Flogging a wooden horse: how faithful will Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey be?

The excitement around Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film of the Odyssey has been taken up a notch this week with the launch of a new trailer and the director appearing on Stephen Colbert’s US chatshow to give a rare interview. With fresh information emerging about the film, which is scheduled to be released on 17 July, it’s worth taking stock of what we know about Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus. And how faithful to the original poem is it likely to be? Details of the film have been emerging slowly over the past 10 months since a teaser was shown in cinemas before screenings of Jurassic World Rebirth in July. A six-minute “prologue” had a similar cinematic release in December and was closely followed by a trailer launched online just before Christmas. More footage was shown by Nolan at the CinemaCon trade show last month before the new trailer went up online this week. The new trailer for The Odyssey. So we know that many of the Odyssey’s most celebrated characters and scenes are going to feature in the film: the trailers show us glimpses of the Cyclops, the whirlpool Charybdis and Odysseus summoning the spirits of the dead. The crisis on Odysseus’ home island of Ithaca is depicted in the latest trailer, with Robert Pattinson in arch-villainous form as Antinous, the most odious of the suitors who are laying claim to Odysseus’ wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and tormenting his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Nolan has been unable to resist including the famous wooden horse, the ruse devised by Odysseus to enable the Greeks to break into Troy, which features in the first trailer as well as being the subject of December’s prologue. Related: The Odyssey: new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s classical Greek epic released online Homer does not in fact tell the story of the horse in the Odyssey, but it is alluded to: Odysseus asks a bard to recount the tale and the Spartan king Menelaus mentions it when Tel…