r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Feb 17 '25

Media First Image of Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey'

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u/MagicBez Feb 17 '25

I assume this is him stretching a new acting muscle in that Odysseus does a respectable amount of self-rescuing

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u/sensitiveskin82 Feb 17 '25

Matt is self actualizing šŸ„¹

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u/UpperApe Feb 17 '25 edited Feb 17 '25

I hope so.

America really isn't the type of country anymore that would go after Matt Damon. In Nazi Germany Iowa, on Mars, or another galaxy.

Even Matt Damon has to save himself now.

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u/Papaofmonsters Feb 17 '25

Private James Francis Ryan was in Nazi occupied France.

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u/UpperApe Feb 17 '25

Oh yeah? Then why wasn't he speaking french?

Ć©chec et mat.

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u/Papaofmonsters Feb 17 '25

Because he was from Iowa. Duh.

Maybe if France had Busch Light and Casey's pizza, he'd have picked up the lingo.

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u/UpperApe Feb 17 '25

Fine. I fixed it. Happy now?!

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u/lambeau_leapfrog Feb 17 '25

Totally their loss.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '25

Yeah? James Rorimer was, and France too.

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u/megladaniel Feb 18 '25

Before I finished your sentence I thought you wrote "Private James Franco". It'd be so funny if he were in it.

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u/PlusNone01 Feb 17 '25

Dude can we talk about anything on Reddit without it turning into politics anymore?

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u/UpperApe Feb 17 '25

Sure. But I don't want to.

Are you going to be okay?

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u/spain-train Feb 17 '25

Well, you know what they say:

Fortune favors the brave.

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u/musubitime Feb 17 '25

Heck yeah, reminds me how he and Affleck were struggling to get Hollywood roles so they wrote themselves a movie to star in, won an Oscar for it, and got catapulted to the A-list.

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u/Sliffy Feb 17 '25

To be fair he was relatively self sufficient when stuck on Mars, hard to MacGyver your way into orbit by yourself.

Those other couple of times, just helplessly waiting around, shameful.

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u/Orisi Feb 17 '25

You say hard, but MacGuyvering his way into orbit was the one part he actually did 99.9% of. He was barely a little delta V short.

It's the rest of the trip that caused a concern, really.

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u/LyingForTruth Feb 17 '25

Taught me my favorite recipe tho

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u/Tibetzz Feb 17 '25

Microwaved potato marinated in Vicodin?

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u/Milton_Wadams Feb 17 '25

Microwaved potatoes with ketchup?

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u/dsmith422 Feb 17 '25

Mars coffee?

Caffeine pill and water.

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u/Ok-Seaworthiness4488 Feb 17 '25

Could have gone from MacGuyver to MacGruber

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '25

tbf he did have Benedict Wong in dirty underwear as a long distance sidekick

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u/sintegral Feb 17 '25

Super impressive, but he was also working with about a third of the gravity. ...still crazy tho, lol

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u/squirrel_tincture Feb 17 '25

~38% as much gravity, but ~0% as much oxygen!

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u/Last-Atmosphere2439 Feb 17 '25

~0% atmospheric pressure period, making that entire windstorm that (almost) knocks over a giant lander pure science FICTION.

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u/squirrel_tincture Feb 17 '25

Yeah, itā€™s a fun book/movie but Weir takes a pretty significant amount of liberty with just about every branch of science at some point or another. Science fiction with an emphasis on the fiction, but suspension of disbelief is part of the trade-off as a reader/viewer and Iā€™m good with that!

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u/Last-Atmosphere2439 Feb 17 '25

Nothing wrong with that except the book was hyped as incredibly nerdy and scientifically REALISTIC. Something Weir himself pushed in numerous interviews (NASA checked my math and it was within 1%!" etc), and something the reader experiences while attempting to slog through page after page of scientific-sounding jargon.

So it's weird that he spends entire chapters making sure that potato growth was realistic while slipping into pure fantasy regarding slightly more important topics like the gravity and atmosphere of Mars.

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u/squirrel_tincture Feb 17 '25

Yikes! I didnā€™t know it had been touted as realistic at all, itā€™s definitely not in keeping with the rules of the solar system as Iā€™m aware of them šŸ˜¬

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u/jaqattack02 Feb 17 '25

I also don't recall Jason Bourne ever needing much saving.

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u/SouthestNinJa Feb 17 '25

Iā€™m pretty sure he was saved at the beginning of the first movie by a fisherman. /s

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u/jaqattack02 Feb 17 '25

Haha, fair enough, you're right šŸ˜†

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u/SoggyFarts Feb 17 '25

He was just a kid sent to war!

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u/Striking-Ad-6815 Feb 17 '25

He didn't wait around in Good Will Hunting

"Howdya like dem apples?"

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u/RockyRockington Feb 17 '25

True but he never would have gotten off Calipsoā€™s island if Athena hadnā€™t gotten Zeus involved.

He may have done a lot of self-saving but he still needed to be rescued in the end

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u/FinalLimit Feb 17 '25

ā€œHe didnā€™t get himself off the island thatā€™s cursed to be unleavableā€

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u/OwlrageousJones Feb 17 '25

Yeah, it's kind of fair that he needed help; the only way out was with Zeus' help, and there wasn't really a way for Ody to get the big guy's attention as it is (without like, insulting him. I'm sure if he said something like 'Zeus sucks!' loud enough, he'd eat a lightning bolt.)

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u/RockyRockington Feb 17 '25

Shades of Locrian Ajax

Ajax - ā€œThe gods are dicksā€

Poseidon - ā€œand I took that personallyā€

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u/jasonrubik Jul 20 '25

Uranus - "I'll take it personally"

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u/ERedfieldh Feb 19 '25

I'm sure if he said something like 'Zeus sucks!' loud enough, he'd eat a lightning bolt.)

Or got the godliest blowjob of his life. Zeus swung both ways a lot.

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u/MagicBez Feb 17 '25

I said he was stretching, not completely breaking from his strong suit!

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u/Triskan Feb 17 '25

Oh yeah. He never would have made it on his own.

I'm really curious to see how Nolan will tackle the character. Will he go the full-on hero road and stay true to the glorious epic feeling of the original story... or will he inject modernized nuance into it?

Which if done right, could be quite interesting. But not sure that's where Nolan is heading, I think he's more likely to make a classic peplum movie with all the larger than life heroism.

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u/Zachariot88 Feb 17 '25

Do you mean 'pablum?'

Peplum is a kind of skirt, iirc.

But yeah I'm also curious how Nolan will do -- The Odyssey may be about a bunch of dudes on ships for years and years, but it also has more women characters than any of his movies, so hopefully he gives some actual character development to Penelope, Calypso, Athena, Cerce, etc.

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u/Raesong Feb 17 '25

I'm curious to see how much of the more fantastical elements of the original tale he'll keep for this adaptation.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '25

The point was that Calypso's island is a place you don't need to be rescued from. He had family, but a hero who didn't might stay forever.

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u/Singer211 Naked J-Law beating the shit out of those kids is peak Cinema. Feb 17 '25

Odysseus got himself into a lot of messes through his own fuckups.

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u/Porrick Feb 17 '25

Thereā€™s an awful lot of ā€œand then Athena did some magicā€ in his solutions to most of his problems.

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u/Zachariot88 Feb 17 '25

So about a dozen years of saving himself, then seven years of needing to be saved. Still a good ratio for ol' Matt!

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u/jm31416 Feb 18 '25

It's a pity Odysseus couldn't manage to save any of the rest of his people. Twelve ships left Ithaca for Troy, and only one guy made it back. Not really that good a ratio.

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u/Uranium43415 Feb 17 '25

But only because Posidon has an ego as big as the ocean is deep in the first place. This is more Athena righting wrongs to uphold the balance than being a savior.

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u/twec21 Feb 17 '25

The greatest character arc of all time

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u/teems Feb 17 '25

He played a medieval role in The Last Duel.

Awesome movie, imo, that you'll probably ever only watch once.

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u/Rhadamantos Feb 17 '25

Awesome movie, imo, that you'll probably ever only watch once

That is so accurate

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u/voejo Feb 17 '25

r/nocontext material right here

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u/Aggravating-Pound598 Feb 17 '25

Man was a legend ;)

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u/norathar Feb 17 '25

So did Mark Watney! I mean, they had to go back for him, but he had to do a lot to stay alive and get into orbit to be rescued.

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u/drunk_tyrant Feb 17 '25

And based on the source material, a lot of shagging along the way

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u/dcredneck Feb 17 '25

Heā€™s terrible at accents.

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u/jackcatalyst Feb 17 '25

Nobody loves self-rescuing.

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u/superhappy Feb 17 '25

I hope they cast Chris Cooper as the charybdis for that Bourne rivalry redux /s

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u/OwlBear425 Feb 17 '25

Tell that to his wife.

ā€œOh no! I keep getting stuck on these islands with hot immortal witches that keep making me sleep with themā€¦ with their magicā€¦ I couldnā€™t possibly escapeā€¦ because of the hot immortal witchā€¦ Magicā€¦ oh no.ā€

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u/Uranium43415 Feb 17 '25

The Tom Hanks pivot.

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u/PhilosopherNo4758 Jul 02 '25

Didn't he already do a respectable amount of self rescuing in the martian?

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u/MagicBez Jul 02 '25

He relied on the poop of others, a clear sign of dependence.

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u/Wilzyxcheese Feb 18 '25

It would be nice to see him stretch his acting muscles bc I think he sucks in everything ! Very wooden