There was anachronistic armor, sure, but Homer's interpretation of the bronze age, and classical interpretation of the past in general, were full of anachronism left, right, and center. Making it all bronze age accurate would be a far greater slight to the source material than what they did.
I'm glad to see someone note this. Reddit coverage of the movie has been saturated with self-satisfied nerd-ragers making sure everyone else knows they know a thing (the Dendra panoply and boar tusk helmets, but also that the statues would be painted instead of bare white marble, etc.). It's apparently yelling-fire-to-order-troops-to-shoot-their-bows level of triggering for some. Which would be fine, of course--everyone has their own lines. It just seems 1) like people decided ahead of time that they weren't going to like the thing and went out looking for things to be upset about it, and 2) a bandwagon/sharks smelling blood in the water. I haven't had much faith in recent movies by any existing name big-budget directors, so I already lean towards the likelihood that this won't be great. However, it really feels like it has acquired a hate-dom well ahead of us knowing anything about it.
No, not all of his fans are bros by any means, but there's a large number of men whose identity is wrapped up, in part, in being big fans of "cinema," which turns out to be The Godfather, Scarface, Fight Club and anything Christopher Nolan does. If you look for online discussion of his works, it's often drenched in testosterone.
Nolan (and Snyder, to name another example) seem to have developed fandoms that other people who like their movies feel compelled to make clear they aren't part of ('sure, I'm a Nolan fan, but not one of
those Nolan fans'). As you point out, it does seem to be associated with the... association of his work with the man-o-sphere (and perhaps legitimization thereof?). Interesting then that Ridley Scott (who directed an actual movie about gladiators) doesn't fall into the same category.
I it’s not so much the armour being anachronistic, my issue is it’s bog-standard Hollywood-Greek. It’s fine, but I would have liked to see something a bit more original from such a big name director.
But then del Toro’s Frankenstein was also an on the nose obvious interpretation. Maybe obvious is the new originality?
I think big name directors doing the unobvious (particularly in big budget movies) has, overall, been kind of the outlier we maybe got overused to for a while. Nolan himself being part of that trend -- hot off the accolades for
The Prestige he went with a brain-bender like
Inception. That's a real example of big name director going for originality. But I think a much more overall prevalent model is something like 90s Spielberg going to
Jurassic Park -- a masterpiece of filmmaking, but literally one of the first things your 5 year old who just discovered that movies have to get made would suggest doing once the technology was possible. Same with earlier eras and directors like Mankiewicz and movies like
Cleopatra.
As for del Toro's
Frankenstein, I think that it's an opposite* of originality, it's something he'd been wanting to be able to do his whole life. I can totally see 17 year old high school del Toro** doing a senior thesis on how Frankenstein is the real monster (heck, a proverbial third of future lit majors and film students I know seem to have had that as at least a term paper, or otherwise are intensely familiar with the story like it was a formative work). That it took until 2025 and someone like del Toro to say, 'as much as I love the Boris Karloff interpretation, do you think we could try to hew a little closer*** to the book for this one?' is a testament to the influence the Karloff version had (or more likely that we're forgetting the many times it has been tried in the past, just not as big budget event films).
*maybe not polar opposite, but on the other side of the compass.
**I know nothing about 1980s Mexican high school, this is interpretation.
***it's worth mentioning that in the book itself, both doctor and creature are absolute monsters.
I think we're in a weird spot for cinema, a handful of years since the pandemic disrupted movie-going habits (and streaming moved a tick or two down the line on its journey from hot new thing to ubiquitous market-shaper). No one knows what's going to sell, and people are randomly jumping back and forth between safe, conservative bets and wild ambitious projects. It'll be interesting to see how things go.
