, dark, and grim. Colors are muted, sepia-toned, all gray iron and filthy hardened leather. This Hollywood misrepresentation of ancient warfare is the one hill I will die on. These warriors were shining, as vividly hued as the bright paint on the ancient statuary we wrongly believe to have been bare white. Far from the dim, grimy stock of both Nolan’s and Snyder’s palettes, an ancient battlefield would have sparkled and flashed like a fireworks display. This failure to do justice to the actual beauty and drama of the real arms, armor, banners, horns, ships, and other kit of the ancient theater of war is, as I wrote when comparing the helmets of 300 to the genuine article, like making a tin can stand in for a Picasso.

But the most important topic of historical accuracy Nolan nails with such poignancy and contemporary pertinence that I was left choked up. I have written in Slate’s pages about moral injury, how we carry the things we do in war for the rest of our lives. The Odyssey has always been a story about PTSD, about how homecoming effectively becomes impossible after the experience of battle. We return from combat so changed by it that we haven’t returned at all, reunited with loved ones we no longer recognize, attempting to reconnect to relationships that no longer make sense. I will never forget coming back from Baghdad and heading right to dinner at a fancy restaurant in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, staring incomprehensibly at the waiter as he tried to explain the butter-pairing options that would go best with the wine. I clearly remember the confusion and anger that I could barely keep off my face at the many friends who had gathered there to welcome me back, and how I felt perplexed and furious that anyone could ever think that bullshit like this mattered at all.

Toward the close of the film, Nolan gives Matt Damon as Odysseus an outstanding monologue as he explains to Penelope why it took him so long to return, perfectly encapsulating the agony of this disconnect—the realization that to go to war is to die, even if you survive, because the change is so complete that not just the returning veteran but the world they return to are irrevocably altered. It captures the rather generous translation of the famous poem by Heraclitus: No man may step in the same river twice. For it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.

The beauty and tragedy of the Odyssey, the reason this story resonates so powerfully across miles and millennia, is how perfectly it grasps the agonizing truth of impermanence, that the things we do to be worthy of those we love inevitably separate us from them.

In this, Nolan perfectly portrays the universal and enduring historical truth of war. Whatever he may have gotten wrong in depicting physical kit and color, on this—the most crucial fact—he absolutely hits his mark.

Read more in Slate about The Odyssey.