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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 agree that Nolan is overrated, but I think it proves how desperate audiences are for solid filmmaking craft, which is something that Nolan does really well. He builds big sets and shoots on location and performs real stunts, and at least makes an effort to utilize the power of visuals. I don't plan to make a special effort to see this movie, as I'm just not a mythology enthusiast to begin with, but I'm willing to believe that it's much better than the usual theatrical dreck.
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I probably remember more about the South Park episode parodying Inception than I do the movie itself.
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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.
I heard about that bit, and I can only think it is supposed to refer to "I solved the problem of how to conquer Troy and have Greece win the war, which meant the Greek fleet all heading home at the same time, and then they (like myself and my ships) had to invade islands for food and supplies, and killed the inhabitants, woe is me, the Bronze Age Collapse is all my fault".
Funnily enough, reviewers whose tastes often align with mine (we all agree Rings of Power is terrible) saw the movie and really liked it, so it must come across way better on the big screen when you watch the entire movie, because the trailers were dogshit.
The movie does posit that the Sea Peoples are returning Greeks for that reason.
But that isn't even the main problem. The movie outright states that the thing that caused the collapse of the entire civilization was the breaking of xenia/Zeus's law because of the Trojan horse gambit and the attendant sack (no mention is made of the much more unambiguous violation of hospitality that kicked off the war).
The movie makes an outcome whose cause so uncertain we debate the causes today into a pretty straightforward monocausal event.
It's much better than I thought from the trailers. Trailers were awful and bland and I suspect that's part of why the antiwoke stuff was able to dominate. The PR just didn't give you much.
TBF they didn't have to. The story is the story and Nolan is at the peak of his powers in terms of box office draw.
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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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