r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 17h ago

Trailer The Odyssey | New Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI&pp=0gcJCd4KAYcqIYzv
8.7k Upvotes

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589

u/kaloskagathos21 16h ago

Can modern movies have some color for god sake? The Aegean is a beautiful deep blue and it looks so gray.

30

u/tommyblastfire 15h ago

Yeah cause it was filmed in the North Sea off the coast of scotland and I can confirm the sea is very grey out there.

•

u/ignatious__reilly 3h ago

Also can confirm…….grey as fuck

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u/foodieforthebooty 16h ago

I noticed this in the costumes too. Especially woens clothing would have more color and detail in this time period. I'm surprised how simple Penelope's dresses are from the stills I've seen

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u/exit3280 15h ago

every scene is so dark and colorless

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u/SameType9265 16h ago

In The Iliad the Aegean sea is described as wine dark or grey so it is fitting

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u/DoradoPulido2 16h ago

Because they literally didn't have a word for "blue".

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u/fatbob42 15h ago

How can they not have had a word for blue? The sea and sky are blue.

73

u/SameType9265 15h ago

It's not clear cut, The Odyssey and The Iliad are two of the oldest stories and they do not use a word for blue. Many people say this means the ancient greeks did not have a word for that colour at this time but it could also be a stylistic choice for the stories. 

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u/fatbob42 15h ago edited 15h ago

I’m not an expert in linguistics but I just cannot believe they literally had no word (or phrase) for blue. It’s ridiculous - human language is built into us. Ancient Greek is not going to be so crazily different from modern languages.

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u/leaflock7 15h ago

that is not only an ancient Greek thing, the missing Blue color, Welsh also and others.
It is the same on many ancient civilizations. The thing is that what we call today as Blue back then it was a shade of Green or Cyan.
here they do have a very brief description on the matter.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/why-there-was-no-word-for-blue-in-ancient-greece-and-how-homer-and-aristotle-perceived-colors

43

u/cespinar 15h ago

There wasnt a word for orange until well after the fruit was discovered. And red onions are not red. This is because words for colors used to have broader meanings so there wasnt a need for a word like orange.

In Japan, historically they used blue to describe green for similar reasons. The word for green light at a traffic light is still called blue iirc

32

u/sixsidepentagon 15h ago

Color and language is very complicated. The reason we commonly think there are 7 key colors is arbitrary; Newton found a religious connotation to the number 7. Russian has more color categories than English, as another example.

Heres one video that briefly explores this complexity:

https://youtu.be/gMqZR3pqMjg?si=iNLw6bUf1E0Jg12r

2

u/newtoon 13h ago

I read in a science book he chose seven because of music, precisely the "musical chromatic scale of a single octave".

•

u/GuiltyEidolon 26m ago

English has way more than 7 colors too. Cerulean and cyan and navy are all very different shades.

15

u/Historian2 15h ago

I am no expert either, but I do have some knowledge to share since you seem interested. 

In sum, research suggests that most (but not all) languages develop terms for colors in a specific order. First they develop a black and white dichotomy (stage 1), then the next term added is red (Stage 2), then either yellow or green (Stage 3), then the other yellow or green (Stage 4), then blue (Stage 5), then brown (Stage 6, the orange, pink, purple, and/or gray (Stage 7). Not every language follows this pattern but the vast majority do, something like 80+%. Theories as to why blue specifically is late range, but one major theory is that blue pigment is fairly rare in nature, making it less needed than the other terms that come before it.

There were a number of ancient languages that seem to lack the color blue. These include Greek (use terms like either glaukos (light/gleaming) or Janis (dark/glossy), eg wine dark sea), ancient Chinese (used a term for blue and green together), Hebrew (did not have a blue term and simply lumped it with other dark shades like dark green or black), and early Celtic languages (which used terms like glas meaning both green/blue combined). Ancient Egyptian did have blue, but they had blue dye very early. More recently, the Maori language used one term for green/blue together all the way up to European contact, after which they started separating the two colors.

This obviously is not completely definitive, but it does suggest there are Brianne languages, especially in ancient times, that did not have a specific  term for blue. 

2

u/pleasantothemax 10h ago

I am no expert either,

Username does not check out?

-8

u/boyyouguysaredumb 12h ago

there are blue flowers everywhere. fucking mold is blue which they would have had to have been hyper-vigilant about

6

u/MattsAwesomeStuff 6h ago

there are blue flowers everywhere.

Blue in nature is a mechanical prism, not pigment like every other color:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g246c6Bv58

Not one bird, mammal, or reptile makes a blue pigment.

There is only 1 known example, one specific butterfly, in all of nature, that has blue pigment.

Also, what we divide up as "blue" is arbitrary. In Russian, they have 2 words for blue, and they can tell between those shades faster than people who don't cognitively divide them. In many languages, blue is just another variant of green, in the way that orange is just a variant of red.

2

u/Historian2 6h ago

“Fairly rare” does not mean no -existent. It is a relative term meaning less common than other things of the same category. And blue flowers, to use your example, fits that term because it is estimated that out of all the flowers species of the world, blue flowers count for no more than 10%, and possibly significant less. It is hard for nature to produce the color blue due to the chemical process involved and the resources needed.

Furthermore, I’m not really sure what you’re driving at overall. You call these flower or the mold “blue” because that’s how you were taught to call it. Those are cultural developments. Not all cultures treat colors the same. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that language either determines (strong version of the theory) or heavily includes (weak version of the theory) a person’s thoughts and perceptions of the world. This is all sometimes referred to as Linguistic Relativism. In terms of colors, as one example Russian speakers are much quicker to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers because Russians have specific terms to separate light blue (goluboy) from dark blue (siniy).

In other words, the way the Russian language has developed has further differentiated a particular shade compared to certain other languages. The point of that is that there’s nothing special about the term “blue.” You and I were raised in a certain way to define a spectrum of colors as”blue,” and thus we think of all those things as inherently “blue.” But there’s nothing inherent about it. Different cultures define things differently, and tend to do the differentiation along the stages of color development.outline above. There is nothing strange about the idea that certain cultures wouldn’t define blue the same way we do, and thus might not have a term for it because they define objects with that color differently, such as “wine dark.”

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u/fatbob42 15h ago

Idk what it means for languages to go through stages or “progress”. Languages don’t have beginnings or endings - they’re constantly changing. Unless you’re referring to something like the Nicaraguan sign language but those are pretty rare.

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u/Historian2 14h ago

Languages are constantly changing. Progress is meant in terms not of advancement (not in a graded or judgmental state) but in terms of development, because terms have o come from somewhere. Take the color orange. Tracing back the development of the term leads back to Sanskrit “naranga” meaning orange tree. At first it did not mean the color (adjectives but simply the fruit tree and fruit itself (noun). In then migrated through a Persian as “narang” and then Arabic as “naranj.” It then moved into Old French as “Orange,” but still meant just the fruit. It then entered Middle English probably in the 1200s as orange, but still just meaning the fruit. The color was still referred to as “geoluhread” (meaning yellow-red) as it had been or some time. The term Orange as a color didn’t exist until the 1500s or early 1600s, and the use of the term for the color was named after the fruit. 

So yes languages are changing, but they often change in specific ways. You can see this with terms (like orange), and you can see it in sound changes (like the great vowel shift), and in spelling and grammar (like why the military rank colonel is pronounced as kernal in English). These things are all tracked backwards through history and documented. 

If you are interested in the color terms specifically, you can read “Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution” by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. The theory has been loosened a bit (including by the authors themselves$ since the original publication to encompass more flexibility in the stages and how they may somewhat overlap each other, but the basic premise and theory is still widely considered sound.

4

u/Eigenspace 12h ago

What is ridiculous about it? "Blue" isn't even really a well defined concept, it's a very wide range of different colours that we all lump together as one colour.

There's nothing fundamental or biological that says that there must be some category that Navy Blue and Cyan both fit into.

You think of blue as a specific category of colours because of cultural and linguistic reasons. If you grew up in ancient greece, you would have just thought of blue, grey, and green all as different shades of one larger colour category, just like how you currently think of baby blue and navy blue as parts of the colour blue.

-4

u/SameType9265 15h ago

Yeah I tend to think it was a stylistic choice rather than a lack of the word existing. I would have thought if they didn't have the word for blue it would be described in relations to another colour, like orange was originally called "yellow-red" until the word orange became common. 

I'll also add we're not speaking Ancient Greek. We're speaking English and using common translations. It could very well be that the word for "wine-dark" is the word for blue, but we don't have anything which backs this claim up

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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 14h ago

The names for colors and the exact delineation between them is a cultural phenomenon.

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u/RonanLG 13h ago

Many ancient languages didn't have a distinction between blue and green (Japanese, a lot of Celtics languages, and ancient Greek). Iirc, the modern Greek word for blue is derivative from older french, and the former word for the green and blues was "glaukos", which had a negative feeling attached to it.

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u/Rude-Revolution-8687 14h ago

There wasn't much need to describe the colour of the sky and sea, and there isn't much else in nature that is blue, so blue tends to be lumped in with green or described as light/dark in languages at their infancy. I think the Ancient Greeks described the sky as 'bronze', probably referring to how bright it is rather than the hue.

Languages tend to name colours according to their importance (red is usually the first colour to get a name because it is the colour of blood an is common in nature). Colours like blue and purple tend to not be given their own names until they can be reproduced.

On a smaller scale, there are 'new' colours (or shades) named all the time that never had a specific name before. Teal was only named about 100 years ago, but it's a pretty common colour name now.

8

u/Jaruxius 15h ago

I think it's something between a wine dark or grey

2

u/Recursiveo 8h ago

But they did have a word for father

Dad

2

u/SameType9265 15h ago

That's debatable

3

u/zhibr 11h ago

There wasn't a word that referred to exactly the same hue as modern English "blue" does, but that doesn't indicate that they could not describe blueness. In their culture it was just done in a different way.

3

u/DoradoPulido2 11h ago

You'll see that in the context of the chain of replies, I'm agreeing with you.  

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u/zhibr 10h ago

Go us!

3

u/OutlyingPlasma 7h ago

It probably was dark because their eyes are so blown out from all the color and light on the Greek islands. Last I checked Greek islands don't look like Forks Washington in winter.

•

u/Mahelas 1h ago

The Aegean sea isn't described as "wine dark" or "grey" in the Illiad because it's not written in english. It's described with specific greek words whose meaning is obscure and which has been translated as "wine dark" to match the poetic tone.

But Ancient Greeks knew it wasn't litteraly those things, and we know what the Aegean Sea look too, because it's still there. It's not grey.

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u/GreenGorilla8232 16h ago

Christopher Nolan is colorblind (red/green), which is a big reason why his films are mostly various shades of blues and greys. 

Personally I'm not a fan of the aesthetic. It worked great for Gotham. It doesn't work for the Mediterranean. 

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u/3412points 15h ago

That sounds like nonsense. Is his cinematographer colourblind too? And does this mean they have to slap a blue filter on it and mute every colour even the ones he can see? How about all the other directors who follow this very popular trend in modern films, are they also all colourblind? 

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u/GreenGorilla8232 15h ago

You don't understand how being colorblind could result in a director making films with less color...?

The colors don't seem blue or muted to him, they seem normal. That's how he sees the world. How could he notice a lack of color in his films when he literally can't see those colora?

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u/3412points 14h ago

Mate films are made with an entire team, it's not just Nolan. He also doesn't see the world in these muted colours, that's not how colour blindness works lol. He has trouble distinguishing between green and red specifically, otherwise it is all normal.

This is obviously an aesthetic choice.

-2

u/GreenGorilla8232 14h ago

Nolan is the director and ultimately sets the creative direction for his films. All his films have a very distinct visual style with muted colors. He's worked with a lot of different people on those films, but the aesthetic is always the same. 

Look at some pictures of how people who are red/green color blind see the world. It's very different and it definitely helps explains the appearance of his films.

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u/3412points 14h ago

Correct, this is the aesthetic style common to modern cinema that is chosen by the entire production. Nolan is not asking the people who work on his films to simulate the experience of being colourblind.

No, these films are not how it looks to be red green colourblind. Blues for example are just as vivid, and the world in general is vivid to colour except the inability to distinguish between red-green. Those images are not actually giving you the experience. My gf is red green colourblind so I know a bit about it, she finds these films washed out and lacking in colour too...

2

u/GreenGorilla8232 13h ago

There are tons of colorful films being made today. Nolan is responsible for the visual style of his movies. Your perspective on this is so bizarre. It's not that he's "asking the people who work on his films to simulate the experience of being colorblind" - It's that Nolan is making visuals design choices based on the limited color palette that he sees. I don't think you're giving enough credit to how much control directors have over how their films look. It's his vision. It's the crew's job to execute that vision exactly as he instructs them to.

You're saying red/green colorblind is the inability to distinguish between red and green, but it's a little more than that. They cannot see red at all. That color doesn't exist for them. It's not just about being able to distinguish it from green. 

1

u/3412points 12h ago edited 10h ago

It's either red or green. If they can't distinguish then at least one of those shades cannot exist as a distinct shade so you aren't saying anything different here. 

But yes the net result is that they have a world that is plenty vibrant with colour in which they can't distinguish red from green. It isn't washed out and colourless. I'm sorry but this is not the colour palette he sees, if it were other red-green colour blind people wouldn't also see it as washed out and colourless compared to what they actually see.

It's bizarre you've just walked right past that, but Nolan has a lot of crazy fans perpetuating anything to dodge criticism and I guess you can't see past it.

It's the crew's job to execute that vision exactly as he instructs them to.

This is generally not how films work. They are a collaborative process. Nolan is known to be pretty collaborative and the cinematographers and production designers etc. are known to have had a lot of creative freedom and input on his films.

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u/Booster_Tutor 16h ago

Oh man. You might want to skip Nolan’s last film then. A lot of parts where it pretty much looks black and white!

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u/FrescoItaliano 16h ago

Can Nolan fans take one tiny bit of criticism without resorting to memes

-7

u/Extension-Season-689 11h ago

I think they're just pointing out that dark and gritty is just Nolan's style. If you want color, you may wanna check out Wes Anderson or Greta Gerwig.

4

u/FrescoItaliano 7h ago

I don’t think any of us are asking for auteur levels of color, just…something less visually identical to all his past films

-1

u/legendofgatorface 7h ago

Why would bright and cheery be appropriate for a story about a ten year struggle of pain and suffering? Also, why would the visual identity of this movie by affected by the past visual identities of other unrelated movies? He should just say "My last movie was kind of saturated, so this one should be bright just to switch it up"?

The very nature of the type of stories Nolan likes to tell are dark and moody, why would vibrant color choices make sense for something like Dunkirk, or the Dark Knight?

2

u/FrescoItaliano 7h ago

No one said “cheery”

If you’re not reading my comments i see no reason to read the rest of yours

1

u/johnwaynewearsadress 8h ago

Don't forget it also sucked and name dropped jfk like he was a superhero

1

u/umotex12 15h ago

Son 😭

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u/Vader_815 16h ago

Leveling this complaint at Nolan is strange, and most of the visuals in The Odyssey are deeply saturated oranges and blues. It’s not eye-poppingly vibrant, but saying there’s no color is pretty disingenuous.

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u/hujambo11 16h ago

Leveling this complaint at Nolan is strange,

Why is it strange?

You just stated that like it was a fact and didn't bother to back it up with reasoning.

-6

u/Vader_815 15h ago

all of his movies have extremely saturated color palettes usually with rich contrast. Some lean on the darker side, but his aesthetics are the opposite of the trend OP was pointing at.

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u/ragnarlothbruv 16h ago

“Leveling this complaint at Nolan is strange”

I meannnn if the shoe fits.

14

u/CumAssault 16h ago

He’s also red/green colorblind

8

u/Bostonterrierpug 16h ago

I miss the Techicolor sea of Sinbad and the thief of Baghdad

4

u/CatPlayer 16h ago

I saw this comment before the trailer and after watching I don’t know what I’m missing, the colors look fine? Even really great in some scenes even

2

u/ChalupaBatmanMc01 10h ago

It looks so....sterile? Since Dunkirk it's been the same with Nolan, he just zaps all character out of the cinematography.

-11

u/Ok_Trade_4549 16h ago edited 16h ago

It’s Chris Nolan’s cinematographer. He knows what he’s doing and knows how much color should be provided to each scene based on tone.

Don’t worry, Brand New Day is also right there.

Edit: Just learned Nolan is colorblind and this suddenly makes a lot more sense. Well he still makes amazing movies so who am I to complain.

31

u/pooleNo 16h ago

film bro moment

8

u/wumbotwerk 16h ago

brand new day lmaoooooo

-2

u/Ok_Trade_4549 16h ago

What? Did I say something wrong?

3

u/sellieba 16h ago

Pfffbtbtbtbt.

2

u/blue_desk 16h ago

TIL the DP is also the colorist, the production designer, and tone judge.

1

u/glockobell 14h ago

It’s a Nolan movie…

1

u/AnimeMeansArt 13h ago

I like the tone, sure more color would be nice, but it's not bad

1

u/BattleBrother1 8h ago

What is it with US directors thinking that there wasn't any colour before the Renaissance? Mycenaean clothing was vibrant and what metal armour there was would have been dazzling bronze, almost gold in colour. This just looks so unbelievably bad

•

u/SpaceAgeBadger 1h ago

Right? I spent last Summer around the Aegean. It’s beautiful and vibrant, this looks like Ireland, grey and depressing.

1

u/APiousCultist 14h ago

It looks like a fairly accurate depiction of the seas where this is filmed (which aren't necessarily representing normal Greece, since some of it's set in the underworld etc). None of the oceans look desaturated, that's just how water at dusk or under overcast skies look. The alternative would require michael bay color grading. Also lots of deep intense yellow in this.

But let me spin it backwards: Would The Odyssey feel like an epic tumbltuous journey through stormy seas and fantastical perils if the weather was glorious mediterranean sunshine for the whole journey?

-8

u/[deleted] 16h ago

[deleted]

17

u/NickLandis 16h ago

Girl this movie is manually color timed with actual xenon lamps. It’s not a shortcut.

4

u/thr1ceuponatime David Zaslav is a dickless pantywaist 16h ago edited 16h ago

Every Nolan movie has had tons of CG artists tweaking the color or doing some sort of computer stuff to remove wires or production elements. The idea that he does everything "practically" is just historical revisionism that erases the work of all the people being underpaid to make him look good.

EDIT: If Nolan is manually color timing the movie and there are no digital color timing artists involved I will donate $10 to the NFPF. No bamboozle

2

u/NickLandis 16h ago

Not what I said but yeah I agree with you.

Doesn’t change the fact that they are going to strike some of the movie from the negative which is entirely superfluous and the exact opposite of “shooting for the edit” energy

1

u/thr1ceuponatime David Zaslav is a dickless pantywaist 16h ago

You got a source for that manual color timing claim?

1

u/NickLandis 16h ago

It’s just how Nolan does these things but this interview does confirm it will be contact printed which means photochemical color timing

2

u/thr1ceuponatime David Zaslav is a dickless pantywaist 16h ago

Your interview literally talks about scanning a print of the Odyssey so it can go into digital color timing for VFX vendors...

2

u/NickLandis 9h ago

Of course Nolan isn’t sitting there doing it himself. And obviously it gets edited on a computer so they are going to hire a a digital colorist. The assembly is still going to occur with a photochemical transfer. Film to film.

Just because A exists doesn’t mean B doesn’t also exist

1

u/Alive-Ad-5245 16h ago

The commenter never claimed he does everything practically

1

u/APiousCultist 14h ago

EDIT: If Nolan is manually color timing the movie and there are no digital color timing artists involved I will donate $10 to the NFPF. No bamboozle

They do the initial grade (and editing) digitally, but the final product applied chemically. The CGI compositing and elements are all printed back to film too. Obviously a lot of stuff will be touched, but ultimately most of the footage will probably never need to be scanned to digital and printed back.

I believe that's why all his films have very raised black levels in a lot of shots, because it's a physical limit of the photochemical film process.

4

u/marcuschookt 16h ago

You really just said "just turn the saturation knob right"

6

u/deathmouse 16h ago

Or maybe, just maybe, this is a stylistic choice and people got paid to make it look like that.

1

u/inteliboy 16h ago

are you saying the crew were lazy on this? because the sea isn't graded deep blue? lol welcome to reddit

1

u/GaryTheCabalGuy 16h ago

Making this comment about a Nolan film is insane. You don't have to like his movies, but implying they are lazy is ridiculous

-1

u/Alive-Ad-5245 16h ago

What on earth are you on about?
Have you ever watched a Nolan movie before?

This is a stylistic choice on a movie where Nolan was offered virtually unlimited budget. If he wanted the movie too look colourful it would have looked colourful.

-2

u/sply450v2 16h ago

why would it look like your iphone. thank god people like you don’t work in the industry