This is fair, but I'll make the counterpoint that an epic story deserves elevated language in most cases. I'm not crying to cry over a stylistic choice, but I don't think it's ideal given how the movie's marketed.
Damon should have said his f-bomb comment about getting off the beach with his Good Will Hunting voice.
It gave me flashbacks to that scene in The Dark Knight Rises when Batman and Catwoman are fighting on the roof and the thugs are just sort of moving around.
There were some times in the final fight scene where the action went by too quickly or was too hard to see, but I feel like that's most films nowadays, so I don't really think about it too much.
Also, the treatment of that dog definitely warranted everything that happened to the suitors in the climactic scene.
TDKR does indeed have terrible choreography. The Bane fight in the sewer is atrocious. Many of the punches and kicks don’t even look like they make contact.
Odysseus recounting how the fall of troy was this immense guilt and how it upset the delicate balance of human decency reminded me of the ending of Oppenheimer. It was very heavy and got me choked up.
Some of the scenes are done so well that they will become the standard for what people visualize when they read the poem. The pig transformation is horrifying, the suspense leading up to the cyclops is palpable, and the landscapes capture the duality of the beauty and simultaneous indifference of nature. This kind of film is a closing argument for every film executive that wants to do everything in post-production and thinks it does not matter if an actor is looking at a blank screen or a real location. We have had three high-profile adaptations of classic literature recently, and it is fascinating in how they diverge in approach. Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein both tries to undo the misconceptions made about the story that stem all the way back to James Whale's 1931 film, but he also does not think his audience is smart enough to understand the Biblical allusions of the text, to the point that a dying character literally looks at the camera and explains the text of the film. Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights continues the tradition of just covering half of the book, which is sort of like turning off Scarface right after he kills Frank and marries Elvira. Her Tumblrfication of the source material is indicative of wider cultural trends, as audiences desire more and more for moral unambiguity and filmmakers become beholden to the algorithm. Nolan is trying something trickier here, taking a story from a time of legends and trying to add moral dimensions more fit for a modern audience. People tend to flatten time, but there are important differences in books written in the 1800's where people lived relatively modern lives and an oral poem from thousands of years ago that was meant to entertain people around a fire. There is only so much lipstick you can put on a pig, though, and we have to balance Odysseus' regret over the actions at Troy and the fact that he massacres 108 unarmed suitors for the crime of being greedy, minus the handful that were actively plotting to kill him and his son. A more interesting comparison might be to Robert Zemeckis' 2007 Beowulf film, which also took a simple heroic epic and tried to add a moral reckoning in the form of Beowulf failing to kill Grendel's mother and instead sleeping with her and creating the dragon. That twist fundamentally misunderstands the point of Beowulf and takes what was supposed to be a tale of heroism and instead makes it into mostly nothing. However, Nolan's shading of Odysseus as a man of regret is more profound here because we still have not learned the lesson that might seem obvious. In another film with Matt Damon, Captain Miller says that for every man he kills, the further from home he feels. Is getting back to Penelope and Telemachus even possible? Getting the physical body back is the odyssey, but the journey is not complete in just that sense. The cyclops wasn't looking for trouble, they invaded his home and you cannot criticize him for eating them when they are willing to eat meat even under predictions of death. The witch is completely justified in being afraid of the soldiers given everything we know about the raping and pillaging that armies do. The ghosts of Sinon and others are right that the wheels of history have been able to move with their blood. It is asking the audience to ponder a lot of moral questions that you do not typically expect to find in a movie that has its own popcorn bucket. This run of three movies represents the strongest in Nolan's career. His films have often been criticized for being cold and obsessed with spectacle over characters, but here he finds characterization in some pretty stock figures.
I enjoyed reading that. I don't know if I agree with everything but I also feel like I don't know enough to disagree, so I'll just say that.
I assure you it will not tarnish the legacy of the first film since it already has multiple awful sequels.
It is very funny that the far-right got mad about Elliot Page being in it to the point that they made up the idea of him playing Achilles, even though the character of Sinon ends up being portrayed as meek, which is what they literally believe about trans men.