When the Odyssey trailers first dropped, the YouTube comments were full of people criticizing the costumes, questioning the casting, mocking the dialogue, and declaring the film a flop before it had even come out. Ever since the film came out, the reception tells a very different story. It has an 88 on Metacritic, IMDb is currently 8.4/10 from 528,000 user ratings. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 94% from 515 critic reviews and a 96% audience score. Obviously, those numbers don’t mean everyone loves the film, and there are legitimate criticisms to make, but it’s interesting how the pre-release discourse was dominated by people confidently predicting this film to be a failure. People seemed to be genuinely convinced that Nolan had lost his touch and that the movie was going to be embarrassing. What fascinates me is how the sheer volume and certainty of the backlash seem to have vanished from collective memory. There’s no comparable discussion about how wrong the predictions might have been, no real reflection on the premature judgments, just a complete shift to the next thing. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

It's obviously not the same instrument but it sounds very similar.

It appears around the minute 1:40.

Does it sound similar to you as well?

Take the final game of the 1985 World Chess Championship between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, and tell it alongside Napoleon’s Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The circumstances are surprisingly similar.

Karpov had been world champion for 10 years. Going into the final game, he needed a win to keep his title. Kasparov, just 22 years old, only needed a draw.

At Waterloo, Napoleon was making one final attempt to defeat Wellington and save his empire.

Nolan could tell these stories simultaneously, cutting between the chessboard and the battlefield.

Karpov begins an aggressive attack against Kasparov’s king. Cut to Napoleon sending his forces against Wellington’s defensive lines.

Kasparov absorbs the pressure and begins looking for opportunities to counterattack. Wellington holds his position as the Prussians begin arriving on Napoleon’s flank.

As the game progresses, Karpov commits more and more to his attack, leaving weaknesses that Kasparov can exploit. Meanwhile, Napoleon is running out of options and commits his Imperial Guard in one final attempt to break Wellington’s army.

Kasparov launches his decisive counterattack. Wellington’s forces repel the Imperial Guard, and Napoleon’s army begins to break.

There you have it, would you watch?

Alright, let's actually be rational and constructive about Nolan and his work for once.

Lately, I've actually been enjoying Denis Villeneuve's work more, but whenever I rewatch one of Nolan's movies, I just keep thinking that it's an absolute masterpiece. Even his "worst" movie is still better than most of Hollywood's output.

Of course I'm a fan of Nolan and I often defend his movies and style, but that doesn't mean I can't see when he has some flaws. I believe there are plenty of reasonable people here who feel the same way. After all, as movie lovers, or even critics, we should be at least somewhat unbiased. Not that we're always like that, but you get what I mean.

I personally have several of his movies among my favorite movies of all time. I often can't decide which one is the best, and the competition for that spot usually comes down to The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Inception and Interstellar. I probably lean towards The Prestige the most, simply because of how brilliantly constructed that movie is. But I guess it also depends on my mood.

Of course, the mood and atmosphere of his movies is pretty much always the same, and it's true that sometimes you'd like to see a change. And as we've seen with The Odyssey (phenomenal movie btw), he approaches pretty much any genre in his own way.

He's also not that great at action scenes, we all know that, nothing new here. People sometimes criticize his screenwriting and dialogue as well. That's actually something that never really bothered me personally, and I've never seen it as some major problem. And yeah, underdeveloped female characters, we know that one too.

But what I'm more interested in is your actual opinions. What do you genuinely dislike about him, or what do you love about his work? And how do you approach these things in a constructive way?

I've only mentioned a few examples here, and there are definitely more, but even so, he's a phenomenal director and one of the best of our time, constantly pushing the industry forward.

The hate he gets is sometimes almost astronomical, but I guess that's somewhat proportional to his success, so it's not that surprising. As they say, if nobody hates you, you're probably not that good, right?

So, let's hear your opinions.