5 aliens in a trench coat

It takes a certain type of person to like the style of decor in this 1925 home in Brooklyn, NY. TBH, I've only seen this look in the NY/NJ New York Metropolitan area. There must be dedicated stores. Anyway, I don't like it, but it's unusual. This house has 3bds, 5ba, 1,584sqft, $1,685m (Zillow must like it- their est.: $1,733,300)

...it was, and I say this most begrudgingly, good.

Listen, I went into this determined to be a hater. I think Christopher Nolan is a massively overrated director. I have disliked most of his movies, and the only two up till now that avoided my antipathy are The Prestige, which I'm just ambivalent towards, and The Dark Knight, a movie I admittedly loved when it first came out but which I have grown to like less and less with every subsequent revisit, to the point where now I admit I just like Heath Ledger's performance in that movie and not much else.

I especially hate Nolan's grounded approach to fantastical stories. His movies always seem deathly scared of straying from reality, and play off that neurotic terror as a "bold artistic choice" that "elevates" the source material. He makes fantasy and sci-fi that's afraid to be fantasy and sci-fi, and I find that repellent in its artistic cowardice.

And while this movie did not prove me wrong in that assessment at all, I will admit, in this case, the choices Nolan made worked for the version of the story he's telling. I do not slam O, Brother, Where Art Thou? for toning down the fantastical elements of the myth to a more grounded magical realism that wraps around the character study it's going for, because that character study is good and the fantastical elements that remain in it are effective the way they are used. And, in this case, I reluctantly admit that the same works for how Nolan handles the fantastical in his version of The Odyssey, because, like the Coen's, he is making this less about the journey and more about the man on it.

I can make a thousand quibbles about how it handled the monsters, the gods, the magic, even and especially key character beats in the poem (No "My name is Nobody?" No olive tree wedding bed gambit? Heresy!), but looking at this as its own story, its own take, I have to ask myself whether what's presented tells a coherent and effective story on its own merits. Does the emotional core of this story hold? Does it have a strong connecting theme? Do all the elements support the exploration of the theme and the power of the emotional core?

Does it earn the Creech the Truck Monster from Monster Trucks Seal of Cinematic Adequacy?

And yeah, reluctantly, begrudgingly, I must admit that it does. Every choice and change here works for the story it is telling. It is emotionally and thematically solid. Nothing is incongruent, everything is satisfying, it succeeds at being what it's trying to be, and what it's trying to be is a story that is interesting, a story that is based on The Odyssey but told in the voice of a very different man from a very different time than Homer, and that's all it needed to be.