A week before director Christopher Nolan's IMAX epic version of The Odyssey would blast into theaters nationwide July 17, John Shelton, a Christian movie buff with a master's degree in divinity, mused in Christianity Today whether the Oscar-winning director's vision would "do justice to the great humanistic themes and foreshadowing of the gospel that have ensured Homer's relevance for multiple millennia." Could the movie, Shelton wondered, make "human hearts sing with perennial themes of home, human greatness, fatherhood, time, and loss?"

So Shelton—whose day job is VP of policy for Advancing American Freedom—joined the crowds that drove the film adaptation of Odysseus's long, tortuous trip home from the Trojan War to a $264 million box office record for an opening weekend.

After seeing the movie, Shelton answered his two questions with an enthusiastic "yes"—the Christian ethic, he gladly reported, is on display in the film, even if not explicitly.

"The value of the weak over the strong is part of this Christianization," says Shelton, as in a flashback where Odysseus (Matt Damon) rescues a puppy that would otherwise have been tossed off a cliff. (Spoiler alert: The near-dead 20-year-old dog is the first to recognize Odysseus when he returns dressed as a beggar; it's a scene that might remind Bible-savvy readers of the disciples who don't recognize the risen Christ.)

Shelton sees this same value embedded in how Nolan presents Penelope’s dozens of suitors as bad, dangerous people. They have camped out at the palace trying to wed and bed Odysseus's wife (Anne Hathaway), threatened his son (Tom Holland), and tossed the old dog on a dung heap. When Odysseus murders the suitors, the audience at Shelton's theater burst into applause.

"Without the adaptation Nolan made, he would just look like a thug, a murderer," Shelton says. "There would be no sense of justice to us as moderns watching this film."

Central to Nolan's film is the way the director inverts the warrior virtues, the primacy of power, and the tactics of lying, deception, and betrayal. Odysseus has broken trust, broken what is due to his family, his warriors, his pagan beliefs. (Spoiler alert: the goddess of wisdom Athena [Zendaya], who pops up when Odysseus questions the choices he's made, looks just like a girl his men murdered as they destroyed Troy.)

In the pagan world, he is valorized right for his martial strength, his cunning, and his trickery. But in the film, says Shelton, there is "a beautiful confession scene" where Odysseus speaks to Penelope, who is behind a screen. "The setting seems to intentionally mirror a Catholic confessional," says Shelton, where the hero is regretful, remorseful. He is taking accountability, and now he is capable of mercy.

"Even the language of the Gospel—the good news of the returning master—is thematically in the movie," Shelton says. "And there are frequent mentions of 'Zeus's Law' (hospitality toward strangers) where you get the sense of the Golden Rule to treat others as you would be treated because you don't know if you might be entertaining gods."

Shelton concludes that the film is "a successful adaptation of Homer that reflects a changing sense of what it is to be moral, to be virtuous, to be a human being in a world marked by sin and evil. The film itself wrestles with that marvelously. There's not just monsters out there—the Cyclops, the Giants, the Whirlpool in the angry sea, the Scylla and the Charybdis. The hardest thing to deal with is ourselves. We can be brutal, more inhumane than the beasts, more inhumane than the monsters. There's this real grappling with human nature here that I think makes it a success."