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An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

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Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#151

Post by Marsymars »

globular-toast wrote: post #54
d3Xt3r wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wonder why they didn't do the Hobbit as well Because it should've been done as just one movie. Someone got greedy and decided to split it up into three movies, and it was such a drag watching all of them - and I say this as a huge LotR fan who enjoyed all the extended LotR cuts. The other big issue was the frame rate of the movie, 48FPS was a risky move and didn't really translate well to the big screen, it felt li…

The problem with the 48fps release of The Hobbit is it was only available in 3D (and digital). I don't like 3D, not least because it gives me a headache after about 30 minutes, so watching a 3 hour film was not enjoyable at all (I hadn't internalised the sunken cost fallacy at the time; I shouldn't have stayed for the whole thing). IMAX shows that 3D is completely unnecessary. Gravity is the only 3D film worth seeing…

> I don't like 3D, not least because it gives me a headache after about 30 minutes

FWIW, I get this too, but it's not actually because of the 3D effect, it's just because I have a big head and the glasses at theatres press on the side of my head, giving me a headache.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#152

Post by protocolture »

class3shock wrote: post #4

I'm not a scholar of Greek history but as layman, I thought it was good and good enough to recommend. Visually it is quite beautiful and despite what the review states it does have an ethical thread at its core it follows. There are some choices I just don't understand; the armor, mostly the Trojans and Agamemnon's, looks like something that would be on a low budget scifi tv show and jamming a bunch of well known cel…

>the armor, mostly the Trojans and

I read a couple comments from an extra who had worn the same costume in at least 2 other films.

Between that, the Viking Longboat and the name brand actors falling out of every hole, my instinct is that he was asked to tune the film for a very particular budget/advertising campaign and had little to work with outside of that.

Its like, yes you can film here, here and here, and have weird custom shit here, but these actors will fill seats for marketing so you need to pay them, and then make do with whatever money is left.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#153

Post by adrian_b »

petesergeant wrote: post #12

I read about 2/3rds of this before giving up. People who are upvoting it: what are you getting from this review that I'm missing, exactly?

As someone who has read the Odyssey in original, and who has enjoyed it very much, the useful information that I got from this review is that most of what I considered as the best parts of Odyssey are exactly those which are missing from this movie.

This review, like a few other reviews that I have seen, concludes that Nolan's Odyssey is not a bad movie, it is not boring and it has some spectacular scenes, so it may be worth viewing, but it definitely is not Homer's Odyssey at all.

I always dislike when American movies take the name from some classic work of literature, but then they change the story completely and frequently even contradictory to the original.

Nolan had a story that he wanted to show, which did not match any Ancient Greek story, and he should have better done this without calling it "The Odyssey", which creates false expectations, though an unknown name might have generated less publicity and it might have tempted less people to see what it is about.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#154

Post by adrian_b »

throwaway3060 wrote: post #19

I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review. Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition…

Yes, while I agree with most of the criticism about the movie, that sentence has also stricken me as incorrect.

It is not known who the "sea people" were, e.g. whether they were invaders coming from far away or they were just some poorer local populations that had revolted in a time of famine, but what is known for sure is that a lot of cities around the Eastern Mediterranean have been destroyed and burned during several decades, and this has resulted in the disappearance of several centralized kingdoms, leaving only a few surviving big states, i.e. Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, while everywhere else no central authorities remained and the territories were fragmented into small independent parts, consisting mostly of a city and its neighborhoods.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#155

Post by seabombs »

stasomatic wrote: post #115

In a movie involving a few archery scenes, a movie with a gargantuan budget - hire an archery instructor. As an advanced amateur archer, the glaring mistakes, from stringing a bow to the draw form and release, it's hard to suspend disbelief and continue watching. Yes, it's a movie based on a myth, but it would have been that much better for me, only if they threw a couple of $Ks to an archery coach. Same thing with m…

I have almost no experience of archery and this annoyed me. So many close shots of Odysseus or other soldiers limply firing arrows that look like they'd barely make it five feet. But the next shot is a soldier getting barrelled off his feet by the force of it...

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#156

Post by adrian_b »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #123
throwaway3060 wrote: post #19

I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review. Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition…

This may blow your mind, but what if the "People From the Sea" are Odysseus, his family, and his crew? * It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group? * Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experien…

They were not hypothesized.

The term "Sea People" or "People of the Sea" has been taken from Egyptian documents that described a series of battles for defending Egypt against them.

Egypt succeeded to repel them, but other regions were not so lucky, because around the same time a lot of cities were destroyed. Because of the coincidence in time, it is assumed that the Egyptians have fought against the same people who destroyed the other cities.

There are also documents from Ugarit, written immediately before that city was destroyed, which requested help because they expected an imminent attack, but it was too late and the city was destroyed before receiving any help.

The documents do not contain enough information to identify who were the attackers, but there is no doubt that attacks existed and they destroyed many cities in Greece, Crete, Anatolia and in the territory of modern Syria.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#157

Post by quuxplusone »

Avicebron wrote: post #109
2Pacalypse- wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looks pretty though. Does it though? Somehow Nolan made the mediterranean climate and Aegean sea look like washed out coast of Scotland or something. What's with the Hollywood's attack on color lately?

They've been dune-ified.

You mean the new, worse, Dune movies. The David Lynch Dune movie was pretty colorful, right? So Dune itself was... Dunkirk-ified?

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#158

Post by Avicebron »

quuxplusone wrote: post #157
Avicebron wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been dune-ified.

You mean the new, worse, Dune movies. The David Lynch Dune movie was pretty colorful, right? So Dune itself was... Dunkirk-ified?

Yeah I mean the new worse ones. Now that I think about it Villeneuve probably started it with Sicario. So Sicario-ed?

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#159

Post by marcuschong »

beloch wrote: post #32

"But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The T…

[dead]

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#160

Post by potsandpans »

jrimbault wrote: post #62
jf wrote: post #49

When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try". Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't ab…

How do you get 'roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"' from this critique? Nowhere does she say something vaguely like that.

People increasingly do not understand that there can be nuanced criticism of things they liked.

It seems like most people can still understand, "I didn't care for it." Even if sometimes even that's too much to bear.

But I've observed that the expansion into, "I noticed some problems, and I'll articulate them" seems to get bluntly polarized into something much less generous.

"I'd like to see you do better" is a run of the mill response to criticism. Which overall demonstrates a lack of maturity / confidence in ones own taste.

For the record, I loved the movie. I thought some parts were odd. I found this piece interesting.

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