The Odyssey Trailer Breakdown: 5 Hidden Details and Easter Eggs You Missed

Christopher Nolan finally dropped the trailer for The Odyssey, and it looks like he is swinging for the fences. This is his big-screen take on Homer’s epic, with Matt Damon as Odysseus. The footage leans hard into the aftermath of the Trojan War, the weight of leadership, and the terror of running up against forces you cannot outmuscle. It feels less like a shiny fantasy and more like a survival story with gods and monsters lurking at the edges.

Five trailer takeaways worth pausing on

• Yes, the myths are intact: we get Cyclops Polyphemus. There is a quick but unmistakable glimpse of the Cyclops, which tells me Nolan is not filing the mythological edges off this thing. In the story, Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, and that one brutal choice triggers everything that follows: Poseidon’s curse, endless storms, and years of being toyed with by a god who is not amused.
• The Underworld sequence looks haunting. The trailer shows Odysseus in a fog-choked landscape where soldiers rise from an ash-covered field, and he looks genuinely rattled facing the dead. In Homer’s version, that journey is about knowledge: he seeks out the prophet Tiresias for a way through Poseidon’s wrath and a path home. Along the way he confronts his mother, legends like Achilles, and fallen comrades — grief and the cost of war staring him in the face.
• Poseidon’s curse is all over the back half. The storm imagery dominates late in the trailer. We see Odysseus rowing the oars himself, and what used to be a fleet is down to one ruined ship. That is not just bad luck. In the myth, the god’s fury comes from Odysseus’s pride — he could not resist shouting his real name after escaping the Cyclops, and the sea has been punishing him for it ever since.
• Agamemnon appears to be in play, and Benny Safdie is him. Early on, Odysseus bows to a Greek commander who sure looks like Agamemnon. Later, in the Underworld, there is another figure who resembles him again. Benny Safdie is playing Agamemnon, and the character radiates authority. My read: Nolan may be using him as a mirror for Odysseus’s long, messy trip home.
• The Trojan Horse is here, and it is brutal, not pretty. We see the massive horse being hauled ashore and a tense shot of soldiers crammed inside, trying to keep themselves quiet through sheer pain. It underlines Odysseus as a strategist first, a brawler second — and, fittingly, that same cunning draws divine payback later.

Big picture: this trailer suggests Nolan is chasing something that might be the most audacious myth adaptation anyone has tried to put on a screen. It reads as a psychologically heavy, consequence-driven odyssey (sorry) rather than a parade of VFX set pieces — though the monsters and storms are very much present.

What and who

The film is called The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan and produced by Syncopy. Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, with Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Benny Safdie, and more in the cast. The US release date is July 17, 2026.

Bottom line: expect a stripped-down, nerve-jangling voyage where personal choices, pride, and survival matter as much as gods and creatures. Nolan seems more interested in endurance than spectacle — and that might be exactly why this hits.

What did you spot in the trailer that I did not?