Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey First Look Is More Classic Hollywood Than Homer

“Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he made movies about Batman and Oppie.” That’s been the cry of every movie fan since Christopher Nolan announced that his next movie would be an adaptation of epic Homeric poem The Odyssey. Surprisingly, we don’t have to rely on secrets of the Muses to learn about one aspect of Nolan’s approach.

The first image of star Matt Damon as hero Odysseus has hit the internet, giving us our first indication of Nolan’s thought process. And must of us are reacting by nodding and saying, “Yep, that’s about what I expected Matt Damon as a Greek hero to look like.”

Matt Damon is Odysseus. A film by Christopher Nolan, #TheOdysseyMovie is in theaters July 17, 2026. pic.twitter.com/7a5YbfqVfG— odysseymovie (@odysseymovie) February 17, 2025

One social media user, however, disagreed. A user with the handle Big Serge pointed out that The Iliad describes Odysseus’s headgear as “a kino leather helmet adorned with boar tusks,” not the more broom-top helmet seen in the picture.

That observation underscores an important aspect of Nolan’s take on The Odyssey. Unlike, say, Robert Eggers‘s painstaking period recreations in The Witch and The Northman, Nolan does not seem to put historical accuracy first. Rather, he’s going for classic Hollywood homage, a tribute to the movies of his youth. While the costume Damon sports doesn’t look much like Kirk Douglas’s duds in the 1954 movie Ulysses (using the character’s Roman name) or by Bekim Fehmiu in the 1968 TV miniseries, it does recall depictions of Ancient Greece in productions such as The 300 Spartans (1962) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

Jason and the Argonauts featured legendary stop-motion effects work from Ray Harryhausen, a creator who Nolan also seems to have in mind for The Odyssey. Unlike previous productions which used trick photography to increase the size of the actor playing the Cyclops Polyphemus, Nolan will reportedly use puppetry to portray the creature. Although it’s hard to imagine a perfectionist like Nolan adopting the herky-jerky nature of Harryhausen’s creations, he’ll certainly try to recreate the effect of watching those mythical monsters as a child.

Although the decision to veer towards old Hollywood instead of historical accuracy might surprise some, it is very much in line with Nolan’s previous work. Christopher Nolan has always enjoyed integrating aspects of movies that influenced him into his own films. The Dark Knight borrows from the epic immediacy of Michael Mann’s Heat. Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey helped guide Interstellar. The play of identities in Memento comes directly from the 1970 Nicolas Roeg film Performance. In fact, Nolan famously shows his cast and crew a curated set of movies before each production, to help guide their work.

Yet, despite these nods to the past, Nolan still manages to create films that feel original and of the moment. With a cast that includes celebrated young actors such as Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Mia Goth, as well as established stars like Damon and Anne Hathaway, he’s sure to continue that trend with The Odyssey.

The Odyssey sails into theaters in 2026.

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