I’ve heard very, very different takes.
What do yall think? analyses are welcome, joke responses as well ^^
The ending soured me. It implies that the Greek civilization is dead but it will continue “in the West”. The dialogue at a few parts feels very unnatural.
For the most part though, it’s a well acted, well directed, well written film, and I still enjoyed it.
It implies that the Greek civilization is dead but it will continue “in the West”.
COUGH COUGH
Predicted without having even seen the movie. 😤
Gonna ride this high for a good while…
This Greek Western civilization is the mythology that gave birth to fascism.
oof… that implication alone makes me completely turned off to the idea of watching it, thank you for you feedback ^^
I understood “sailing West to honor the dead” to mean sailing geographically West, as in the only cardinal direction you could sail in starting from the East Mediterranean sea to go into exile. That’s at least what I understood Penelope was proposing when she originally suggested they run away by sailing West to escape Agamemnon.
that also sounds like a death <-> sunset analogy (or whatever)
It troubles me that some of the it is made in West Sahara. Making a movie on occupied land just makes it less attractive to me.
same
3 hours is too long bro (scrolls on instagram for 3 hours)
lol XD
I saw a review from a channel I like that called it a Christian morality tale about responsible leadership.
i haven’t seen the movie myself though.“Nolan’s films tend to regard power as dangerous, institutions as compromised, and the public as extremely vulnerable to manipulation. All the while suggesting these problems can be managed somehow by an exceptional individual who understands the moral burden of exercising his power.”
sounds somewhat worrying, although i would have to watch the video
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I haven’t watched it yet but I’ll pirate it eventually
Nolan films are usually pretty good spectacle if nothing else. Similar to Tarantino, but somewhat less shallow.
What I wanna know is whether Oppenheimer is worth watching or not.
Oppenheimer/Barbie meme spam put me off both movies at the time but now I have recovered.
I found Oppenheimer fairly underwhelming and a disappointing watch, oddly reminiscent of the mid-late 2000s Oscar bait movies. While I wouldn’t say watching the film is a complete waste of time, as the cinematography and scene work is decent enough, Oppenheimer is not a movie I would ever spend the time watching again.
The overall message seemed fairly convoluted and confused as a film attempting to make a moral point, while simultaneously only providing surface level and disparate biographical information on Oppenheimer or the Manhattan Project. Ultimately, not a particularly interesting narrative film, and a lackluster at best informational film.
There were some cool shots.
The Oppenheimer plot is pretty self-aggrandizing and just fucking boring. The whole film is exposition through conversation and very slow paced. You would think with so much dialogue there’d be something noteworthy to chew on but there really isn’t.
It just feels like 3 hours of BS for a few moments of cinematography brilliance
Barbie is kinda lib and a bit shallow in it’s feminism but it’s also a lot of fun if you can get over that. I haven’t watched Oppenheimer and don’t care to.
It’s fine tbh.
Oppenheimer wasn’t worth watching, its more an artistic experiment like a Terence Malick film - no plot, no story, no sense of pacing or time, and overall not entertaining.
However there is an unrelated documentary about him made in the 80s that’s fantastic - The day after trinity.
Thanks
I won’t bother. Nolan movies suck apart from a couple of his early ones.
omg!! The only movie I watched of his was ‘Inception’ and I think it’s a little overrated. He does a very good job of creating suspense, very tense movie, but aside from the hallway fight scene with the changing gravity, I didn’t think the other fight scenes were good. (just like the Matrix, I think they definitely underused the whole ‘you can do anything you want’ aspect of the movie)
The Prestige is a good movie and Insomnia wasn’t too bad. But the rest of his movies are pretentious while also being shallow.
Agree, the prestige is delightful.
Depends on your preferences, but I personally really liked it. I enjoyed it as a theatrical experience, and I appreciated that it depicted the ancient world as a whole as brutal & violent (as opposed to the typical fascist propaganda that is sword and sandal movies romanticizing ancient “Western” societies). I found it interesting that Nolan introduced a diegetic anticipation of the bronze age collapse flipping the hero’s journey from the source material on its head into a journey of grand reckoning. It’s got a sharp anti-imperialist message and it pisses off right wingers, so I’d recommend it if any of that sounds cool to you. Second Wind did a review and analysis on their channel that I thought was really good: https://youtu.be/AC4ABA1hbRw
spoiler
In my view which is similar to the Second Wind reviewer, Nolan applies the homecoming (νοστος) theme of the source material as a metaphor for American imperialism coming home. The big twist that the Greeks are the true cause of the bronze age collapse which is blamed on rumored sea peoples is straightforwardly a mirror of the ongoing collapse of Pax Americana, down to the classic American technique of blaming some migrant outgroup while ignoring that said migrants are fleeing the warzones America creates around the world. Everywhere Odysseus and his men go, they’re treated as the belligerent imperialists that they are. We also see back in Ithaca the same belligerence reflected most directly in the boorish suitors, but there’s a normative belligerence that we see across the Greek socities, whether it abuse of puppies/dogs (aka man’s best friend) or the maintenance of hegemonic patriarchy and slavery (again, a very obvious mirror of the US). While at first we think Odysseus eats the lotus flower because of PTSD, it becomes clear by the time we’re caught up that he’s eating the lotus flower to forget what his monstrous actions and to forget his home so he would not have to return and face the consequences of his actions. I do think Nolan intended that to be a critique of our attribution of victimhood to veterans who have PTSD, where the reality is that they are the perpetrators of trauma at our behest so that the rest of us in the imperial core can benefit from our imperial plunder detached from the traumatic cost of obtaining it. Odysseus is delivered home by the gods not because he has been morally redeemed, but as the deliverer of the fated imperial reckoning which ushers in the bronze age collapse. It ends on the hopeful musing that with collapse there can then be renewal and that in time Odysseus’ mistakes (i.e. America’s mistakes) will be forgotten. I think there’s something subtle about that final line. It’s not that Odysseus’ mistakes will be forgiven, but merely forgotten, implying his mistakes would have so little relevance to the present that they have neither need nor want to remember them.
ic
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Hollywood slop imo, i lost taste from American movies and tv a year ago and i can’t watch anything since, maybe i didn’t watch a movie for a little bit more than a year idk
The crazy thing is there used to actually be a time that not all American movies were slop (John Carpenter films, James Cameron films, the Lucas Star Wars films, etc. Now it’s so bad that people are turning instead to movies made by YouTubers like Iron Lung and Backrooms over anything coming out of the industry.
Emily Wilson wrote a very good review of the film: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man
Wilson’s review seems more a review of the intellectual and analytical value of the film instead of an actual film review. Reads more like someone analyzing and critiquing the individual brushstrokes and materials used by an artist then the actual finished painting itself.
Watch Troy (2004) with all the sexy glistening hunks on display but its totally not gay because manly heterosexuality or something.
It was not really worth it to watch in the theater. It would be “okay” to watch at home.
