r/ChristopherNolan

The Odyssey premiere will happen soon. Early reactions will be out on social media. And then the spoiler reviews will start coming out within a couple of weeks. This is it.

Worst case expectation:  It's a boring movie with no strong emotional impact, glaring plot contrivances, and so it will only be remembered in the future for its anachronistic aesthetics (casting, costumes, props.)

Best case expectation: It's a very emotionally moving, well paced, well constructed narrative. A thrilling masterpiece fantasy that is on the level of the Lord of the Rings films. So even the harshest critics will only point out the historical inaccuracies of the aesthetics while appreciating the filmmaking. It'll be seen as a great fantasy film that just happens to be inspired by Homer's Odyssey. Like Kubrick's Shining, not an accurate adaptation but a great film on its own.

Because Lord knows, it doesn't just need to be OK or even good at this point, it needs to be a masterpiece of a script. The bad word of mouth for this is pretty disproportionate before it's even out. I know Lord of the Rings trilogy is a very high bar but that's just the level of storytelling quality it will need to have for Nolan's credibility to survive as a storyteller.

Seeing a lot of historical revisionism about his entire career now. "Oh Chris is a hack and only makes good movies when his brother Jonathan is writing for him". Such is the world. I've never been this iffy about a movie. Nolan's filmography is basically my entire childhood so I definitely have my bias. I'm still a harsh critic myself so even I won't be able to lie to myself if it's genuinely not a good movie.

No exaggeration, this is the most important movie of Christopher Nolan's career. It's make or break. I'm not worried about the box office at all, just the quality of the storytelling.

A lot of the people who are hating on the Odyssey will also claim that Dune 3 is their most anticipated movie of the year. I realized that everything people are complaining about with the Odyssey can be applied to Dune 3. The main complaints about the Odyssey are

Cast members inaccurate to the source material
Modern language
Overuse of A list actors like Zendaya and Robert Pattinson

I feel like the story I hear constantly is that Warner brothers ruined this movie and by extension contributed to it losing money. Is that actually true tho? I loved the movie but I could see it being too confusing for the average person

Interesting thoughts + a theory

This reminds me of when Jason Clarke was at the Oppenheimer photocall, and of course his work went on to be one of the best performances of the film.

Do you see Morton receiving awards recognition for this role too?

If you watch his face acting when talking to his dad, you can feel the oldschool British emotional suppression felt between father and son. He thinks his father is going mad with self righteousness as his brother goes blind and he refuses to go back, but also feels a duty to help him, and somewhat partially agrees in a greater good. But there are no actual words between them expressing this. But you can tell that his paralysis in being unable to help his brother, and inability to talk to his dad about it in this situation will haunt him forever.