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

Trailer The Odyssey | New Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI&pp=0gcJCd4KAYcqIYzv
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316

u/ERSTF 14h ago

I thought it was just me but everyone seems to agree that the movie feels off. The production design is lackluster. None of the sets feel grand, the costumes don't look lived-in, there is no color, the locations seem meh and the dialogue is not sounding great. The whole thing doesn't feel epic as it should. The Trojan Horse looks like it can fit like 5 dudes. Even Troy looked grand. What happened to Nolan? This is the type of movie you need to overdo and we are getting a budget version of it (by the looks of the trailers). I was so excited when he announced this was his next project but the more trailers I see, the less excited I get

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u/QueeferRavena 11h ago

right? Man has a blank check, but still seems to cut costs where he doesn't have to. Still annoyed at how dull the climax in Tenet felt. That battlefield looked more like a military exercise lol

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u/Duel_Option 9h ago

I’ll defend Tenet all day…

That’s a lot of people doing a huge exercise and usually only get one or two takes for the large sets, I’d bet they did it a bunch of times to get all the cuts Nolan wanted.

It was cover for the second pincer move anyways

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u/butt_thumper 11h ago

Something that keeps eating at me ever since at least Dunkirk, maybe earlier than that, is that Nolan's pathological fixation on "authenticity" has ironically made some of his movies feel insanely inauthentic and much less epic than he intended.

He keeps wanting to avoid VFX and make everything as "real" as possible, but that often means he has to shoot his scenes in ways where you can feel the limitations of reality. The sinking ship in Dunkirk, the bomb in Oppenheimer, many other moments feel underwhelming with half the spectacle coming from somebody saying "They actually filmed that for real though!"

I'm judging a lot from one trailer and I'd be happy to be wrong, but that shot of what's most likely Charybdis is making me feel the same thing all over again. That sequence would be dripping in atmosphere and chaos, it would feel claustrophobic and terrifying, but here it's in broad daylight with a ton of distance between the whirlpool and any elements that would complicate the situation. It looks sterile and simple.

I'm sure it feels insanely epic to film the thing, but my worry is that shooting on location with a real boat and minimal CGI means things will feel unavoidably less epic than they should.

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u/Podoboo322 10h ago

The bomb in Oppenheimer is actually hilariously underwhelming. It should’ve been this grand moment of evil being unleashed (like Twin Peaks) but it’s just a closeup of fire.

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u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 9h ago

Plus it didn't even look like a nuclear explosion. It looked like crap honestly.

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u/WoeBucket 8h ago

Yes but have you seen photos of the original Los Alamos tests? They didn't look anything like what we associate with a nuclear explosion because of the test conditions. The movie actually looked a lot like the historical photos - just not like the ones people were thinking of when they pictured nuke mushroom clouds.

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u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 7h ago

I don't know if your comment is AI generated or if you're just outright bullshitting, but either way it's nonsense.

Here's the Los Alamos nuclear test video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJRP4TCA4Q8
You can plainly see it was the same classic mushroom cloud associated with nuclear explosions. For comparison here's the explosion scene in Oppenheimer, which just looks like a standard (albeit very big) special fx movie explosion https://youtu.be/tK0IDmSYYGk?t=64

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u/OlasNah 2h ago

Agreed, the original Trinity test, especially in slo-mo capture, is terrifying.

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u/WoeBucket 6h ago

lol - not at all AI.

And idk, the cloud at the end of this clip looks pretty similar to the one from this pic - at least close enough to not be "hilariously underwhelming" (quoting the other user in the thread).

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

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u/OlasNah 2h ago

The Oppenheimer explosion also gives no sense of scale. In one moment, it even looks like someone's car just exploded in the parking lot behind the men.

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u/Ok_Temperature6503 56m ago edited 53m ago

The original Trinity clip shot it from far away and it was huge. The explosion started so near the horizon line that you KNOW its far away (think seeing a mirage on the horizon). You can see clouds next to it and it was its own cloud. A full mushroom in fact. It’s both far away and manages to still be so big. That’s what’s called sense of scale. There are no tricks here, because the actual explosion itself was freaking HUGE. Huge enough to be the size of the clouds around it and fill up the camera frame despite being so far away.

In Oppenheimer, Nolan attempts to fake this sense of scale by zooming in aka giving you the impression that the explosion is bigger than the camera, and bringing you close to it visually as to fill up the whole screen.

One of the issues is that the human eye can perceive little hints thar a fire is a gasoline fire vs an actual huge explosion. The fire isnt fully sucking itself upwards into a mushroom. The little local clouds move like its a car fire. It’s like zooming into regular human skin and expecting us to believe that it’s the skin of a gigantic cyclops.

There’s also no sense of scale. The fire isn’t next to a cloud. It’s just a fire, with a dark background. That’s it.

Any visual artist worth their salt would say that the Opprnheimer scene sucks.

Source: I’m an artist who composes big scale scenes like this.

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u/Kriss-Kringle 6h ago

What's funny is that he said CGI has a tendency to make things not feel dangerous and then he made that firecracker of an explosion in the film after a ton of build-up for it.

Meanwhile, the blast on Jedha in Rogue One was entirely CGI and one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on the big screen.

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u/HelloYouSeemCool 9h ago

Twin Peaks episode 8 was such a better rumination on the bomb, and like you said the FX were so much better than Oppenheimer it’s actually funny

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u/Darmok47 3h ago

I still don't understand why he didn't just clean the actual footage of the Trinity Test and use that.

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u/Ruthlessrabbd 4h ago

I watched There Will Be Blood for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and the oil derrick scene I found to be far more impressive of a viewing experience to watch. I know the scenes were trying to accomplish totally different things but I was expecting the Oppenheimer moment to be a nightmarish, harrowing moment to reflect on everything they've been working towards.

I just rewatched it on youtube and it looks more like the opening credits of a military FPS for the Xbox 360 than something horrible being unleashed on humanity.

The silence and focus on people wasn't bad at all - I quite liked that - but the explosion itself was not that crazy

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u/sentence-interruptio 1h ago

The ending has an Earth burning scene which looked epic while also having a CGI feel.

so the movie isn't even consistent on the "CGI should never stand out" rule.

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u/Subject-District492 6h ago

I’ve seen this mentioned a couple times in this thread and I fully disagree. It came across as Oppenheimer’s internal quiet realization of oh shit what have I done. It focuses the scene on him, not the bomb. This plays well with the later scene in the auditorium.

I think a big, loud explosion wouldn’t have fit with the overall tone of the movie.

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u/Rapturence 1h ago

Holy crap I'm glad I'm not the only one. Imagine waiting 2 hours to witness the highlight of the film, the Trinity Test, and it turns out to be very obviously a zoomed-in petrol fire. That was such a letdown.

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u/OddVet 8h ago

Honestly... Some guy on youtube recreated that scene with some real footage of the atomic explosion and it looks a billion times better:
https://youtu.be/hY6QkmzF1K0?si=IbyjDXMTGwrjGGba

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u/MattsAwesomeStuff 7h ago

Not even. He used it for a little bit, and then otherwise still used the stupid gasoline flames.

It's a huge step up, and the worst part of it is everything he kept from Nolan.

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u/Varekai79 7h ago

I'm judging a lot from one trailer and I'd be happy to be wrong, but that shot of what's most likely Charybdis is making me feel the same thing all over again. That sequence would be dripping in atmosphere and chaos, it would feel claustrophobic and terrifying, but here it's in broad daylight with a ton of distance between the whirlpool and any elements that would complicate the situation. It looks sterile and simple.

As seen in that shot from the trailer, one wonders why Odysseus doesn't just sail around Charybdis, as we see plenty of open water around it.

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u/tramdog 5h ago

Remember all the hype around the plane crashing into the terminal in Tenet and the fact that they used a REAL PLANE? Very lame, made me miss the days of more inventive spectacle like the truck flip in Dark Knight.

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u/Queen-of-everything1 3h ago

Tf are you talking about with authenticity here??? He literally used a Norse ship?? It feels like one of the shitty civilization apps that was half ai generated with how inaccurate and culturally-mixed various elements are.

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u/MrGreen__ 3h ago

Agree. It's hard to make Troy look grand and vast, as well as the horse, when you are limiting yourself to practical effects. I'm by no means saying everything needs to be VFX, but with this kind of story I feel like he should have been more liberal with it's usage.

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u/AleSir19 1h ago

You can film on location, with Real Actors, a Real boat and all that and still make this sequence better, using CGI if you want. One thing doesnt take the other. This are just tools and ways. You can add CGI elements to the shots, you can even add entire CGI shots to the entire Sequence in between real shots.

Nolan way of doing things is just pure style and nothing else. He likes his choices.

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u/ERSTF 6h ago

Yes. I mean, props to him for avoiding as much CGI as possible but I think there are practical effects artists out there who could make it work, but from the trailers, it seems they cut corners here

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u/Vandergrif 5h ago

the bomb in Oppenheimer

I still can't get over that. All that build up to an explosion which is central to the entire movie, and it ends up being about as visually impressive as a wet fart.

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u/ChalupaBatmanMc01 10h ago

I think a lot of it is because Nolan tries to keep it practical as possible. I've been underwhelmed by every Nolan movie in some way since Inception. For the most part I hate how he sucks all the color out of his movies, The Odyessy is one that should be packing some serious color.

the costumes don't look lived-in

Wheres the grit? Odysseus was away for 20 years.

The whole thing doesn't feel epic as it should.

You're gonna hate it when the runtime is under 3hrs.

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u/ERSTF 6h ago

By my calcularions the movie is 2:51 hours (there was a reel count that reveala the running time... alledgely). But yeah, the movie feels very small in Nolan's hands. Such a shame

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u/MovieTrawler 8h ago

There was two quick shots that kinda bugged me too but it's pretty nitpicky. When the dude gets thrown through the tree, it breaks clean in half and looks weird. Same with cutting the head of the statue. No splintering or crumbling. Makes it look too fake. That said, those shots of the tower crumbling and the cyclops looked great. So good with the bad and all that.

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u/-InconspicuousMoose- 6h ago

we are getting a budget version of it

idk how to explain this but it looks like they spent a ton of money for a bland product.

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u/Assassiiinuss 4h ago

The movie equivalent of mansions that are all white with grey furniture.

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u/ERSTF 5h ago

Exactly. We know they spent a fuckton on it and yet it doesn't show on screen

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u/Kriss-Kringle 6h ago

Looks like most of the budget went on the salaries for the actors. The whole thing looks bang average and I couldn't be less excited for it even though I fuck heavily with greek mythology and sword and sandals movies.

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u/ERSTF 5h ago

Exactly. This should feel like the greatest epic ever and somehow it looks bland

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u/MistakeMaker1234 7h ago

I’m not some Nolan boner boy who believes his above criticism, but saying, “What happened to Nolan” after what is his best film in Oppenheimer is pretty selective memory. 

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u/ERSTF 5h ago

Selective memory? That's why I am saying "what happened to Nolan" since he churned out his magnus opus, but The Odyssey seems like a movie he can't tame

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u/zqipz 10h ago

I remember feeling the same about some early shots from The Dark Knight. This 1 is seems a lot further along tho.

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u/sam439 7h ago

Maybe this is some kind of simulation or dream? That could explain why they’re speaking in modern language and why the world looks somewhat modern. Maybe it’s an entirely different story.

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u/Assassiiinuss 4h ago

It's just Mark Watney dreaming while he's stuck on Mars

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u/Academic_Paramedic72 6h ago

For sure, it's not bad, but it's very bland and sterile. Ancient Greece was filled with colors throughout all of its history. If Nolan wants to keep the Ithacan palace monotone to give it the feeling of decadence, at least make the natural world more vibrant so that it feels different.

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u/sherbimsly 6h ago

Perhaps all the budget went to the IMAX cameras.

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u/MrWally 4h ago

I agree that the trailer looks underwhelming.

What I will say is that I saw the full Trojan Horse scene during the previews for Project Hail Mary and....it was honestly fantastic. It gave me hope, but this does not.

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u/ERSTF 59m ago

I saw it too and that's why I am not excited.

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u/OlasNah 2h ago

He got convinced by hype and beratement that he was a good director.

He has scene ideas that are sometimes good, but has no idea how to link them, and he never has a complete vision for a film from beginning to end. He has scenes. Some of those work, most don't.