The odyssey Trailer.

Christopher Nolan’s next film, The Odyssey, is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX® film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX® film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.

The Odyssey stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, with Zendaya and Charlize Theron.

The Odyssey is produced by Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan for their company, Syncopy. The executive producer is Thomas Hayslip

A full-length trailer for Christopher Nolan's big-budget film adaptation of "The Odyssey" has dropped, giving folks a good, healthy earful of the movie's actual dialogue. In what feels like a strange choice, though, Nolan has decided to give the film's characters American accents. To be fair, many members of the cast are from the U.S.: Matt Damon (Odysseus), Anne Hathaway (Penelope), Zendaya (Athena), and so on. Meanwhile, Charlize Theron (Calypso) was born in South Africa, but she's been working in the U.S. for decades now. Who could forget her star-making turn in "Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest?"

Most curiously, though, Nolan has asked his British cast members to affect American accents as well. The London-born Tom Holland is playing Telemachus, and he speaks with a nonspecific American dialect. Elsewhere, Robert Pattinson, also born in London, co-stars as Antinous, one of Penelope's many suitors, and he, too, seems to hail from Southern California. At one point in the latest trailer, Antinous leans in close to Telemachus and whispers, "You're pining for a daddy you didn't even know." A daddy? Not a "father" or a "patriarch," but a daddy. It's a colloquialism that feels weirdly out of place.

Later still in the trailer, Odysseus, leading an army of soldiers, yells openly, "Let's go!" like he's heading an American Little League team. Not to belittle my own voice, but American accents often lack the necessary gravitas to communicate the grandeur of ancient Greek poetry. It's especially egregious when people are saying "daddy" and yelling "let's go." The American voice lends, forgive me, an amateurish quality to Homer's ancient epic. I haven't seen Nolan's film yet, but the new trailer is giving me some doubts.

Read more: All 12 Christopher Nolan Movies, Ranked From Worst To Best

The Odyssey sounds weird in American English Penelope sitting in front of the shroud she's weaving in The Odyssey (2026) Penelope sitting in front of the shroud she's weaving in The Odyssey (2026) - Universal Pictures It's worth noting that early versions of English only came into being in about 450 CE, while Homer's "Odyssey" dates back to the 8th century BCE. The poem is older than the language of Matt Damon.

But then, Christopher Nolan had to make a creative decision, didn't he? He could have taught his actors to speak in the exact dialect of ancient Greece and then presented his movie with subtitles, but that would likely have made his nine-figure epic all the more expensive. Alternatively, he could have hired Greek actors to speak the film's dialogue in modern Greek, but that, too, would have been an anachronism, as ancient Greek is different from the version spoken today. Not to mention, most Greek actors don't command the same kind of blockbuster attention as Hollywood stars like Damon and Anne Hathaway.

Even if Nolan had allowed his actors to speak in their own voices, that might've been distracting as well, highlighting the American-ness of some characters and the British-ness of others. So, instead, he elected to make everyone sound American, which is fine. Every version of "The Odyssey" that exists today is a translation, anyway.

What rubs me the wrong way is the casual colloquialisms in Nolan's script. The "pining for a daddy" line doesn't bear the ring of ancient poetry. It sounds like, well, a slang term written in the 2020s. Ditto for Damon yelling "Let's go!" That's an action movie line, not an entreaty of Odysseus, spurring his men to battle.

It's fine that the characters speak English, but did Nolan also have to make their dialogue sound so casual and accessible to the modern ear? It would have been more appropriate if the language did sound a little poetic, highfalutin, or otherwise dusty.

The American-ness of The Odyssey is distracting so far Telemachus standing in a dining hall in The Odyssey (2026) Telemachus standing in a dining hall in The Odyssey (2026) - Universal Pictures But then, this issue with the language in "The Odyssey" is a very old problem that cinema has never quite been able to solve. One can likely list dozens of movies off the tops of their heads in which Ancient Roman characters speak with British accents. British actors like Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov similarly played Roman characters in movies like "Spartacus" and "Quo Vadis," and, for many folks, the British accent might as well be the accent of Ancient Rome. Never mind that the people these actors are playing would have been, in the real world, speaking Latin.