A complex story with impossible questions: Oppenheimer delves deep into our past and future
Christopher Nolan provides a beautiful, layered and unnerving look into the American Prometheus.
After taking viewers on a voyage through time and space, a journey into the subconscious, and a trip to 1950s America, Christopher Nolan is ready to take us all on an…Odyssey. That’s right, pack your bags and bring you sea legs, the trailer for the Academy Award winning director’s ancient Greek adventure is out.
Based on Homer’s epic, The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus (Matt Damon), King of Ithaca, who starts off just having won the 10-year Trojan War. As with anyone who has been away from home for that long, all he wants is to go and see his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway).
With the stage set, we see our hero spend yet another decade trying to make it back to his kingdom, facing some of the fiercest monsters of Greek mythology and even the wrath of the gods.
The two-minute trailer doesn’t reveal much to the casual observer — except that the film comes out on July 17 and is directed by Nolan — but some things stand out. The first shot shot shows a battlefield with makeshift graves for the fallen, likely showing the end of the war our hero is to return from.
Another shot shows Odysseus‘s men erecting a giant wooden horse. They are then seen inside this ‘Trojan’ horse as their enemies drive swords through its interior to check for intruders — nobody makes a sound, of course. The Trojan horse, which the Greeks used as cover to enter the fortified city of Troy, appears in the Homeric text as the weapon that won the war.
The second part of the trailer is where we see the mythological element come alive. There are shots of Odysseus trying to escape the Cyclops and facing the dead as they rise from the ground in the underworld. There are naturally, a few scenes on boats, with the protagonist and his men battling storms signifying Poseidon’s rage.
We also see Hathaway as Penelope in two shots. One, as she waits for her husband‘s victorious return and another of the couple in an embrace as the hero prepares to leave. She asks him to promise he’ll come back and he replies, rather ominously, “What if I can’t?”
Nolan, who is known for his extreme attention to detail and refusal to relying on computer generated graphics, has his own very big shoes to fill with this latest project after his last movie, the historical biopic Oppenheimer, took home Best Picture at the Oscars and won him Best Director.