Christopher Nolan finally brings Homer to the big screen. The second trailer for The Odyssey has arrived, featuring Tom Holland as Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Robert Pattinson as the treacherous Antinous, and Matt Damon leading the cast as the hero Odysseus. The film follows Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. Compared to the trailer released in December, we see right from the opening scenes Damon’s character speaking with Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, characters like Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) and Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), and even Odysseus engaged in battle against the Cyclops, before embarking on the long sea voyage, caught in a deadly tornado, and clashing with divine figures scattered throughout the story’s scenes, while Antinoüs attempts to seize the throne of Ithaca.
The trailer for The Odyssey, in theaters July 16
This second trailer for The Odyssey, Nolan’s thirteenth film as director, which hits theaters on July 16, gives us a glimpse of more than the previously released footage. The choice to open with a dialogue between Ulysses and Calypso, who asks him, “What do you remember?”, could certainly suggest that, once again in Nolan’s cinema, memory is the true starting point. The memory of a man who must reconstruct the meaning of what has been, of what he has lost along the journey.
There is Telemachus, whose greatest desire is to search for his father: “You grieve for a father you’ve never known,” Antinous tells him in the trailer. The father-son relationship is another major Nolanian theme, from Interstellar onward, and here it finds the perfect mythological setting. On the Ithacan front, the figure of Antinous seems to emerge as the perfect antagonist. Robert Pattinson, who previously shared the set of Tenet with Nolan, plays the arrogant suitor occupying Ulysses’ palace—a man who uses a politically strategic issue as leverage for his ambitions, namely “We need a king,” in a kingdom bereft of leadership. Penelope, meanwhile, fights a personal and political battle, one of words, resistance, and time bought. Matt Damon, of course, remains at the center of it all, playing a Ulysses who, judging by the trailer, is a broken, shattered man—not the triumphant hero of popular tradition, but a man trying to piece together the fragments of an identity scattered among wars, seas, monsters, and gods, and a man seeking revenge.
What we can expect from this visual masterpiece—worthy of the IMAX format for which Nolan shot every frame—is a journey into the mind and identity of a man who reweaves the threads of time, who encapsulates the father-son relationship, and who forges a pact with memory as the sole thread holding together a self scattered across the Mediterranean. It will not be a linear journey, nor a singular one; there will be many voices and many tales that may intertwine with one another, starting with Ulysses and Calypso, Penelope, who resists Antinous and the suitors, and Telemachus, who stubbornly searches for his father. Multiple temporal planes, and just as many emotional planes, which Nolan will likely interweave with his layered gaze and elliptical editing.
