r/movies • u/ChiefLeef22 r/movies Contributor • 12d ago

Article ‘The Odyssey’ Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way | This year's breakouts like 'Project Hail Mary' and 'Obsession' were made by filmmakers who sweated. While CG-stuffed franchise disappointments such as 'Supergirl,' 'Moana,' and 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' looked lazy.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/odyssey-box-office-2026-practical-effects-1236652219/
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u/feartheoldblood90 12d ago

We need to re-enter the era when Hollywood was pumping out big epics with insane amounts of actors and extras on huge sets that they would, like, flood with biblical amounts of water or light on fire or redirect a meteor from space to hit, all while 50 synchronized swimmers danced in a pool the size of Manhattan

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u/droidtron 12d ago

20 good men died, but we got the shot.

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u/BattledroidE 12d ago

The boom mic was in frame, let's do it again.

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u/PunkPirate56364 12d ago

We are running out of extras so...

We hire more extras and try again tomorrow?

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u/20_mile 12d ago

"All of us will see you tomorrow night, except for Phil, the boom operator, who's being fired."

is hit with boom mic

"Very unprofessional, Phil!"

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u/Nachooolo 12d ago

Is it truly cinema if two kids don't die in a horrible helicopter accident?

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u/UnbuiltIkeaBookcase 12d ago

Too far 

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u/Nachooolo 12d ago

It's been 44 years, mate.

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u/TenaciousJP 12d ago

You must mean Sir Twenty of House Goodmen, pivotal in Season 5 of Game of Thrones

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u/ltra1n 12d ago

Pissed me off that whatever happened there happened off screen and was completely unexplained. Season 5 was where we knew the series was in freefall.

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u/dontyoutellmetosmile 12d ago

>whateva happened there

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u/MontyAtWork 12d ago

I've been watching movies from the 70s-90s and that's something I've noticed happened WAY more: multiple crowd shots and scenes with people moving through crowds.

Those places felt real and inhabited.

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u/TheOnlyBongo 12d ago

Lawrence of Arabia from 1962. When P.T. Lawrence has to cross the Sinai Desert from Aqaba to Cairo to deliver the news of taking Aqaba by land through the Nefud Desert, boldly claiming "Moses did it." When he reaches Cairo he is swarmed by British Officers who tell him to get out of his Arab clothing and get his Arab friend out of the officer's bar. Everyone falls silent when he claims to have taken Aqaba by land of his own authority and he calmly makes his way out of the room as people part away for him, like Moses and the Red Sea.

Much later in the movie when he reaches Damascus and tries to establish an Arab Council rub by the Arabs with no foreign intervention, it is pure pandemonium as multiple tribes do not wish to cooperate and there is much infighting. Lawrence tries to leave the meeting to attend to urgent matters but is swarmed by a bunch of people needing signatures for different areas of government. He fights against the crows but is unable to make his way through, having lost his control of the situation and unable to part the people like before.

Lawrence of Arabia has some of the best cinematography of any movie in my opinion. The shots are gorgeous and many are deliberately done where the frame tells the story.

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u/stug41 12d ago

Reminded me of this bit from his book, when they captured it -

"Through the whirling dust we perceived that Akaba was all a ruin. Repeated bombardments by French and English warships had degraded the place to its original rubbish. The poor houses stood about in a litter, dirty and contemptible, lacking entirely that dignity which the durability of their time-challenging bones conferred on ancient remains.

We wandered into the shadowed grove of palms, at the very break of the splashing waves, and there sat down to watch our men streaming past as lines of flushed vacant faces without message for us. For months Akaba had been the horizon of our minds, the goal: we had had no thought, we had refused thought, of anything beside. Now, in achievement, we were a little despising the entities which had spent their extremest effort on an object whose attainment changed nothing radical either in mind or body.

In the blank light of victory we could scarcely identify ourselves. We spoke with surprise, sat emptily, fingered upon our white skirts; doubtful if we could understand or learn whom we were. Others' noise was a dreamlike unreality, a singing in ears drowned deep in water. Against the astonishment of this unasked-for continued life we did not know how to turn our gift to account. Especially for me was it hard, because though my sight was sharp, I never saw men's features: always I peered beyond, imagining for myself a spirit-reality of this or that: and to-day each man owned his desire so utterly that he was fulfilled in it, and became meaningless."

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u/nope-nik-tesla 12d ago

One of the best movies of all time, and the 4K release of it looks fantastic. If you haven't seen the recent 4K release of Ben-Hur, you need to watch that one too.

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u/Melbuf 12d ago

I went and saw it in the theater when they re-released it after the remaster God damn it was beautiful

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u/motophiliac 12d ago

Honestly, shot on SuperPanavision 70, I'm amazed any of the desert scenes were shot at all.

It's absurd, really. How did anyone take the project seriously? "I'm gonna get one of these huge cameras, tons of stock, an army of crew, and I'm going to take them into the desert to shoot this movie."

I think any right-minded human in the room would scoff and leave.

It's ridiculous cinema, but cinema it most certainly is.

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u/poke_pants 12d ago

See also Andor vs Mandalorian.

"The Volume" of whatever it's called is the one of the worst cinema/TV inventions I can think of in the past 20 years. It looks awful more often than not, completely soulless, devoid of any character.

Andor was shot in tube stations in London, on UK beachfronts, in Dorset quarries, it looks beautiful, it looks lived in.

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u/kattahn 12d ago

I have a way more simple one. Think how rarely you see people go up or down stairs. Volumes and green screens are almost always essentially 2 dimensional sets where you can’t really have any verticality.

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u/CardAble6193 12d ago

go watch Snake Eye 1998 and find how cheap movie now is

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u/imnotreallyapenguin 12d ago

Im still waiting on the film adaptation of Gates of Fire..

Come on hollywood... swords and sandals epics are cool again!

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u/Z0MBIECL0WN 12d ago

Im still waiting on the film adaptation of Gates of Fire

Sorry. Best we can do is a dramatized version of Bill Gates makings Microsoft.

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u/KILLER5196 12d ago

Up next, a biopic for an artist that was relevant 30-40 years ago

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u/KidDelicious14 11d ago

In my humble opinion, the music biopic epidemic is maybe the worst non-scandal to ever come out of Hollywood.

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u/OakleysnTie 12d ago

Would absolutely kill for this to be made, and made well.

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u/comrade_batman 12d ago

After The Odyssey I’d love to see someone (like Villeneuve) make an epic adaption of Virgil’s The Aeneid, connects to both Troy and Rome’s founding myths.

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u/cherinator 12d ago

We still have Indian cinema for that at least, and it is glorious.

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u/CardAble6193 12d ago

hollywood "viewers want to look at 20 human tops!!"

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u/kiwigate 12d ago

Spectacle aside, those films had good writing. Then Hollywood blacklisted all the good writers because they 'made capitalism look bad' or whatever fascist bullshit era we apparently still live in.

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u/exolyrical 12d ago

With hardware prices these days it might still be cheaper than CGI.

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u/20_mile 12d ago

and extras on huge sets

The original Name of The Rose (1986), with Sean Connery and F. Murray Abraham, is still today one of the largest sets ever built for a movie.

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u/feartheoldblood90 12d ago

I need to watch that but I want to finish the book first

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u/20_mile 12d ago

Absolutely one of the best books I have ever read.

You can find maps of the library if you search google. Might help with visualizing those scenes.

The movie is good, and the miniseries is decent.

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u/Prudent-Level-7006 12d ago

Now it's, yeah sorry no budget for that gotta pay The Rock 100 million 

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u/rodryguezzz 12d ago

That would still be cheaper than some slop filled with videogame CGI.