Two weeks out, how are we feeling about this one? Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which hits theaters on July 17, recently began screening for press attending junkets. Critics will get to see Nolan’s epic on July 6 in NYC and LA. The review embargo lifts two days before release, on July 15. Regardless, Universal Pictures has now released a final trailer—and it’s still very hard to tell which way this one will go.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the fantasy elements of Homer’s poem have not really been shown in the trailers. Barely a glimpse of the Cyclops. Where are the sirens? Hell, at some point, Circe transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs. Instead, what we’ve seen so far has been very much grounded in realism.
As it stands, Nolan has been treated very kindly by critics throughout his career, with only “Tenet” receiving relatively low scores by his standards. Even then, it still holds a respectable 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. Heading into release, Nolan appears to have the mainstream critical establishment on his side when it comes to “The Odyssey.”
Nolan is going for broke here, with the casting, that $250M budget, an R rating, and a story that has been so influential over the past 2000 years of storytelling that there’s an immense familiarity to its tropes. Hopefully, the execution will be anything but familiar and he will inject some much-needed freshness into this 2,000-plus-year-old tale.