primer on ocean waves so i can explain to you and you can explain to others how nolan's odyssey was visually and technically underwhelming.
there are 2 main types of waves. wind waves and swell. wind waves (called chop when the period is short) are caused by present wind kicking up the surface of the water. this is where you see little whitecaps and generally pointy, uneven waves. swell is caused by powerful sustained wind whose waves have traveled a long way and developed into consistent self-perpetuating wave forms, and looks like long smooth waves; the energy is coming from the sea itself. swell is the thing that makes you feel like the entire ocean is heaving & is what throws ships around. the sea state is usually described as a combination of swell (the ground movement of the sea) and chop (the movement of the surface) so you might say we have a 4 foot swell (measured from the trough at the bottom to the crest at the top of a large heap of water) plus 2 foot chop (smaller waves closer together on top of the swell). swell is the hardest to get in photo or video in a way that shows its true size, especially if you're shooting on your phone for an instagram story from the bridge of a ship, but if you were say making a 70mm film adaptation of a story where the main character is being tortured by the ocean itself you would probably want to figure that out. because you generally need swell in order to get any kind of impressive motion going on*
*EXCEPT in storms, when the winds are so strong that the wind waves themselves "heap up" and can become mountainous without a preexisting ground swell (when the waves escape the storm or the storm ends these waves will sort themselves out and continue as swell). wind waves obviously behave differently and have different features in higher winds. the beaufort scale is the tool used internationally by mariners and meteorologists to determine wind speed in unprotected waters and describes the features of gale-force, storm-force, hurricane-force winds.
so for example when i'm driving a small work boat at my job, if i notice long streaks of foam starting to run down the backs of the waves, that's my cue to call in and consider ending operations for the day, because on paper my operational limit is sustained 30 knot winds (in that anything higher increases my level of risk). you can see how things get more impressive the higher the winds get, and based on this you can imagine the kind of things we'd expect odysseus to encounter. spindrift is when the wind is so strong that it breaks the surface tension of the water without interacting with any object and all the crests look like they're steaming, it's super cool to see. here's a really good video of the waves caused by "violent storm" winds so you can get a sense of what it might look like if the ocean was mad at you. we want mountainous waves blocking out the horizon.
here's a shot of a "storm" from the odyssey trailer.
so check the scale. this is literally described as a Gentle Breeze. like a Moderate Breeze if we're being generous. what else can you say. this is 2 seconds after a guy gets swept overboard by a wave. obviously the trailer doesn't represent the entire movie but i watched the whole three hours of that and i would say that the bigger seas occasionally got up to 3 foot swell with 2 foot chop, but usually just a 1-4ft chop on flat ocean. it's possible that it got up to force 6 but definitely not above that and im not sure it got that high, i mostly just remember confused seas with a lot of quick, smooth chop (this kind of behavior doesn't affect boats at all). occasionally it looked like they would try to use a powerboat wake to simulate swell but they shot way too close to the origin (and you can't get big swell that way) and just ended up with more sharp, confused-looking waves
as for the on-deck shots, the behavior of the ship and the conditions on deck were obviously totally inconsistent with the environment, but also comically inaccurate even for the conditions they were pretending to be in? so like first of all the ship was almost always rolling side to side, which IS the scariest and most dangerous type of motion especially in a boat shaped like that, but if you're in a storm you should be turning your boat to point into the waves so that you're pitching fore and aft instead of killing everyone on board. we should be seeing the prow dive into the front of a wave and have green water flood the front of the ship and then see nothing but sky a second later. in a ton of these "matt damon is wet and getting splashed with white water" scenes you can see the flat sea in the background and they often stop trying to make it look like the ship is moving at all from one shot to the next. the spray they throw at the crew is imo not enough to snatch someone off a deck like that, and it all looks like white water that comes from waves hitting the side of a boat and splashing up, but in a lot of cases the direction it comes from makes no physical sense. maybe that's poseidon idk. what you should see instead in this kind of situation is a whole wave breaking OVER the side of the boat and basically a solid wall of water sweeping people away, but you need big waves for that.
this is stuff that directors of maritime films work hard to perfect. even major directors like ridley scott (white squall), peter weir (master and commander), baltasar kormĂĄkur (adrift -- similar size ship to the odyssey btw), ang lee (life of pi) have developed and used strategies for showing us waves and storms that are exciting and impressive and scary. it IS understood to be an essential element of competence in this kind of film. of all these The Odyssey should be the most epic. it's The Odyssey. all maritime literature is descended from The Odyssey. but christopher nolan didn't seem interested in spending more than $100 of his thousand morbillion dollar budget on the main antagonist of the story.
there are a thousand adaptational and baseline writing decisions in the film that make it awful by any measure but people like to handwave all that on the basis that it's "visually impressive" and "exciting" But it's not that. this is the most obvious way that the DIRECTION of the film fails at one of its essential tasks. it's supposed to be a seafaring adventure but it's not because the sea is boring. there is no credit due for anything nolan did here. He showed you a gentle breeze.
