The first trailer for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has dropped with much fanfare (obviously!). It goes without saying that the filmmaker has scaled up with every new film, and the jaw-dropping visuals of the trailer suggest that he may have made his biggest, most ambitious film yet. Social media is already buzzing with excitement about the amount of possible awesomeness that Nolan is going to deliver.
Every frame in the trailer screams EPIC. And when it happens to be the adaptation of an epic poem — Homer's "The Odyssey", translated so many times — we don't expect anything less.
We get a succession of gorgeously composed images. We get ancient ships gliding across calm waters, their square sails silhouetted against fading skies. We get armored Greek mythological figures — Benny Safdie's costume looks incredibly cool; the Oppenheimer actor plays King Agamemnon — with ranks of soldiers behind them. We get a group of men rowing a wooden ship in unison in waters both turbulent and calm. We get men facing unseen otherworldly opponents (Nolan is finally tackling giant creatures!). We get a wide shot of a group of people straining to pull the Trojan Horse out of the water with thick ropes, and much, much more...
It goes without saying that watching it on anything less than a huge theatre screen would be ridiculous. Interestingly, for a film shot entirely on IMAX (making Nolan the first filmmaker to do so, yet), one gets the feeling that the film would look as splendid on a scope/Cinemascope/Anamorphic aspect ratio (2.39:1) screen as on any of the Flat/True IMAX/Full Container aspect ratios (1.85:1, 1.43:1, 1.90:1).
Perhaps Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema designed their shots to make them look great in either of these categories. On social media, some cineastes are leaning towards the view that the film would look good in either dimension, unlike some of Nolan's earlier films, which featured sequences that were cropped in the scope screens.
Anyway, we'll know for sure on July 17, 2026. Perhaps IMAX will be the ideal way to see it. Or perhaps both. Does the thought of watching The Odyssey on IMAX first, followed by a scope screen, excite you? It does us.
