“Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he made movies about Batman and Oppie.” That’s been the cry of every movie fan since Christopher Nolan announced that his next movie would be an adaptation of epic Homeric poem The Odyssey. Surprisingly, we don’t have to rely on secrets of the Muses to learn about one aspect of Nolan’s approach.

The first image of star Matt Damon as hero Odysseus has hit the internet, giving us our first indication of Nolan’s thought process. And must of us are reacting by nodding and saying, “Yep, that’s about what I expected Matt Damon as a Greek hero to look like.”

Matt Damon is Odysseus. A film by Christopher Nolan, #TheOdysseyMovie is in theaters July 17, 2026. pic.twitter.com/7a5YbfqVfG

— odysseymovie (@odysseymovie) February 17, 2025

One social media user, however, disagreed. A user with the handle Big Serge pointed out that The Iliad describes Odysseus’s headgear as “a kino leather helmet adorned with boar tusks,” not the more broom-top helmet seen in the picture.

That observation underscores an important aspect of Nolan’s take on The Odyssey. Unlike, say, Robert Eggers‘s painstaking period recreations in The Witch and The Northman, Nolan does not seem to put historical accuracy first. Rather, he’s going for classic Hollywood homage, a tribute to the movies of his youth. While the costume Damon sports doesn’t look much like Kirk Douglas’s duds in the 1954 movie Ulysses (using the character’s Roman name) or by Bekim Fehmiu in the 1968 TV miniseries, it does recall depictions of Ancient Greece in productions such as The 300 Spartans (1962) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).