Though it dates again to the eighth century BC, The Odyssey has lengthy been a monumental a part of the Western literary canon, and with good purpose. The story of Odysseus’ decade-long return from the Trojan Warfare to his dwelling Ithaca is stuffed with excessive journey and unimaginable monsters. Gods equivalent to Athena and Poseidon, nymphs and sirens, and cannibal giants all seem in Homer’s unimaginable journey.
However little or no of that exhibits up within the first trailer for Christopher Nolan‘s tackle The Odyssey. As an alternative, the trailer emphasizes the fundamental human drama of Odysseus (Matt Damon) struggling to get dwelling and realizing that he shares some guilt for holding his males away. All through the trailer, we get glimpses of a number of the different human gamers in that drama, together with Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland as Odysseus’s spouse Penelope and son Telemachus, and Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, the Greek king who pressured Odysseus into serving within the Trojan Warfare. By specializing in these human beings, Nolan guarantees an epic grounded in actual feelings.
For some, the dearth of gods and monsters in The Odyssey trailer highlights an issue with Christopher Nolan’s strategy. Whereas the filmmaker typically makes excessive idea films about dream heists, time capers, and Batman, Nolan tries to floor them as a lot as doable. Batman Begins famously supplied a real-world purpose for each a part of the Caped Crusader’s mythos. Even Oppenheimer was much less in regards to the atomic bomb itself and extra about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s doomed relationships.
To that finish, some have criticized Nolan’s visible fashion, particularly in relationship to The Odyssey. Past even the complaints about historic accuracy, which have been brewing ever since Damon was seen carrying a Hollywood-style push broom helmet as an alternative of these worn by precise historical Greeks, is the problem of his stylization. Nolan tends to take a brutalist strategy, utilizing muted grays and browns and emphasizing scale. He doesn’t have an expansive shade palette.
