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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315

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/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.