It looks like it has some good ideas and is going to be more in-depth on the actual Odyssey itself than most takes, but I must admit to personally being rather vexed by two issues.
1) Casting - this is a "me" issue, I get it, but I am not hugely enthused by a lot of these casting choices, and particularly Tom Holland as Telemachus, who it's important seem well, young. I guess twink death catches up with us all eventually, no matter how boyish, and it caught up with ol' Tom. But maybe that'll all be fine. At least Nolan can very reliably get good performances out of people, unlike a lot of modern "big money" directors! Some of those performances might be eccentric (c.f. Bane) but at least they'll be something!
2) Costumes, particularly armour - I mean, what?! Okay, I don't need to have them authentic bronze age armour or clothes or makeup. That's not important (though it would look fantastic, as Total War: Troy illustrates). You could just have everyone in classical Greek armour, or really stylize things like other Trojan War-centric adaptations have. That's fine. But this is just weird and ugly and oddly cheap-looking. The Greeks seem to be largely dressed in very dark leather, which looks both modern and as noted, weirdly cheap and unfinished, honestly like something from Xena if Xena was given an "edgy remake" by Netflix in 2016 but remained equally low-budget. And the only other armour we get a really good look at is plastic-y looking steel-coloured plate? Like what? I mean, why not just at least colour it bronze? Because again, it looks awful, cheap and weird. It's not evocative or cool, it just looks like they didn't finish the costumes. We see that on 8ft tall guys who I guess maybe are the usually-edited-out Laestrygonians, who in the original story are primitive man-eating giants but different to the primitive man eating giants who are the cylopses. As the latter are a lot more interesting and defeated in a more iconic and interesting way, the former tend to get cut. I don't mind changing them from primitive to advanced, or from giants to just "really tall guys" (even though the main cyclops is still an actual giant), those kind of make sense, but why steel plate? And why have it look awful?
I was wondering with early trailers if the armour stuff was all going to be "fixed in post", because that's happened with a lot of superhero movies, including Nolan's own Batmans, where some early trailers had armour/constumes that looked pretty dodgy, but in the real movie they looked fine. However, given they've looked the same for a pretty long time now I'm kind of concerned that maybe Nolan somehow thinks that looks fine? There's still time, albeit just barely given the mid-July release date. We've seen trailers for Marvel movies with bad/unfinished-looking stuff be finished in time for release 2 months later (I think one time though they didn't finish SFX for cinema release, but did for Disney+ lol, but that was mid-pandemic). Weirdly the one thing that gives me some hope is how bad the SFX are on chopping the head off the statue. That's amatuerishly bad, and I don't buy that Nolan would let that in to a final film, so maybe these images are from like, eight months ago or something in terms of finished-ness?
So I'm keen to see what he does with it, I just worry particularly about the costumes. If they look as bad as they do here, I'm not going be able to stay immersed because my brain will continually be going "What the heck?!" (and it was fine with stuff like the Brad Pitt Troy, which is very stylized).
