The first trailer for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey dropped Monday night, and it looks like everything you hoped it would be.
Matt Damon as Odysseus, staring down the Cyclops with that quiet intensity he does better than almost anyone. Robert Pattinson slinking through the halls of Ithaca, scheming to take the throne while Odysseus is away. In just two and a half minutes, you get a sense of scale that feels genuinely new.
And then there's the cast. Anne Hathaway plays Penelope. Zendaya is Athena. Charlize Theron takes on Circe. Tom Holland is Telemachus. Every single one of those names would anchor a film on their own. Nolan has assembled the kind of ensemble that makes you wonder how many scheduling miracles had to happen behind the scenes.
The technical side is just as ambitious. This is the first narrative feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras. Not partially, not for select sequences. The whole thing. If you saw Oppenheimer projected in IMAX 70mm, you know what that format can do. The depth, the grain, the way faces fill the frame. Now imagine that applied to the Mediterranean, to ancient battlefields, to a Cyclops cave. It is going to be something to experience in a theater.
Ludwig Goransson is back to score it after his Oppenheimer work, which won him an Oscar. His collaboration with Nolan already produced one of the best film scores in recent memory. Whatever he does with Greek mythology and war should be fascinating.
The film opens July 17. That is less than a month away now, and the anticipation is building fast.
If you know someone who is deeply invested in Nolan's work, they have already sent you this trailer. Probably with a paragraph attached. If you are that person, I get it. This looks like the kind of project that only Nolan would attempt at this scale, adapting one of the oldest stories ever told with the biggest canvas available in modern cinema. Homer's Odyssey has been adapted before, but never like this. Never with this cast, never on this format, and never by a filmmaker who treats spectacle and intellect as the same thing.
If you still have not seen Oppenheimer, now would be a good time. It will give you a sense of what Nolan and Goransson can do together, and it will make July 17 feel even more urgent.
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