I watched it as well, but modern series seem full of filler nowadays. I don’t mind filler, when I was a kid I used to watch Stargate SG-1 (and I love it), but this filler seems more wasteful and completely pointless, like they are dragging the plot on purpose. I also really dislike how they keep jumping from one plot to another, sometimes with 4 or 5 going simultaneously, it’s just bad. Kyle Maclachlan and Goggins are the standouts of course, and the only reason why I watched till the end.
It’s really good. As a Herzog fan, I would never have guessed Nastassja was the daughter of Klaus Kinski.
Some other standouts from Wim Wenders which I like is Perfect Days and The Salt of the Earth.
I went to see The Odyssey at the local IMAX theater. It does look like it was shot on film. Lighting was not the same as with old movies - evening scenes seemed to be less bright overall, probably shot with wide apertures.
Shadows were lifted a bit in some scenes, and it was clear there was color grading (often blue tones dominating the shadows, with yellowish highlights). I’ve read that grading was done with printer lights, which I assume are applied across the entire image at once.
Contrast was generally not very high, but that depended on the scene.
In terms of the story line, it was obviously very condensed, and I thought the movie was dominated by action scenes. The overall theme seems to be “We broke the law of Zeus” (xenia - be welcoming to strangers and guests, and be a good guest yourself and honor your host), and as a result civilization itself was falling apart. A bit of a commentary on our own times, perhaps?
I studied English literature in college and one of my first lit classes we went over all the classic plot mechanisms and tropes. There aren’t that many. The artistry is how you work within the one you’ve chosen. In some respects I feel like mastery is when you don’t necessarily notice it.
Perhaps self servingly, I think the literary arts are the hardest of all. Its just so easy to produce work that is so bad. Photography I think isn’t far behind, with all the auto everything, its easy to get the mechanics correct, but there is so much more than that.
So yes, I agree. Zoomed out, a lot of it is the same.
“When TV executives need a new concept, they turn on this computer; after sorting through millions of possible plot premises, it spits out, ‘THREE QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN AN APARTMENT,’ and the executives turn this concept into a show. The next time they need an idea, the computer spits out, ‘SIX QUIRKY BUT ATTRACTIVE YOUNG…’”
I think his solution was to locate that computer and destroy it with hammers