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The Odyssey (2026) Trailer
- Thread starter 3liteDragon
- Start date
ForAcademicPurposes
Gold Member
I'm going into the theatres knowing diddly squat about this film bar the title. You should too
darrylgorn
Member
Looks underproduced. Either that or they just couldn't find proper rowers who can move in coordination.
Ulysses 31
Member
SJRB
Gold Member
Not the first time sloppy things get past Nolan.
Nolan can't direct an action scene to save his life. TDKR especially is filled with goofy stuff like this. Inception is like this too, with weird cuts and logical inconsistencies throughout the sequence. Tenet too with sloppy hand to hand combat and super choreographed motions.
Trilobit
Absolutely Cozy
Inception and Tenet had surprisingly good fight scenes, but his Batman movies were pretty poor. He had to makes insane cuts in Batman Begins to keep it somewhat exciting. He's better with story and atmosphere.
It's from Saint Seiya
Chuck Berry
Gold Member
NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt
Biggest Trails Stan
Not sure how I feel about this, there's something super off about the costumes..
The_hunter
Member
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
2800 years is definitely reaching the limit for not giving out spoilers. Another 1000 years and we can start letting people know that
God
Jesus's
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Chuck Berry
Gold Member
FYI - The Armand Assante two parter from 1997 is on Amazon Prime
Chuck Berry
Gold Member
ForAcademicPurposes
Gold Member
I can make an acception when it comes to certain film directors. I'm going to do the same with Doomsday but that will be like dodging a North Korean minefield. That was oddly specificYou never read it? Kinda goes against your username absolutely
Dr Bass
Gold Member
Are you one of those guys that thinks Denis Villeneuve makes brilliant movies?
JimmyRustler
Member
Not gonna lie, the 5 minute intro before Avatar looked horrible. I thought the costumes would only look this cheap in the preview photos and the end product but man, it really looked bad.
Giallo Corsa
Gold Member
Re: the prologue ahead of Avatar...
When Odysseus's men put on their armor it looked like it was made of thin plastic. It was bending and flopping all over the place and didn't reflect light properly.
Odysseus shooting his bow to take out enemies was so...perfunctory, for someone who is supposed to have legendary mastery of the bow.
The real enormous metal Trojan Horse was fun to see.
When Odysseus's men put on their armor it looked like it was made of thin plastic. It was bending and flopping all over the place and didn't reflect light properly.
Odysseus shooting his bow to take out enemies was so...perfunctory, for someone who is supposed to have legendary mastery of the bow.
The real enormous metal Trojan Horse was fun to see.
winjer
Member
kruis
Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Christopher Nolan is soooo overrated. He had a tremendous run in the 2000s with Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight. These are all absolutely great movies. But Inception was the beginning of a downward trend. I liked Inception, but The Dark Knight Rises was a piece of crap. Interstellar was flawed but a real step up. But then the real decline started: Dunkirk (left me completely cold), Tenet (concept didn't work as a movie) and Oppenheimer (didn't even finish this).
Audiophile
Member
This might also be made worse by shooting in IMAX. I love IMAX where it fits and in certain Nolan movies, but I feel with Nolan's more stark, less dense visuals paired with the subject matter here; where we naturally expect something richer, the hyper-present and very detailed look of IMAX can accentuate a lack of production values.
Just as parts of The Hobbit movies in HFR 48fps looked cheap and mundane due to the increase in temporal resolution, there's also something to be said for having too much spatial resolution. Sometimes too much detail is a bad thing, it overloads our senses and takes us out of the experience, distinctly aware that I'm looking at sets and costumes, not worlds and characters.
Cinema is very often about whittling the frame down to what's important, most often that means colour or light and shadow (at least before poor practices with digital led most filmmakers to try and expose everything flat and protect every shadow or highlight rather than make sacrifices with intent), but sometimes I think that applies to the general detail level across the frame. A softer image can actually be more engaging and immersive for certain stuff. I also want fantasy to be fantasy and it just doesn't work if it's pin sharp across the board. Once again looking at The Hobbit; I'd argue it looks naff with the ultra sharp digital image even in 24fps, whereas the soft, filmic look of LOTR absolutely outclasses it.
There's something very barren about what we're seeing here and pointing film cameras at it with an effective resolve of ~18K and a very specific texture / depth of field profile isn't so flattering. It puts me at a distance emotionally. It's a lack of detail captured with the most resolution...if that makes any sense.
It seems very in at the moment to do minimalist frames (Villeneuve has the same thing going on) with less fine detail and a focus on silhouettes and simple shapes. Meanwhile, if you look at Spielberg movies from say the 2000s, the frame is absolutely packed with detail but the image is actually quite soft, it's the inverse. I think more minimalistic frames are a great way to add dynamics to otherwise rich looking movies, but if you do a whole movie with it it leaves you cold unless it's very specifically suited to the tone/subject.
Just doing IMAX as much as possible where you can isn't the answer imo. I think Nolan would do well to perhaps entertain VistaVision in many places which gives an effective resolution close to standard 65mm and it would look a lot more coherent and fitting for a lot of content while also being easily adaptable to IMAX aspect ratio/s. We don't need all of the detail all of the time, especially when your subjects are so visually stark, what we need is a frame curated down to what matters.
I honestly wonder if it's even possible to shoot an entire movie in IMAX and maintain production values high enough across the board so that it all looks good and doesn't just start to feel like celebrities playing dress up. His older movies had limited amounts of IMAX and maximising the quality of the scene was likely manageable in those smaller segments, you could probably get it dialed in. Smaller film stocks will paper over a lot of cracks and just brings things together in a very pleasing, organic way.
I felt like this problem started to really rear its head with Nolan in The Dark Knight Rises. He managed to make everything before and some stuff after feel coherent, but in TDKR there's a specific scene where everyone is fighting outside in the middle of the street and the production values are poor, the choreography is abysmal, the lighting isn't flattering and to make it so much worse he pointed the most detailed motion picture cameras in history at it and the cheap, mundane, ickiness of it all just felt so much more apparent. Truly an example of "here's a bunch of grown ups playing make believe", suspension of disbelief cratered. You only need to go back to his previous film, Inception, which was all shot in Super 35mm (and a little matted 35mm VistaVision for FX) to see an example of far less detail feeling far better, more coherent, immersive and richer. I'm so glad that film got made on 35mm and not IMAX, it just wouldn't have felt the same. It feels like one whole thing, a singular vision that invokes a specific feeling, whereas some of his stuff since has felt very stitched together.
I'll always be excited to see what he does next on the basis that he's made some great films and if we're lucky he'll once again do something that suits him, on the other hand, he doesn't seem to be growing much. My concern going forward is he's going to maintain this starker visual style, continue down this path where he's almost a caricature of himself, exaggerating his weak spots and to top it off only use IMAX going forward, which again is the wrong move in my opinion, you choose what suits the subject. He also seems to be trying to outdo himself on getting bigger and bigger with the presentation and it feels forced, I'd rather he go back to basics, pull out a regular film camera and just make something tighter, smaller, more focused, get the basics dialed in again. Something like The Prestige, Inception or even Batman Begins. "The Prisoner" thing folks were talking about sounded far more interesting to me.
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nkarafo
Member
The fuck is this Minecraft bullshit?This just looks awful ... Absolute mockery of ancient Greece ... What is Nolan thinking?
Wandering Leopard
Member
It's basically irrational to get too upset/bothered bothered by inaccuracies in a movie, especially a big budget one. Kind of like being shocked at getting wet if you go outside in the rain.
It's also not the first time this would've happened eg. I'm sure some Arabian people thought some of Lawrence of Arabia was absurd; and the same applies to Japanese people who watched the Last Samurai. No doubt there are many other examples too.
And we all know it won't be the last time this happens, oh well.
It's also not the first time this would've happened eg. I'm sure some Arabian people thought some of Lawrence of Arabia was absurd; and the same applies to Japanese people who watched the Last Samurai. No doubt there are many other examples too.
And we all know it won't be the last time this happens, oh well.
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DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Okay, so we're getting Nolan's version of Gods and Kings, which I remember people hating on Ridley Scott for the cast and costumes.
falconhoof
Member
I got to feel that there's a more acceptable point in between hiring Greek actors to play Greek characters in one of the oldest and most treasured stories in human history and Tom Holland though.
falconhoof
Member
I'm under the presumption that the image is just AI slop taking the piss out of the costumes. They look bad, but they're not anime painted on feathers bad. Close, fucking very close, but someone tell me its an AI image and not real.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
I still can't get over the goofy Power Rangers Putty Patrollers bred with SG1 Jaffa grey power armor.
The_hunter
Member
That armor is cool looking, some slight adjustments could be made to make it look better for the screen.
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Bojji
Member
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Renoir
Member
tough i was having youtube/internet issues lol
Behold, the beauty of IMAX
MayauMiao
Member
John Bilbo
Member
That looks interesting.
SirKicksalot
Member
No way they'd all be equipped like that or wearing it everywhere. Most troops would wear leather and linen armor, and they were an expeditionary force.
kittoo
Cretinously credulous
This and Project Hail Mary are my most anticipated movies next year.
Pagusas
Elden Member
so excited for Project Hail Mary. If its even half as good as the book its going to be a roaring success.
nkarafo
Member
The Trojans look legit. If you told me these armor pieces were found in an ancient site, i would believe it.I think Troy did a good job with armors:
P:axMagellanic
Member
Starting to look like 2011's Immortals. No Mickey Rourke to elevate this one tho, lol.
Nikodemos
Member
I find it impressive how basic-bitch the whole thing looks, despite the obvious big budget. The fetishistic adherence to desaturation/low luminance, the crap stage-setting/architecture, the pseudo-longboat ships, the Xena, Warrior Princess costumes (now with 25% more Batman), it's all wack.
Angry_Megalodon
Member
Because even being mythical there should be historical accuracy in regards with architecture, geography, demographics and the myth itself. The story is fantasy, the setting is not.
Besides, the overall tone and aesthetics of the movie don't feel right at all.
Branded
Member
Fair enough. From the trailer the only thing I could make out that didn't immediately felt 'accurate' were the armor designs but that's not to say I dislike them or anything. Cautiously optimistic.
Yup, we all had hopes that Nolan was going to do a "realistic" Odyssey with a strong theme of accuracy of place and grounded, practical effects.
If this was a film from a bunch of guys in Peru doing an Incan themed spin on the Odyssey, then any fanciful elements could be more magnified as we are already changing the setting. But we all just assumed this was going to be a Mediterranean based, circa 1000 BCE film so the trappings should reflect it.
If this all turns out to be a film about Atlantis, lost kingdoms, gods as technologically advanced humans, shit like that, then I guess. Or if the tone was, from the get go, a more fantastic vibe like Gods of Egypt for example (not based on any actual myth, IIRC), then criticism would be blunted.
But there was something a lot of us wanted from Nolan and so far this movie does not appear to be delivering. Could just be bad PR folks misunderstanding the audience (I can't see this campaign firing up the zoomers either) though, so maybe it'll get better.