{"id":344734,"date":"2025-12-12T16:52:04","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T16:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/344734\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T16:52:04","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T16:52:04","slug":"the-odyssey-prologue-shows-matt-damon-emerging-from-trojan-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/344734\/","title":{"rendered":"The Odyssey Prologue Shows Matt Damon Emerging From Trojan Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn its first released footage, Christopher Nolan<\/a>\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey<\/a>\u201d promises to be the director\u2019s most expansive vision yet.<\/p>\n

\n\tA six-minute clip from the film is playing before this weekend\u2019s Imax 70-millimeter screenings of \u201cSinners\u201d and \u201cOne Battle After Another.\u201d The clip depicts the story of the Trojan horse \u2014 ironically, not a major plot element in Homer\u2019s Odyssey, though part of the mythology around Odysseus in general. For those unfamiliar, the story is one of warrior Odysseus\u2019 canniest strategems: He ordered built an enormous, hollow horse that could be occupied by soldiers. If the Trojans accepted it as a seeming peace offering, the men within could breach the impenetrable walls of Troy and wage war from the inside.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of which, it seems, will be explained onscreen. As the clip begins, Jon Bernthal\u2019s Menelaus, king of Sparta, asks Tom Holland\u2019s Telemachus, son of Odysseus, \u201cDid you hear the story of the horse?\u201d Telemachus indicates that he has.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDid you hear it from the inside?\u201d Bernthal says. And then we\u2019re off: Matt Damon<\/a>\u2019s Odysseus, Bernthal, and many others are shown huddling within a giant wooden horse that has landed ashore in Troy. The Trojans are shown cheering with delight as Odysseus listens incredulously \u2014 then, soon enough, he and his men are being jostled as the horse is brought onto land and are forced to dodge swords being plunged into the horse, seemingly to test for hidden Greeks within.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTime passes, and the horse sits triumphantly at the steps of a massive building within the walled city of Troy. Appearing nervous in close-up, Damon commits to action; in a cut to a view of the horse from the outside, we see Damon drop a rope to climb down and silently attack an unsuspecting sentry. A dialogue-free assault ensues, with the Trojans sounding an alarm. A high volume of faceless guards stream out and attack the Greeks; Odysseus is shooting their men with arrows, but the real hope for his men lies in a ploy to which we cut repeatedly amidst the action. As the melee continues, the Greeks are effortfully turning the gears that will open the gates of Troy.<\/p>\n

\n\tNo student of classics \u2014 or fan of movies \u2014 will be surprised that they succeed. And as the gates open, a mass of Greek soldiers stream in. Odysseus\u2019 men have been fighting with only the clothes they wore in the horse: These additional soldiers, though, are fully armed, and Menelaus raises his arms in triumph as he\u2019s handed a helmet to wear. Odysseus bellows in triumph. Brief flashing images of men in full suits of armor, a cryptic monster, and a head being lopped off of a marble sculpture hint at the massive scope of the film before the footage ends. (Notably, cast members including Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Zendaya, and Robert Pattinson aren\u2019t shown.)<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile what we see plays like a grand-scale epic, Nolan hasn\u2019t lost his touch with delicately intercutting between various developments \u2014 the chaos of the warfare against the precision of the gears gradually turning in the Trojan wall\u2019s door \u2014 or for granular character detail in the midst of the spectacle. One might say the carefully wrought story within the massive drama is some kind of, well, Trojan horse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd the particular aspect of how the footage first finds audiences, attached to two Imax rereleases from Warner Bros., provides no small measure of poetic justice for Nolan. Having bolted the studio for Universal to make \u201cOppenheimer\u201d and then \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d promo for his new film is being used to induce people to come see WB\u2019s 2025 offerings.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Odyssey\u201d is to be released July 17. 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In its first released footage, Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d promises to be the director\u2019s most expansive vision yet.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[15279,88,15281,12720],"class_list":{"0":"post-344734","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-christopher-nolan","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-matt-damon","11":"tag-the-odyssey"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}