Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey trailer is out now and here's why I think it will be bigger than Oppenheimer

Dubai: Calling all Christopher Nolan fans.

The first official trailer for the cinematic genius' The Odyssey is out now, and our immediate question? Is the world actually ready for his new sweeping saga?

Hot on the heels of Oppenheimer, Nolan’s Oscar-sweeping historical epic, the filmmaker is going bigger, bolder and far more mythic.

This time, he’s tackling Homer’s The Odyssey — a story that has survived thousands of years, countless retellings, and entire literature courses — and giving it the full Nolan treatment. The scale? Colossal. The ambition? Borderline reckless. The cast? Absurdly stacked.

Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, the cunning King of Ithaca and war hero of the Trojan War. He’s the mind behind the Trojan Horse — the final, devastating trick that ends a decade-long siege and leaves a city in ashes. But victory doesn’t bring peace. All Odysseus wants is to return home to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland). What follows instead is a saga defined by loss, temptation, survival and fate.

Because an easy journey wouldn’t be The Odyssey — and it certainly wouldn’t be a Nolan film.

The trailer teases a relentless series of trials as Odysseus battles gods, monsters and nature itself. Charlize Theron appears as the dangerous enchantress Circe, while the towering Cyclops Polyphemus looms large in one of the preview’s most striking moments. Nolan, unsurprisingly, appears to have leaned heavily into practical effects, with reports suggesting animatronics were used to bring the mythical giant to life — a choice that gives the spectacle a raw, physical intensity.

Visually, the footage is overwhelming in the best way. Roaring seas, violent storms, sweeping wide shots of ships swallowed by the ocean, flashes of war and ruin — it’s epic storytelling on a scale that feels almost extinct in modern cinema. Damon spends much of the trailer soaked, battered and clinging to survival, while a thunderous score pulses underneath it all, daring audiences not to feel something.

And Nolan isn’t done teasing. A six-minute prologue from The Odyssey is already playing in theatres ahead of IMAX screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash, a move that feels less like marketing and more like a declaration: this is meant to be experienced on the biggest screen possible.

Also starring Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya, The Odyssey is shaping up to be less of a film and more of a full-blown cinematic saga. The only real question left is whether audiences are ready for a myth this old — and a movie this massive — to crash back into the modern world.