Forget everything you read online before this dropped. The controversies were pretty silly once the lights came up — minuscule stuff that people cried rivers over, and after actually watching the film, it’s honestly insane how loud that noise got. That’s all I’ll say on it.

If you’ve watched Nolan work for the last two decades, you walked in with high expectations unless you’re part of the rare few who just don’t like the guy. I blocked out the backlash and went in expecting greatness. I got it, and in places I got more than that. My one real gripe is pacing — you can feel how much got left on the cutting room floor to make this fit under three hours. That’s not a guess, either: Nolan’s IMAX 70mm prints physically top out around the 165-minute mark, and he’s said the only way past that limit was “an entire rebuild of the projection system,” so he decided to stay under three hours after shooting roughly two million feet of IMAX film. This thing could’ve been a four-hour movie. I wanted the four-hour movie.

Performances: A

Nolan’s going to have the story locked in and the cast delivering. That’s the floor with him. Matt Damon is great as Odysseus. Anne Hathaway as Penelope is excellent — genuinely emotional, you feel her pain the whole runtime. Tom Holland plays a fantastic Telemachus; some choices for the character frustrated me, but there’s nothing wrong with the performance itself.

Then there’s Robert Pattinson as Antinous. Probably my favorite thing in the whole film. Biggest gut-punch of any performance here.

It’s hard for me to hate Pattinson. He’s my Batman. But I hated him.

That’s the job. Pattinson plays Antinous, the main antagonist among Penelope’s suitors, leading the group trying to convince Penelope to marry him while plotting to kill her son, Telemachus. He could be one of the best actors of our generation right now. And John Leguizamo was in this way more than I expected — fantastic every time he’s on screen.

Action: A

I’ve been critical of Nolan’s action before. It’s never been the priority for him. This is his most action-packed film to date, and it’s not close. After the first 20 minutes I was locked to the edge of my seat for the rest of it. What makes it work is the balance — the film keeps cutting back to Ithaca, where everything’s grounded and emotionally driven, so the spectacle never gets numbing.

The Score: A+

Soundtracks are the glue for me. They’re what turns a good scene into one you feel. Ludwig Göransson has not missed yet, and this might be his best case for being the next Hans Zimmer — except he did this one without an orchestra at all. Nolan instructed Göransson not to use an orchestra in the score. Instead he built the whole thing out of period-inappropriate-sounding-but-somehow-perfect tools: 35 bronze gongs of different sizes, chosen to reflect the film’s Bronze Age setting, layered with synthesizers, plus actual ancient Greek instruments. Absolutely glorious. Something truly unique and epic, and I loved every second of it.

Visuals A+

Almost every Nolan film leaves you dreaming about the images for days. Nothing new there. What’s different this time is that a 3,000-year-old fantasy actually felt real — the environments, the costumes, the creatures, the horror sequences. Practical effects pushed to the extreme, and on top of that, this is the first film in history shot entirely with IMAX cameras, a genuine technical first that had never been done before on a full feature and came with real production hurdles the crew had to engineer their way around. That’s what pushes this from impressive-for-Nolan to just impressive, period.

People gave me grief for my out-of-theater reaction because I said “overwhelmed” instead of a clean good-or-bad. But this film is genuinely in its own category. It’s obviously great — immediately after, I was just overwhelmed by the spectacle in the best possible way. This is a raw, three-hour cinematic journey where you actually feel like part of the world it built. Pacing’s got some issues, sure. But this is another Nolan triumph.

Master performances. Master visuals. Master soundtrack. Master filmmaking.

9/10. Score’s open to change on a second watch, but right now this is one of the best things Nolan’s ever made — and the online noise around it should’ve never been louder than what’s actually on screen.