Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of The Odyssey is being widely compared to his previous film, Oppenheimer, given they were made back-to-back and share thematic ground in exploring men reckoning with the consequences of their wartime choices. However, in terms of storytelling technique, the article argues Nolan's 2005 film Batman Begins is actually the closer relative to The Odyssey, and that the underrated superhero origin story is where he first developed the methods now on display in his latest epic.

Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale, covers Bruce Wayne's childhood, training abroad and transformation into Batman within its first hour, before depicting his battle against the League of Shadows across a two-hour-ten-minute runtime. Nolan achieves this pace through tightly cut "vignette" scenes that skip straight to the essential action without conventional beginnings or endings, exemplified by the rapid 80-second sequence depicting the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents. The article contends these techniques, refined further over subsequent films, laid the groundwork for the dense, propulsive storytelling Nolan now employs in The Odyssey.