Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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What are your predictions for the odyssey ? Will it bomb, will it flourish, will it be meh? What it has going on for it are Nolan, star studded cast, one of the greatest adventure tales ever told. On the other hand for every Dark Knight in his career, Nolan has produced a Dark Knight Rises and all of his movies are one hour longer than needed. The casting has definitely some strange and odd choices. And whether there is appetite for mythical destruction in the public after massive woke coded fantasy and other flops in the last few years remains to be seen.
Personally I will probably skip it, unless invited by some extremely hot chick. After so much culture warring - I just can't get excited for the big Hollywood productions anymore.
I saw a clip someone uploaded and oh boy. Nolan just went straight for the liberal political discourse. It was Penelope and Odysseus in bed at night with baby Telemachus beside them, and she was trying to persuade him not to go to the war, and he came back with the geo-political strategic reasons why the establishment were pursuing this war and it was unavoidable (Agamemnon was using Helen's abduction as his excuse to break Troy's trading monopoly, he would not give up on that, so Odysseus had no way to say no).
Well doesn't that just scream ancient Greek epic of martial honour and warrior values to you, modern audience citizen? How can you not love and applaud this movie?
And of course it was as dark as the inside of a badger, but that's only because us proles don't appreciate subtle modern cinematography.
I really wish he had gone the Shakespeare adaptation route and set this in 1950s USA or 1890s British Empire or some damn thing. That would be a fresh take and he could then insert his Colonialist Politics For Beginners lectures without them seeming as much out of place.
EDIT: I'm not saying Nolan is wrong about that, in fact it's part of the historical interpretation take on the siege of Troy (and very well-established by now, so he's not doing anything novel for those who have read even a little on this), and of course Odysseus as a canny political operator himself would have been well aware of all that in the background motivation. But it's so jarringly modern to come out with it like that while in the trappings of ancient Greece that it breaks immersion and makes you go 'this is Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway' and not 'this is Odysseus and Penelope'. Odysseus and the other suitors swore the oath, back in the day, to go to the help of her husband. That's what is dragging him into this expedition: he is honour-bound by his oath (ironically, suggested by him as a solution to Helen's father) to join Menelaus and be under the authority of Agamemnon as leader. Helen's abduction by Paris (whether or not she went willingly) is an insult to the honour and reputation of Menelaus personally and to Sparta politically, and since Paris is the son of the Trojan king, Troy has to answer for it. It's all a tangle of obligation and status and upholding the warrior caste standards, as well as manoeuvring for political advantage. Reducing it down to "breaking trade monopoly" is tin-eared.
Odysseus doesn't want to go. How will he get out of it? Is being an oath-breaker better or worse in this case? If Odysseus is prepared to break solemn promises, how can you ever trust him? If he breaks this promise, what about promises to spare enemies or make peace? Is this war justified? Even if it isn't, can he break the oath?
I don't know if Nolan explores all this, or just has three hours of Damon mumbling and grumbling while squinting at the horizon.
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I don’t know if it will bomb or not. But I watched a CAM bootleg on my computer this evening. It was literally the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Now, given that it was a pirate copy and most people don’t n ow what that means, imagine someone with a camera on a tripod in the projection booth filming the screen. As such, I can’t really say if the visual impact of the movie makes up for everything else. But since the fidelity was so low, I have to judge the film by its characters, theme, acting, dialogue and plot. I give it a 2, 1, 0, 0, 1 in each category. Overall score 1 out of 10.
I just watched The Return last night. As such the final scene with Odysseus, the bow, and the suiters was particularly horribly executed. I beg everyone who’s watching the Nolan movie to go find and watch The Return. That movie is also flawed, but the final scene is absolutely epic. Watching Matt Damon swing and axe around in a circle like a retard is laughably bad. And watching him play a famous archer and basically hip firing a bow and arrow is so silly.
I saw one good review say it was “Bracingly modern”. With that, I agree.
Are all Nolan movies this bad? I know he’s got some detractors out there, but I recall telling people I liked Oppenheimer. I need to rewatch it to see I was just caught up in the hype of that too.
It’s hard to emphasize how bad I thought a lot of it is. And then to see the critical reviews give it a 10/10. And I’m sure all of the normies will rave about it too. Am I just crazy?
It’s the worst movie Ive seen in quite some time.
I haven't seen The Odyssey (and won't unless someone physically drags me along), but I think he's a tremendously overrated director. The Prestige is his only film I can really say I like without major reservations. Oppenheimer is overlong, tedious and populated by characters who seem more like robots than human beings: it is beyond me how anyone could honestly claim to have enjoyed the last hour. Memento is gimmicky nonsense (comparisons to the similarly overrated and contrived The Usual Suspects are well-deserved), a puzzle to be enjoyed once and discarded. Tenet represented him at his most indulgent, and could have been a lot of fun (its "core mechanic" certainly has a lot of cinematic potential) if not for its infamously appalling sound mixing and charmless nepo baby leading man: unlike Oppenheimer, at least it was never boring. The Dark Knight had a soundtrack which effectively conjured a mood of dread and anxiety and a staggering performance in Heath Ledger's Joker (I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the best performances in any film so far this century), but I think the effectiveness of that performance has distracted audiences from noticing some of the film's glaring flaws, namely a plot no less implausible than any other capeshit film, an anticlimactic ending, and action sequences just as incoherent as those in the rest of his oeuvre. (In spite of all that, I'd still probably put it in the W column for him, if begrudgingly. I can imagine myself watching it or Batman Begins if I was on a long-haul flight and there was nothing better to watch, the same circumstances under which I watched The Prestige.) Interstellar showed this infamously cold and remote director attempting to go a bit softer and Spielbergian, and the results were embarrassing: sentiment is not something you can fake, as anyone who's used generative AI will tell you. Dunkirk was a transparent attempt to do a Bri'ish take on Saving Private Ryan, and benefitted from featuring extremely sparse dialogue (believable dialogue was never one of his strengths), but missed the memo that Ryan's bloody, brutal grittiness was an essential element of what made it work: a gritty PG-13 war film is a contradiction in terms. I haven't seen Inception since it was in the cinema, but don't remember especially enjoying it, and have always found the basic concept of "it's a movie which is a metaphor for making movies" kind of silly and masturbatory. (I do remember feeling exceptionally annoyed at the Nolan fanboys patting themselves on the back for being able to follow the film's plot, and insisting that anyone who didn't like it was just too thick to understand it. It's not Primer, lads.)
I've noticed that every time a new Nolan film comes out, it makes a lot of money and critics praise it to the heavens as his best film yet – but inside of a year, everyone has completely forgotten about it, which I take as a tacit admission that these films are ultimately rather shallow and unmemorable. I bet you'd all completely forgotten about Dunkirk before reading this comment, hadn't you? Inception was probably his last film which made any kind of durable impact on popular culture. Not only that, but he's getting worse over time: neither Tenet nor Oppenheimer were good films, but the latter was measurably worse. I have a hard time imagining anyone will be talking about The Odyssey ten or even five years from today: even his biggest fans certainly aren't talking about Tenet now. People will say the latter film might have made a bigger impression if it hadn't had the bad luck to come out during Covid, but that's cope and everyone knows it.
If Insomnia, Following and The Dark Knight Rises are widely considered indisputable masterpieces, that's news to me. I have a hard time imagining even Nolan himself would claim TDKR exceeds either of its predecessors in the series.
In spite of all that, it's almost disappointing his films largely leave me cold, as there's a great deal about him I respect. His insistence on shooting on film and keeping CG to a minimum is admirable: as incoherent as his action sequences are, from a purely visual standpoint I think many of his films will age more gracefully than many of their contemporaries. I likewise commend his refusal to simultaneously release his films in cinemas and streaming platforms. The decision to cast a black woman and a trans man in The Odyssey was probably a sop to fend off the entirely warranted accusations of his being a crypto-conservative: politically, The Dark Knight can be summed up as "the PATRIOT ACT was good and necessary, actually" – not a sentiment I'd endorse, and yet not one I can imagine any other blockbuster director encoding into one of his films. Dunkirk was unabashedly, unapologetically patriotic in a way few films of its type are these days (something progressive critics recognised on release, derisively characterising it as a film made for Brexiteers and taking him to task for depicting the British armed forces of the 1940s as fuggin' white males, a historically accurate casting decision he made a point of repeating in Oppenheimer). Politically, he's probably the Hollywood mogul with whom I'd have most in common, and can imagine him being a very interesting dinner party guest, as long as we were talking about something other than movies.
I also agree that The Prestige is probably both his best and most underrated work (I haven't seen Momento or The Odyssey, though). Great unity of effect, and manages to line up the plot and theme in a way that is pretty rare.
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This movie kinda was Oppenheimer. Matt Damon single-handedly caused theBronze Age Collapse ,that event with a famously singular cause, and the movie is wrestling with that.
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At the time I said this for Oppenheimer - It becomes one of all time best movies if you remove everything but the Manhattan project.
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I think it's gonna be too heavy on the dark and brooding and too light on the action. So many of the trailer shots are the brooding looks and traveling and not enough of the action. Which might be more accurate to the story. Also people are gonna hate the story of what happens at his home while he is gone. It adds a lot of length to the story with a very long payoff time.
But it's Nolan so maybe the action will look awesome and kick lots of but.
I like Nolan as a director but he doesn't film great action sequences. His best ones involve massive vehicles or airplanes; anything that is human-on-human is a blurry, boring, mess.
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Not if I go by the trailer with the Laestrygonians. I hope the battle scenes are much better than that mess.
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I saw it yesterday and I liked it a lot. It's definitely not perfect and I can see certain things that could ruin it for people, but overall I think if you enjoy Christopher Nolan films in general, you will enjoy this one. I'll try to say some things about it without spoilers.
Two major things I could see ruining it for some Mottizens and why they didn't ruin it for me:
Culture war. My impression is the culture war nonsense is pretty superficial, so for me personally it didn't bother me too much. Okay, race swapping Helen is silly, but I don't feel like the culture war stuff affected the interpretation and the themes of the story. I feel like Nolan genuinely had a vision for this film that doesn't have much to do with the culture war du jour. I didn't get the idea that this is some conscious progressive subversion of the original story at all. I think all of the actors that were complained about beforehand as diversity hires, did a fine job or at least not a bad enough job to ruin the film for me. In terms of less superficial stuff, the only culture stuff that popped into my mind while watching the film had to do with the fact that the theme of hospitality plays a major role in the film, which it also does in the book btw. There was a line or two where I was thinking, maybe they want me to think about immigration or something in relation to this hospitality stuff, but if that's the case, the film is sending a very ambiguous message about it and not just pandering to progressive culture war memes. Honestly, the fact I was thinking about immigration culture war here might well be culture war brainrot on my side.
If you are a history nerd and care a lot about adaptations being super faithful to the books and historically accurate and such, there is probably a lot to get hung up on in this film. All of the armor and boats and stuff have nothing to do with Bronze Age Greek stuff. There are some shots in flashbacks of Agamemnon in armor at Troy and frankly he looks more like batman than like anything authentically Greek. For me it probably helped somewhat that I only read parts of the Odyssey like 15 years ago or something during Ancient Greek lessons in high school. I had some overall familiarity with the story, but when something surprising happened to me I couldn't be sure if this is some detail that I haven't read or forgotten about or whether this was a deviation from the source material. There are one or two hamfisted interpretations/themes in there where I thought it would have been better if he didn't spell it out as much as he does. On the other hand some Nolanisms were actually incorporated skillfully in harmony with the source material. Nolan always plays around with time and non-linear storytelling, but the original source material is also somewhat non-linear, so that actually worked surprisingly well.
I think those are the two major things I think could ruin the film for some people who are sensitive to those issues. Now onto two things I really liked.
When we compare it to the 2004 Troy film, one massive difference in which Nolan is much more faithful to the source material: it includes a bunch of supernatural stuff. If you've ever read a fragment of Homer, you will know that the gods aren't vague background things, they are very much actively involved in the story. Honestly, if anything, we probably should have had even more and more direct involvement of the gods than Nolan gives us, but I think Nolan gives us about as much gods as modern Western audiences can handle without it becoming goofy.
The characters at times behaved not at all like modern westerns. That is to say, while some influence of contemporary morality and values that we all take for granted is impossible to avoid in something like this, otherwise the film would probably be completely unwatchable for modern audiences, there is a degree of violence and brutality that is at least somewhat trying to represent the original Bronze Age story, rather than sanitizing everything for modern audiences.
Overall, if you're so fed up with culture stuff that you immediately rage-quite when you see a silly raceswap even if it is somewhat superficial and doesn't affect the underlying story, you are probably not going to enjoy this film. Otherwise, if you enjoy other Nolan films, I can recommend seeing it. It isn't perfect, but I personally enjoyed it a lot.
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Granted I haven't watched all of Nolan's movies recently, but I don't think he's made a good movie since The Dark Knight Rises. Interstellar and Tenet were both godawful, though the former at least had a banger soundtrack. I would expect this movie to be more of the same.
Interstellar has grown on me. Tenet had a good idea but couldn't execute it in a way that was entertaining.
Dunkirk was quite good. Oppenheimer was well shot and had sharp dialog up until the final scene with RDJ, which was so unbelievable it took me out of the movie.
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I don't think it'll flop, woke fatigue usually takes time to set in (Star Wars 8 grossed a gigajillion dollars) and Nolan's track record gives him the benefit of the doubt.
As for whether it'll be good. Probably? It's a good story, by a good director with good actors. I'm of the opinion that you should lean into the goofiness of the Odyssey because the underlying plot is kind of grim, but we'll see how this one goes.
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There is practically no competition in terms of summer blockbusters right now, and Nolan has a lot of name recognition. Same with The Odyssey, most people have at least heard of it. It could be the biggest trainwreck of a movie ever produced and people would still go see it just on that basis. Critics are going to glaze Nolan no matter what. If it turns out to be a complete stinker in terms of audience reviews, it's going to hurt Nolan's next movie, not this one. (Edit: currently it's sitting at a 89 critic score on metacritic, and a 5.1 user score...)
I'd be surprised if it cracks a billion though, because the movie doesn't seem like it will appeal to the Chinese / international market.
Kinda strange. On rotten tomatoes it is 96 and 97 correspondingly. Is there a history of audience score mismatch between metacritic and the tomatoes?
A billion will be huge success. What is the break even point of the movie - usually it is around 2.something the budget?
Critical Drinker hasn't released his review which is strange. There is chance the movie is so good he has nothing to rant about, but it is doubtful.
On one of Drinker's recent vids he mentioned he was visiting a con and there'd be a break in uploads. He's previously pointed out good things in movies his audience expected him to dislike (e.g. one of the Wicked movies). Hopefully he's not too audience-captured to call things honestly here.
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If you want to get a bit tinfoil hat, Rotten Tomatoes is a subsidiary of Comcast. So is Universal Pictures, which is the distributor of The Odyssey. If I were a conglomerate that owned both a movie distributor and a movie review aggregator, it sure would be tempting to crack down on "inauthentic review bombing" or whatever.
Apparently break even is $650-750 million, given the large budget and marketing costs.
After the movie leaked on 4chan, apparently they have been frantically DMCAing anything with even a single frame of the movie. That might be making things difficult for reviewers.
We're those real? They looked terrible, I'd have guessed they were footage shot but not used.
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I don't watch many movies, I'm a bit burned out on Nolan and the trailer looked dreadful so I'm most likely skipping this, unless there is some really good WOM from people I know IRL.
It's a bit strange, seeing the almost universally glowing reviews and then the the national newspaper I'm subscribed to kind of trashed it in its review and then posted a series of other articles on why it and Nolan are kind of bad, for completely non-CW reasons.
Ultimately it's Nolan though so I don't think it can bomb.
Which one?
A Swedish newspaper: Svenska Dagbladet
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The reviews are stellar and I was served a Ben Shapiro review on YouTube and even he liked it. It's going to be a monster.
Didn't Shapiro like Return of Skywalker?
IDK - but lots of people were far less mad at that than TLJ.
In his review for Odd he argues that the weird casting ends up being fine, if someone of his politics goes for that....
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I mean, I'm not touching it. All the promotional material looks awful, and the interviews I hear about are all the usual subversive plattitudes about undermining the original meaning of the work. I know there probably aren't many Odyssey stans since schools no longer teach western civilization, but I doubt there are enough anti-fans either who are willing to pay to see the original story ruined/subverted.
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