I'm just going to sit this movie out. I'm too autistic for this. Greek mythology was one of my gateways and I even took a class in college. I honestly wish I could turn my brain off. But I know the smallest thing would have my brain yapping at me like a tiny dog.

I saw it last night in IMAX and was underwhelmed.

Its a fun watch but Calypso/Charlize Theron was definitely weakest part. Her scenes feels like some kind of fashion/perfume ad.

Where are the gay sex scenes Nolan :smuglord:

For most people a movie is 2 hours. For an academic whose specialty is being adapted into a major motion picture, its going to last a lifetime. A whole life time of clearing up misconceptions which didnt exist before. It seems nearly every person you meet asks about it, every book outside of your journal will have to spent a few pages on it.

A classics major doesn't like the changes and thinks that the writing in a modern Hollywood blockbuster is lacking

People are really mad about this review. I found it entirely reasonable, if harsher than I personally would have been.

::: spoiler copying my own criticisms from a previous megathread post I find it extremely annoying that despite being set in mycenaean greece, the movie depicts odysseus as extremely calvinist. the original poem is horny as hell, with our hero taking a break to spend an entire year banging a hot sorceress, while in this one the only sex scene is one where he has missionary sex with his wife and he seemingly spends the following 18 years completely celibate.

granted, it would have been annoying in a different way if Nolan had just had all of the female characters throwing themselves at odysseus, which is how this aspect of the story is depicted in pretty much every other movie adaptation, but I guess what bothers me about it is that rather than make the story element more interesting by giving more agency to female characters, the modern liberal filmmaker's response to feminist critiques of the films of the past is to simply excise sex altogether.

it's the general pattern with filmmakers like Nolan. he'll put lupita nyong'o as clytemnestra/helen, but he won't change the fact that those characters are depicted strictly as objects who are acted upon by men. the right winger's feral opposition to minority representation is the mirror image of the liberal's surface level inclusion of it, with both of them fundamentally missing the point in different ways.

that said i do like the plot thread that odysseus is reckoning with how his plot at troy was a terrible idea with long reaching consequences. the very first thing we see odysseus and his crew do after the war is burn down a village for the crime of running away when a bunch of heavily armed strangers arrived on their beach, and by the end of the film odysseus realizes that the "people from the sea" are more or less blowback from the trojan war. that's a cool way to adapt an old story to a modern framework.

it is unfortunately super idealistic. oddysseus' plan seemingly introduced the idea of violating xenia to the mycenaeans, and this idea's very existence spells the end for mycenaean civilization. the result is that the film positions the sack of Troy as bad because the greeks did it the wrong way, rather than being bad because murdering tons of people is bad. it's both the liberal and fascist critique of the war on terror, incidentally - libs think we just needed more precise munitions, while fascists think that we just needed more indiscreet bombing campaigns, and neither can engage with the fact that we shouldn't have been invading another country in the first place. :::

There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

They need to follow the IASIP approach and shown full penetration

The writing in any Nolan film is always the weakest part, and if he wasn't so good at doing gimmicky shit that looks good, nobody would think his movies are good. He's good at making good looking scenes, but he sucks at telling a story with them, that's why he's a mid director at best

He's like a slightly higher-brow and more broody Michael Bay

ETA: doesn't mean I don't like his movies, you just have to know what to expect from a Nolan movie.

There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible

This was also my main problem with the film