No director gets film nerds quite as excited as Christopher Nolan. Now, coming off of the incredible success of Oppenheimer, The Odyssey might just be Nolan’s most anticipated movie to date. While that movie is still a year away, we’ve learned more and more about it over the past few months.
Now, a teaser for the movie is being rolled out alongside the release of Universal’s Jurassic World: Rebirth, and while it’s playing exclusively in theaters, details about it have begun to leak online.
Like Oppenheimer, Nolan released this first teaser more than a year before the film’s eventual release. This teaser is 70 seconds long, and in it, we get brief glimpses of Matt Damon’s Odysseus, his son Telemachus (played by Tom Holland), and another character played by Jon Bernthal whose identity is still a mystery. The teaser is narrated by a character who sounds like Robert Pattinson, although we don’t know who he’s playing yet either.
“Darkness. Zeus’ laws smashed to pieces. A kingdom without a king since my master died,” the narration intones over footage of ocean waves crashing against the shore. “He knew it was an unwinnable war, and then somehow…somehow he won it.”
We also get two shots of what appear to be the Trojan Horse, which was Odysseus’ plan to defeat the Trojans. We then get a cut to a conversation between Telemachus and Bernthal’s character where Bernthal is explaining that he doesn’t know Odysseus’ whereabouts.
“I have to find out what happened to my father. When did you last see him?” Holland asks. Bernthal then begins shouting at the crowd of people around them. “Interested in rumor, huh? Gossip. Who has a story about Odysseus, huh?” Bernthal yells. “You? You have a story?”
We then get a shot of Greek soldiers marching through the streets at night, followed by text teasing that the movie is coming “one year from now.”
“Some say he’s rich or some say he’s poor,” Bernthal continues, as we see a Greek soldier walk through a massive entryway and unsheath his sword. “Some say he perished. Some say he’s imprisoned. What say you?”
“Imprisoned,” Telemachus replies, as we see Greek soldiers walking toward a city at night.
“What kind of prison? Good, old man like that,” Bernthal says, before we see a few more shots of waves and then Odysseus, clinging for survival on scraps of wood in the middle of the sea.
“The Odyssey” and “17. 07. 26” flash on screen to end the teaser. While not a ton is revealed, it’s clearly an indication of the scope and scale of the project, and also a reminder that no one can do this kind of epic quite like Nolan. Will The Odyssey live up to the immense hype? Given that it’s an adaptation of one of our foundational myths, and given the stacked roster of talent Nolan has assembled for the project, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic. Ultimately, though, we won’t know for sure until the movie actually hits theaters.
