We need to talk about the water.
This morning, Universal dropped the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and while the internet is busy dissecting Matt Damon’s beard or debating the Bronze Age accuracy of the armor in the release poster, the most important thing in this two-minute teaser isn’t the actors. It’s the ocean.
In an era where “water” usually means a fluid simulation rendered on a server farm, the trailer strongly suggests Nolan has decided to put IMAX cameras in open water rather than relying on digital oceans. The result is punishing, terrifying, and crucially, it looks real.
There is a simple rule for evaluating spectacle in 2025: don’t tell me it’s going to be great, show me the thing. The centerpiece of this trailer, the Trojan Horse, passes this test immediately. We catch a glimpse of it about 55 seconds in, and it doesn’t read as a shiny, weightless CGI construct. It looks like a 50-foot wooden structure that actually required engineers to build. When the soldiers hide inside, the lighting is claustrophobic. It feels like a horror movie. That fits perfectly, because The Odyssey is effectively a story about a man losing his crew to monsters and madness.
This commitment to physical reality extends to the camera itself. The film was shot primarily on IMAX film, pushing the format to a scale we haven’t really seen before. In the trailer, the depth of field is razor-thin. This is Nolan doubling down on his “event cinema” thesis. He is essentially telling you that if you watch this on your phone, you are doing it wrong. It is an aggressive stance to take, but looking at the shot of the Cyclops’ cave, which appears to rely more on physical texture than digital spectacle, he might be right.
Ultimately, Matt Damon’s Odysseus looks broken. His delivery of the line “No one could stand between my men and home” carries the exhaustion of a man who knows he is lying. Nolan is taking the oldest story in Western literature and treating it like a gritty survival thriller. July 17, 2026, is a long way off, but in a summer movie landscape that usually feels like a video game cutscene, The Odyssey looks like something you can actually touch.
There are no gods glowing in the sky here. There is just wind, rain, and bad luck.
The Odyssey hits theaters and IMAX on July 17, 2026.
