Lacking in both aura, and, historical vibes. Kinda just looks like slop.
If anyone wants to read the Odyssey, I’d suggest the modern Emily Wilson translation. It attempts to be a more direct and faithful adaptation that maintains a similar rhythm as the original spoken poetry in greek.
More importantly imo she removes a lot of the Victorian brainworms prior English translations smuggled in, like calling slaves “servants” or calling Helen a “bitch” rather than the more correct “dog faced,” which doesn’t have the same gendered connotations as “bitch” does in English. Lattimore is still my favorite translator of.the epics, but Wilson’s is really wonderful. Both her Iliad and Odyssey are worth reading.
Helen:
wtf did u just call merather than the more correct “dog faced,”
Was biden doing a homeric reference when he called that one reporter a “Dog faced Pony soldier”
The Lattimore and Wilson translations are what I’d go for as well. The others are basically just victorian fanfics calling themselves translations.
It’s great, the War Nerd Prose Iliad is great, and I’m a big fan of the Pope translation of both if you want something in a higher register. All such different vibes, all great.
The Nolan vibes are fucked though. Looks like a third rate spinoff of the Dune movies, but without decent art design and using leftover TDKR props.
I don’t even care about the Odyssey that much but I do think the Bronze Age was fucking fascinating. I know the classic canon of western civilization is overplayed, especially by a bunch of marble statue dipshits, but those boneheads think Fight Club is about starting a fight club. Fuck em. The Bronze Age shit slaps. Bunch of goat herders built a wall around a hill and some other group of dickheads with boats knocked it over. Then they tell some elaborate yarn about it for a thousand years. Hilarious stuff.
The lack of any kind of Sea Peoples sword and sandals epic is criminal.
The Aeneid would go so, so hard. The panicked flight from burning troy as the Mycenaean sea peoples burn it, an amazing voyage through a world in collapse, panicked refugees streaming into Carthage since the Phoenicians are the last remaining civ that hasn’t closed borders. and at the end, hope in Apulia, and a promise of Rome.
The sequels write themselves as our heroes sail to another land and start brawls with the locals. They’re basically the Saiyans from Dragon Ball. Agamemnon was extremely Vegeta coded.
This is also one of my problems with the new dune adaptation, it’s visually bland and colourless, when there was so much opportunity to use Islamic, bizanytine and tzarist architecture and clothing as a base for the desings, when the setting is clearly middle eastern/ Caucasus inspired.
There’s a problem in adapting Dune because the vibe of it is that it’s so far into the future it ends up feeling ancient and alien. If they just hung a bunch of Persian rugs and had Islamic architecture in a more obvious way (like in the movies everything in Arrakis was clearly inspired by Islamic architecture, but in a “brutal” and “alien” way), it would like like Earth and Earth cultures but a couple millennia into the future. But that is not the vibe at all.
I think Dennis captured the vibe of Dune perfectly, as a big big fan of the books 🤷♂️
No, both previous movies did it better. These are decadent space aristocrats, they should look colorful and fancy, even the esthetic of the lunch film does better at this.
The movie is visually boring and does not feel alien at all. It feels lazy and cheap.
I don’t know what to tell you. I read the books before watching either film. And I NEVER imagined anything looking like the David Lynch movie. Not sure what other one you’re referring to.
I imagined things much closer to the Denis movies. Specially the Harkonen side of things, I thought that was amazing.
To me the two Dune movies by Denis are some of the best sci-fi movies ever. But to each their own I guess.
The best adaptation is the 2000 mini series, that’s the one closer to the look I want. the lynch movie has it’s flaws but at least it’s more visually interesting than the new ones, Wich are horrible.
I feel saying they look horrible is quite bold. The movies were universally lauded for looking amazing. Denis is generally loved for his visual language. He is a very visual director.
You might have visualized something different reading the books, but saying the movies look horrible is honestly baffling 😂
Also yeah the 2000 mini series is really great despite the super low budget. Still, it looks very much like* the sci-fi of its era. The Denis Dune movies look at least very unique.
Fremen sietches are described as raucously colorful with woven tapestries all over the place to make the cavern interiors more comfortable
They were just fucking empty rooms in the film I was so disappointed. That sterile look was the weakest element of the production design of those films, totally lacking a “lived in” feel.
It’s the usual problem afflicting modern media: everything is too clean and new. Star Wars or Alien being grimy were very intentional decisions that took a lot of work to execute naturally on film. Bat-Agamemnon there is coming off of a ten year siege and he looks like he just took the plastic wrap off his comicon cosplay
This is just vibes on my part but I feel like a part of that modern emptiness is not having enough extras onscreen. In Dune there were these huge sets shot in a way that highlighted the emptiness, maybe they thought having fewer people in them made them feel more epic? maybe it’s just cheaper. The Atreides are heads of a planet-spanning aristocracy which has no “thinking machines”. Surely they’d have attendants everywhere! Fremen sietches, and Arakkeen, should be absolutely bustling.
Blade Runner 2049 is a more open question. The design of LA suggests a huge population density but Earth’s ecology is so fucked that surely we have population decline, so many of those apartments should be empty.
If they wanted big crowds the tech exists pretty easily. I’m sure it’s part of the cinematic language. Vast empty spaces to underscore how isolated and vulnerable the Atreides are
It’s curious, especially when you look at the director’s last work, Blade Runner 2049, which was the exact opposite. Everything outside of the Wallace Corp hyperwealthy scenes looked dingy. Sterile areas were dirty and everything looked prefabbed (on purpose).
(I said production design but what I meant was art direction, oops!)
I just checked imdb and Dune (1&2) and BR 2049 had different art directors, set decorators, and costume designers. No idea how the budgets compare but I have to assume they were similar and people just have a hard time deciding how to art direct Dune. With Blade Runner here they had the benefit of being a sequel.
Looks almost like the design is AI generated. Not sure if it is that or just the capeshit slopification of everything in Hollywood these days though.
LOOK AT THIS DRIP WE COULDVE HAD SOMETHING ACTUALLY UNIQUELY COOL AS FUCK BUT FUCK NO WE GET TROJAN BATMAN INSTEAD
Look at him in Total War, hes fuckin ballin
HOLLYWOOD LET HEXBEAR MAKE MOVIES FOR YOU! JUST GIVE US A BLANK CHECK AND SOME DIRECTORS TO BULLY AND WE’LL MAKE THE FINEST SLOP IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD part 3.
Is there a fix for the invisible horses in the pirated version?
The thread on cs.rin.ru says “Spartan horses textures missing, fix: turn off blood effects”
That sire is awesome! Thank you comrade.
Look… I don’t like Nolan. I think his movies are boring, and pretty superficial. And I don’t think he could ever properly direct a movie with this kind of costuming. He would be incapable of getting a real looking story out of people dressed like this.
To me the tragedy isn’t that the movie doesn’t look “time accurate”. I mean it’s a mythological story, it’s not about accuracy. There are gods roaming around ffs. To me the tragedy is Nolan doing it… why Nolan?
I weirdly feel the 2000s movie Troy is more his vibe, than the actual Odyssey lmao
kinda looks like the pictures of generals wearing like 200 medals on their uniform
I mean that 100% checks out for Agamemnon, who is famous for declaring himself the best of the Greeks while letting Akhilleus do all the work and then unfairly taking his sex slave because Agamemnon had to give away his own sex slave.
The amount of people who’s reaction is “ummm it’s myth not history sweaty there is no accuracy” as if we don’t have boar tusk helmets and the Dendra armor to say nothing of artistic depictions of bronze age stuff not specifically mentioned in the epic.
If it’s myth then explain how they found the real city of Troy by following the book’s own lore!
My favorite study that came out of this was that they put on Mycaenean armour they found and then followed the diet and battle regime detailed in the Iliad and concluded “yeah this armour works.” Experimental anthropology is fun. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0301494
Hey I am on the “accurate enough to be using some real history carried down” side of the Homeric question. The chariots being there despite being misused always felt so telling to me that Homer knew somethings needed to be maintained even if he didn’t know how they would be used in war.
And yeah fuck Schliemann, but just following the fucking directions two thousand years later is so funny
Hilariously, We’ve recently discovered that the layers of Troy associated with the late bronze age (VIIa) are located slightly away from the main hill, meaning that the settlement is a bit larger than we thought and more like the stories of Troy. But, and this is the funny part, Schliemann didn’t just dynamite his way through the layer he wanted because he though old=good. He dynamited the wrong spot!
Didn’t he have depression for the rest of his life after realizing his mistake? Serves him right. The Greek and Anatolian people’s history was just a playground for his ilk’s imagined “western civilization”
Unfortunately not, the seriousness of the error was not noticed until the 1930s, although even in the 1870s it was clear he got the wrong layer. Sir Arthur Evans actually was partially inspired to excavate at Knossos out of the fear some other similar amateur might destroy the sight, and while there’s a lot to critique about Evans, he was a pretty good excavator for the time (and also surprisingly anti-imperialist for someone who ended up with half of Crete in his museum, he played a strong role in halting a massacre of the local Muslim population and was harshly critical or British-Turkish actions in Crete.)
Yeah Evans I know was more a problem in reconstruction and coloring our view of what Minoan art “should” look like. Otherwise much better.
Edit: apparently he had a mound and wild garden built during the Great Depression specifically to give work to unemployed workers.
I been making fun of it in the chat for having no aura
Have you seen the Ancient Greek Brutalism?
Nolan glazers keep coping and saying the only people that hate it its the ones that want historical accuracy and are bringing up the soviet movie Alexander Nevsky as an example of good movies that dont follow historical accuracy
Except unlike Nolan’s its actually has aura
Please tell me where the first picture is from. I didnt see it in the trailer
Its leaked from an early screening
How do you fuck up Corinthian columns so badly? Like, what was even the thought process behind this? “Eh, we don’t need to actually carve any of this shit and make it look like a real place, everything is AI now so no one will care if it looks terrible.”
Aaaaaaah, that’s the point of 3D printers! They were supposed to usher in a glorious age of wild design potential and free makers from some of the hardest parts of large implementation!
It was only like a decade ago!
They both lack color
Nevsky was much more accurate, the russian helmets/shields are all archaeological, and even the teuton inaccuracies are less chronologically/thematically divorced from the source material.
the trojans in nolan are goth 5th century bce? greeks and the greeks are 3rd century bce? if you put this art direction in a film about the Boeotian War you’d be wrong and this film is supposed to be 1000 years before that
are bringing up the soviet movie Alexander Nevsky as an example of good movies that dont follow historical accuracy
The tutonic barbarians most definitely wore silly war hats like what’s depicted in Alexander Nevsky. That’s the Genius of Eisenstein, he still follows closely to historic Realism but adds a beautiful coat of colorful paint to just make it POP
And the style and inaccuracies are in service of a real point. Some Teutons wear modified stahlhelms to drive home the point about historical continuity and that Germans are fucking losers. Eisenstein is always saying something
Akhilleus was an aura farmer, as was Odysseus for sure. They fought and killed people because they wanted their sick, beautiful armour. There’s half a book of the Iliad that describes the armour of Akhilleus and all the pretty engravings it had. Agamemnon’s Medusa shield is an incredible piece of work, commented on by all as Art. These myths were all about aura, and the lifeless blandness of Nolan is so sad to see.
Have you seen the Ancient Greek Brutalism?
This has to be a CGI placeholder. There’s no way.
Christopher Nolan doesn’t get nearly enough hate as he should
Like if you’re gonna make something that’s loose with accuracy at least make it interesting to look at like fuck even 300 looks more interesting and colorful than this slop and that was pure dogwater
300 at least had aura, and was definitely closer to how the Greeks like saw themselves as these gigachads. It’s cryptofascist slop but at least it has an art style.
That made-for-tv Odyssey movie they had on NBC back in the day looked better than this
And that starred Armand Assante
This line delivery by Armand Assante plays in my head whenever I see his name or face.
LAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWW!
He almost ululates a few extra syllables into the unbroken chain of A’s it’s glorious
Ah, Judge Dredd, you got the cure for the daily blues
The movie that almost gave us a robot killing Rob Schneider. Almost.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I like Memento, the Prestige, though Inception a little less. I was crazy about Inception when I was a young teen because it was the first big concept sci fi movie I saw, but now I think the characters don’t feel interesting enough to make it work. Interstellar is fine, same problem though. Haven’t seen Oppenheimer or Dunkirk. Tenet was hilarious and pretty fun, but definitely a guilty pleasure. His brother can write a good script, but often it just feels like he’s too invested in the nonlinear plots to make characters that have anything going on behind their eyes.
He fundamentally can’t do action set pieces. Nothing makes sense spatially. The opening Tenet opera house scene makes very little sense. Same with the sinking ship scene in Dunkirk.
The only movie I’ve seen from him I enjoyed is Inception because it’s action movie fluff, the batman movies are honk shoooooooooooooo
I despised the dark knight rises I really do. Bane sounding like autotuned sean connery and being a lovesick puppy
Officer gordan getting the drop on the next batman
Sending the entire police force into the sewers
The police force being 'the resistance ’
Batman Begins is alright, but goddamn does he strip Batman of anything fun
And the biggest problem is how influential those movies are, everything lives in their shadow for some reason
So now movie Batman is once again doomed to be joyless, dark and gritty
The best batman is Adam West hands down
He didnt need molded plastic for his physique. Pure West. And how come batman doesn’t dance anymore?
I love him, animated series Batman is the next best, followed by Young Justice Batman
He’s such a good father in that one
Nolan only has one style and it works for Dark Knight but doesn’t work for anything else.
I mean he does well with more modern settings, like Dunkirk and Oppenheimer were quite satisfactory. I suppose the problem is that his style only truly works in a modern to post-modern contemporary period when life was drained from the world.
it works for Dark Knight
I disagree, tbh. Edgy Batman sucks, despite apparently being the preferred version for basically all Batman writers.
Creatures of the night are inherently edgy.
You take the edgy out of Batman and you’ve just got Sherlock Holmes with a grappling hook and ninja shurikens. Ninjas are also inherently edgy though. So take those edgy components away and you’ve just got Sherlock.
No, Batman is a wholesome story about wacky family hijinks and solving crimes and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Look how happy he and his son are.
I absolutely knew this version was about to be posted
Just saw your second paragraph (ninja edit I think?).
You take the edgy out of Batman and you’ve just got Sherlock Holmes with a grappling hook and ninja shurikens. Ninjas are also inherently edgy though. So take those edgy components away and you’ve just got Sherlock.
I think furry sherlock is a good idea, let’s find a director for this.
He solves crime in his bat fursona and his primary method of transportation is grappling.
I think that would work as a cartoon with self awareness and humour
Agreed lol, jokes aside I would watch it.
I think edgy batman can work, but he needs silly villains.
This is a good point. If Batman isn’t going to embrace being silly then the bad guys have to. It works either way but somebody has to acknowledge the inherent silliness of the furry billionaire beating up criminals in a city that has like the cosmic concept of evil polluting its drinking water
It’s an oddly constipated look.
If he’s secretly made it all aliens instead of gods and monsters, hence the scifi armour (for one guy) and blocky temples… well, it’s still a boring look, but at least then there’s a kind of - the autocorrect thinks I want to say “fake alchemy” next, which… I kinda agree with.
Like if Lord of Light was drab and functional.
fait accompli?
I read this as “Agamememon” at first and thought people were mad about some new Digimon thing lmao
Agumonmemnonmon
I don’t think it’s a fair critique to criticize the film for not using period accurate Mycenaean armour given the Odyssey poet was not Mycenaean and the Ancient Greeks in their depictions of the Odyssey used classical era armour, not Mycenaean. That said, the armour does look boring as hell and if you’re adapting an adventure story that even the Greeks thought was from an older time that was different enough from their own you might as well have some fun with the designs.
Lmfao the Mycenaean armour looks way better than the generic nolan dark armour too.I mean at least have boar helmets which are attested to in the Epic and we have uncovered. Plus these are the most boring classical era armor as is. The people the epic is talking about would be closer to the Mycenaean if the war had happened. It is totally fair to expect that you use the armor that was found with the same helmet the epic mentions.
Yeah but my point is that the Greeks themselves, who venerated this story, didn’t do that. Not bland though, unlike this snoozefest.
But the Greeks did mention the boar tusk helmet. It is in the version they venerated. Even in their retellings with the trappings of their day, elements were retained. We have the artifacts, we have the text.
The outside was cleverly adorned all around with rows of white tusks from a shiny-toothed boar, the tusks running in alternate directions in each row.
So in this case they did do that. Which makes the blandness even more inexcusable.
i would not have any issue if this film was a period-staged version of the story–like Romeo + Juliet–but these pictures do not communicate any remotely consistent ancient period.
i’ve genuinely thought about this problem before and decided a rinascimento performance in all’antica would be the firmest/freshest historical base you could do, 16th century europeans adored “classics” and had a whole (well-documented) wardrobe with which to communicate it, while we have a very limited archaeological picture of the bronze age almost entirely limited to the haute-nobelesse.
Fuxk make it a swanky broadway jazz musical like how they did the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in Hadestown, but at least make it interesting to look and listen at
If the Trojan Wars did actually happen I’d imagine both sides would be employing mercenaries from across the Mediterranean, which totally could have had black guys from Northern Africa in their ranks.
“Kek!! Right on!” is one of the GOATs of left-wing memes so hard its unreal.
I’ve seen it used against “tankies” more than against chuds so far.
Something like first panel “man I hate US imperialism in South America and Africa so much”
Then “kek! right on! Based Xi and comrade Putin are building a multipo-”
Or something similar where the first panel was critical of Biden, then the second panel is someone saying they’re voting for Jill Stein or whatever.
There’s a black Greek guy in this movie?
That’s historically accurate actually, because “Greek” was not a race, it was more like a cultural identity that you could pick up by practice. A black Greek would just be a Greek with black skin. If they spoke Greek, worshiped the Greek gods, understood Greek cultural practices, lived in a polis, boom they’re Greek. There were multiple Greek states in Africa, even below the Sahara like the Auxamites, who spoke Greek and ruled parts of Ethiopia until around 1000AD.
Also, there were Ethiopians (people of burnt faces in the Greek) under Memnon at Troy fighting the Greeks, this was in fact the subject of a now lost poem part of the.broader Epic Cycle, of which the Odyssey was part. And in one part of the Odyssey, when Athena makes Odysseus beautiful, she is clearly described making Odysseus’ skin black (though the Greeks described colours very differently than us, so wouldn’t read too much into it)!
That’s historically accurate actually, because “Greek” was not a race, it was more like a cultural identity that you could pick up by practice. A black Greek would just be a Greek with black skin. If they spoke Greek, worshiped the Greek gods, understood Greek cultural practices, lived in a polis, boom they’re Greek.
I knew this was true of Romans, and it makes sense that it would be the same for the Hellenes, but still good to know! I think even among people who know and accept that “race” is a modern construct, it’s hard to truly internalise that not only did these cultures not conceive of themselves in racialised terms, they were also more or less cosmopolitan.
For the Greeks of the classical era the larger divide was mostly if one was a citizen. Which of course would likely preclude people passing through or refugees from far flung places, but for something quite different than colorism or even strictly being foreign.
Greeks don’t even exist yet. When we say Greek, they say Hellenes which comes from Helen. These people in the movie who are from mainland modern Greece are Achaeans and still pretty disparate and even more population movements are to come in the next centuries.
True true, even more credence to the point. Though the historical identity of Greek is like predicated on and constructed by the Iliad and Odyssey.
The fact that no one seems to show care with Greek cultural identity, like it is just this collective past for all modern Europeans and Anglos is so gross. There is this fantastic video essay on modernizations and attempts to “fix” Greek myth by a student of the Classics that I absolutely love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tL3Pbc_zhU&t=5s
She made me question the way Greek history is abused both for reactionary and liberal pan-European identity. To quote Katerina Cosgrove
If these writers co-opt Greek oral histories, handed down from mouth to mouth and generation to generation, I don’t see them leaving any room for minority Greek writers, within Greece and in the diaspora, to tell their own stories and to have any hope of getting them published and garnering attention. My Greek publisher, the oldest house in the country, is struggling to stay afloat in the new Greece. Greek writers can’t get published. Maybe the Greek myths don’t belong only to the Greeks. Yet I wonder why the international publishing industry chooses these particular books to champion, white writers writing for white audiences – a structural issue that I can’t begin to unravel here. Greece has suffered from many waves of colonisation, and this feels like the latest.
I’m not saying these writers should not have written these books. The West has always appropriated Greek cultural heritage for its own purposes. The easy aspects are often celebrated while the marginalisation of Greek peoples – both ancient and modern – is rendered invisible. I am saying, though, that we should be thoughtful and humble, listening and approaching any culture’s myths with a healthy dose of respect, even dread and wonder. The Greek gods would be justly pleased by this, I think.
https://islandmag.com/read/who-owns-the-greek-myths-by-katerina-cosgrove
This along with the fact that the British effectively made up a “real” ancient Greek language you could learn because they felt then-modern Greeks did not deserve their own fucking history, derisively calling their language “Demotic Greek” (the people’s Greek) really put me off from people like Nolan telling this story.
They wanna talk about “our” canon, as if there is some direct line from Homer to Milton, that some Brit is the heir to that legacy. Said youtuber has a video on this aspect as well actually, in which she talks about Boris Johnson using recitation of the Iliad as part of this pantomime of Greek culture, to cloak modern western Europe in someone else’s past.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Don’t know don’t care
It’s sorta mentioned in the meme?
