Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many film cameras: Christopher Nolan's ODYSSEY

Starring Matt Damon as a toilet brush:

https://people.com/thmb/YILp5A87zz05zzOcagqhNaUNoaY=/4000x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(599x0:601x2):format(webp)/matt-damon-the-odyssey-021725-2-4ae9f59958f347758e261cb65392141c.jpg

Plus everyone else so far:

Tom Holland
Zendaya
Robert Pattinson
Lupita Nyong'o
Anne Hathaway
Charlize Theron
Jon Bernthal
Benny Safdie
John Leguizamo
Elliot Page
Himesh Patel
Bill Irwin
Samantha Morton
Mia Goth
Corey Hawkins
Jesse Garcia
Will Yun Lee
Rafi Gavron
Shiloh Fernandez
Nick E Tarabay
Jimmy Gonzales
Maurice Compte

I don't know how this is a good idea but I've doubted Nolan before.

Jon Bernthal might have made a pretty good Odysseus. Matt Damon, not so much. Honestly, a lot of that cast list is a flashing neon STAY AWAY sign. Ooh, is Zendaya gonna make her one facial expression again?

He should make them all act in ancient Greek.

Needs Tim Blake Nelson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNaCWSAAb8A

He's going to do the mo cap for the cyclops.

He's also going to do the mo cap for Matt Damon.

Yeah this sounds very bad. Nolan often a Cinema of Quality bore and this will be tailor made for that.

assume by this time next year it will be a trilogy

RPattz IS cyclops

bring on the lotus eaters i am here for all this imo

All in on IMAX:

After the success of Oppenheimer, which earned more than $190 million on Imax screens, some 20 percent of its total gross, Nolan challenged the company to improve its cameras, to make them lighter and quieter, and to solve issues with scanning and processing the cameras’ 70 mm film stock, to allow him to easily watch dailies as he shot.

“Chris called me up and said If you can figure out how to solve the problems, will make (Odyssey) 100 percent in Imax. And that’s what we’re doing,” said Imax CEO Rich Gelfond, speaking at the company’s annual press lunch in Cannes on Thursday. “He forced us to rethink that side of our business, our film recorders, our film cameras.”

The new Imax cameras are reportedly 30 percent quieter — so those infamous muffled dialogue scenes in Nolan films could be a thing of the past — and substantially lighter. Gelfond said new film scanning and processing techniques will allow a faster turnaround for dailies.

Having recently read Emily Watson's translation, it was plain to me that Homer's primary concern in every single book of the Odyssey wasn't stuff like the spectacle of blinding the giant cyclops or men turned into swine. Nope. Homer was mostly focused on the proper relationship between hosts and guests, their conduct toward one another, and the various gradations of propriety determined by social status, power, and wealth among the participants. It was a book of bronze age etiquette at least as much as an adventure story. I doubt this will be made apparent in Nolan's adaptation.

Let's go defy some gods:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gu2dTQsWsAAxmSd?format=jpg&name=900x900

And if that didn't work:

https://images.bauerhosting.com/empire/2025/07/odyssey-poster-christopher-nolan.jpg?auto=format&w=992&q=80

There has to be some way to put this alongside a poster of The Brutalist so it looks like these sparks are coming from Adrien Brody

Having recently read Emily Watson's translation, it was plain to me that Homer's primary concern in every single book of the Odyssey wasn't stuff like the spectacle of blinding the giant cyclops or men turned into swine. Nope. Homer was mostly focused on the proper relationship between hosts and guests, their conduct toward one another, and the various gradations of propriety determined by social status, power, and wealth among the participants. It was a book of bronze age etiquette at least as much as an adventure story. I doubt this will be made apparent in Nolan's adaptation.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Thursday, 15 May 2025 19:34 (one month ago)

180 minutes and 9 seconds of who eats what and in what order they eat. Filmed in IMAX.

Initial teaser running before Superman. Tom Holland asking about his dad, a tiny Trojan Horse, and floating around on wreckage.

So maybe Aimless was OTM

https://bsky.app/profile/grousehollow.bsky.social/post/3lwp6v2e63c2u

At last I have finished The Odyssey, after many years and triumphs and tragedies and olive oil rubdowns and what-have-you. So finally know what the epic is all about, which is this: eating meat. Lots and lots and lots of meat.

Got photos if you want it:

https://ew.com/the-odyssey-exclusive-images-matt-damon-anne-hathaway-tom-holland-11857321

I wanted it to take a decade and everyone but Matt Damon gets eaten

the prologue that plays before Avatar 3 is insane, I am seated, etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzw2ttJD2qQ

trailer a bit underwhelming coming after that prologue tbh

but not as underwhelming as that flop Avengers teaser was when it played immediately after the prologue lol

No cheering?

O, Muses! You obviously failed to show up for this movie. The audience will miss you terribly.

no muses no watch

christ this looks dull as all hell.

Doesn't exactly scream summer, that's for sure.

i think of Nolan as a director who's formally strong but unimaginative so taking on a famous work of fiction that everyone already has cool mental images of feels like a big error

i always think back to Inception when they're entering the innermost layer of the dream world and i'm like "okay this is where you put the coolest setting you can possibly think of, show me what you got" and... it's the snow level from a Call of Duty game

It would be great if it was just Matt Damon, in costume, reading the book on location(s) for 10 hours.

just looks like another viking movie

just looks like another viking movie

Coming in 2029: Christopher Nolan's The Saga Of The Volsungs

well I'm just reminded of how The Northman pretty much tanked... I thought it was a good film but it has a lot of anger and weird dude energy at a moment when that wasn't hitting

looks like more of the same

a lot of anger and weird dude energy

I would not be surprised to see organizations catering to right-wing chuds with Roman statue avatars block-buying tickets to this thing in order to promote "classical values" and blah blah blah.

that's why i will only watch these kinds of things on mute, glancing up occasionally for beefcake, which if the trailer for this is representative seems to be sparse to non-existent.

i always think back to Inception when they're entering the innermost layer of the dream world and i'm like "okay this is where you put the coolest setting you can possibly think of, show me what you got" and... it's the snow level from a Call of Duty game

booming post, extremely otm

Nolan is the worst exemplar of several terrible tendencies, I won't belabour the point tho, god speed man-dreck fans

He’s gonna make this epic look like a three hour episode of swords & sandals Dragnet without any suspense except the occasional bit where you wonder when Göransson’s score is finally gonna resolve

I’m not like “oh if it doesn’t have a twist it sucks” guy over here, my family and I still love all the Captain America movies ffs, but what is the deal with Nolan and foregone conclusions ramped up to maximum volume? I assume after The Prestige he just decided “finally, I can stop making movies where the denouement is in question!” and surprising people with anything other than mild disappointments in the moral qualities of minor characters fell off the menu. Oh well. I guess if he and his fans and coworkers are all having fun I should shut up.

I can't say I was ever a Nolan super-fan but always thought his movies were worth watching once, preferably on a movie screen. They usually don't hold up to much scrutiny, despite their possibly higher aspiration, they are ultimately just popcorn movies. I like that he continues to stay with practical effects, I like what is doing with Imax. I guess not everybody likes his aesthetic, but it looks like he at least cares what his movies look like (I'm less sure that he really cares what they sound like). I have weirdly come to appreciate him more his last couple of movies just because his movies stand out more compared to most other blockbusters/action movies which somehow keep looking worse and worse to me.

This looks fun! A Clash of the Titans with fresher special effects (and not cgi slop) sounds great and potentially something he can pull off—the story suits his tendencies to grandiosity.

Tenet is his best movie, where the pomposity somehow actually elevates it to some kind of sublime ridiculous.

And the source text, obviously, can easily absorb just about anything ridiculous or grandiose or pompous you want to impart to it.

Apparently online racists are real mad that Helen of Troy is being played by the totally not beautiful at all Lupita Nyong'o.

I’m really enjoying the spectacle of musk fanboys vs nolan fanboys engaging in their little civil war of words. From a distance, of course, I only know what happens on x.com from screenshots and reposts

at the very least it prevents this from happening:

I would not be surprised to see organizations catering to right-wing chuds with Roman statue avatars block-buying tickets to this thing in order to promote "classical values" and blah blah blah.

It's just disrespectful to the real-life historical figure Helen of Troy who, being from a city in modern day Turkey, was undoubtedly a lily white woman like Sydney Sweeney.

Apparently online racists are real mad that Helen of Troy is being played by the totally not beautiful at all Lupita Nyong'o.

Foremost amongst them, Elon Musk.

Can't see Nolan improving on Horrible Histories' Helen though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSZ2BoBZH-4

it's very sad when serious historians and classicists fall out over stuff like this

Hey, we’re getting the dog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI

When he says "no one can stand between me and home" that is an easter egg callback to Homer.

Is there discourse somewhere on ILE about “The Return” with Ralph Fiennes?

not excited... reading the kids versions of the odyssey and iliad; my brain was always in full color magical harryhausen mode with how i imagined it all. this looks like....a Christopher Nolan film :-( ...dour and grey.

^ i heard NOTHING about tThe Return on release... mention above is first i heard it even happened.... from a quick google, looks great?

I liked The Return, but I’m a bit of a Fiennes fanboy (Fiennesboy?). For those keeping track, it also has his faithful dog.

idk if this was posted/talked about already, but Emily Wilson's takedown of Anne Carson in 2024 was the "Not Like Us" of the classics world

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/anne-carson-wrong-norma/

not really impressed by the cyclops or the big tall men. fantasy movies are a crowded genre, where mediocre films try to outdo each other with SFX. against that yardstick big tall men in tin cans won't cut it!

It's a Christopher Nolan movie, so I don't think it's meant to be funny, but... wow. This is a joke, right?

i'm only interested in beefcake shots from this movie. the poster art and trailer do not bode well. why does nolan have to make everything so 'realistic' in a bad way.

Seriously, the trailer looks like a particularly vicious parody. "What if Christopher Nolan adapted The Odyssey?"

looks like the only thing this has going for it is villainous R Patz and even that's not much

I want to see an IMAX screening of this and the Dune movies with the reels all mixed up.

That's the trailer? Aren't they supposed to make you want to see the film?

https://bsky.app/profile/mattbaume.bsky.social/post/3ml3jbxnlrk2z

more like ody-not-see

the man knows his audience

haaaa

it's REALLY weird to me that Tom Holland keeps calling him "my dad", like thoroughly the weirdest thing in the trailer.

Pvmic I guess but jesus you lot are a bunch of shut-in grumps! I’m excited for this and none of your endless hrrm-ing will dissuade me!!

i'm objectively kind of lolling at the typical Nolanisms but subjectively i'm excited tbh. neutral on Damon, but Patz and Charlize look perfectly cast here, Leguizamo looks pretty bizarre and cool.

it's REALLY weird to me that Tom Holland keeps calling him "my dad", like thoroughly the weirdest thing in the trailer.

This (and Pattinson's haircut) were the things that completely put me off this. And thanks for pointing out Leguizamo - he went by so fast that I was thinking, Was that...? Nah.

Was Anne the only one using an accent?

leguizamo one of the most off putting people of all time

wtf that seems wildly incorrect

jesus you lot are a bunch of shut-in grumps! I’m excited for this

I hope you like it so much you go back to enjoy it multiple times. Based on what I saw in the trailers, that is most certainly not going to be the case for me. If this makes me a "shut-in grump", so be it. To each his own.

Was Anne the only one using an accent?

Based solely on the limited dialogue in that trailer, seems like Hathaway is going English and Pattinson is going American. Which is odd.

Would much rather watch Fritz Lang's Odyssey.

https://job-in-france.babylangues.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/le-mepris-004.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DcczsTGV0AUVuS3.jpg

I am much more into Holland as Telemachus now that I’m seeing Pattinson is Atinous. love that dynamic

I for one look forward to another round of Leguizamo Doing Way Too Much
It’s very nostalgic for me

Ye Gods! This entire thing seems off.
If you haven't seen "The Return" I definitely recommend it. Can get a little ponderous but it's the Odysseus you wanna see. No monsters and men turned into pigs,though.

i am upset that they are using the word “dad.” furthermore, there seems to be additional dialogue in english and almost nothing in ancient greek!

hahaha

also this

Pvmic I guess but jesus you lot are a bunch of shut-in grumps! I’m excited for this and none of your endless hrrm-ing will dissuade me!!

Based solely on the limited dialogue in that trailer, seems like Hathaway is going English and Pattinson is going American. Which is odd.

I should have specified that Anne seemed to be the only one not doing an *American* accent in the trailer. That appears to be the default accent they're using. I'm sure Nolan already has a smug defense ready for stuff like that. "The region where Penelope grew up would have spoken differently ..." or "Well, actually, the English word 'dad' is by some accounts a more accurate translation of the Greek, because ... "

they don’t show it in the trailer but leguizamo’s character speaks like hans & franz

Man the Emily Wilson translation is impossible to overrate thusfar. Inclined to dive right into her Iliad once I’m through it

I just started it!

God it’s good. I’ve only read Fagles before this

Same!

Christopher Nolan on reuniting with Elliot Page a decade after 'Inception': “It was really fun. Elliot’s just terrific, and I just thought this was such a great part for him. We had such a great time years ago on Inception. It’s nice to reunite with people.”

Seems like a good dude.

He can be a good dude with good thoughts and still be up his own butt when it comes to making movies though

I like the fact that this movie is winding up racists, but sadly I don't care for Nolan's films very much so I suspect I wouldn't enjoy this one either.

Not a huge Nolan fan but he's technically very good, I like the setting, if anyone can turn Homer into a blockbuster it's him. Risked it all on a couple of IMAX tickets.

I'm kinda surprised at how much I'm looking forward to this considering how Nolan-skeptical I am, but if this is just a prestige blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey with movie stars and monsters and landscapes and big storms, I've definitely got some room in my life for that. But I cant shake the fear that he'll feel compelled to fuck around with showoffy timeline games and annoying flashback tricks and that type of overcomplicating shit that he loves.

tbf, Homer fucked around with timeline shifts and parallel stories in the Odyssey jumping around between present and past, and Telemachus and Odysseus.

for sure, and i'm fine with all that, but theres a part of me that worries that Nolan will think its like about that and just go nuts with it. cautiously optimistic though.

No way am I intending to see this, but at least the source material suggests it'd be a more interesting way to spend three hours than Oppenheimer was.

i got no issue with using the source text as a vague reference for an unrelated movie - it's not exactly the first time the Odyssey has been used that way. i just have no interest in Nolan's work. also dude you'd probably be more comfortable remaking Ulysses 31 or something.

Probably not seeing this movie but it's cool that everyone's talking about the Odyssey! My favorite translation is Fitzgerald but I've never really given any others a try. My dad read it to me when I was four (dooming me to a lifetime of being a nerd) and I imprinted on that translation.

I was a Fitzgerald adherent for several decades, but I now prefer Emily Wilson. Each has its excellencies. Wilson is more easily assimilable as a work of modern poetic translation. I recall Fitzgerald as hewing more closely to the letter of the text, but sometimes his servitude to the text cramped the narrative and the poetry. Wilson was unafraid of 'editing Homer' if it served her readers while not doing Homer a disservice.

if anyone can turn Homer into a blockbuster it's him.

― disco stabbing horror (lukas), Sunday, July 12, 2026 2:40 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

A little while back, I was discussing this movie with a coworker. He's a big Nolan fan and is stoked about the movie. I haven't watched that many of his movies, but I'm low-to-mixed on those I have seen, so I'm not anticipating it unless there are tremendous reviews from people I trust. But he asked me who I would want to see direct it?

I thought about it for a minute and came back with Alex Garland. And I haven't even seen his whole filmography either, but what I've seen indicates to me that he's capable of, and maybe in the right place in his career, to approach an epic fantasy film. And so I went and looked up his wikipedia article and, as it turns out, he is directing an epic fantasy film right now based on the Elden Ring video game (source material I'm completely unfamiliar with). Video game adaptations can be fraught, obviously, but I hope he pulls it off.

If anyone can make a really good FromSoft film adaptation, it would be a feat on par with the Jackson LOTR trilogy. By which i mean, its extremely doubtful :-(