Unpopular Opinion? Nolan should have done the Siege of Troy, and Denis Villeneuve should have directed The Odyssey

Just watched Nolan’s The Odyssey last night and left the theater with pretty mixed feelings. Don't get me wrong—it’s far from a bad movie, but I was expecting something more visually groundbreaking. Instead of a major visual or narrative leap, it felt like Nolan just applied his standard template to ancient Greece.
A few thoughts on why it didn't fully land for me, and why I think the directors were swapped:

1. Nolan’s style limits the mythic scale
Nolan’s commitment to practical effects works wonders for grounded thrillers, but here it felt like it stripped away the awe. Scaling down elements like the Laestrygonians into tall, imposing humanoid warriors made sense for practical set pieces (the boulder destruction was visceral), but it lacked a true sense of ancient wonder. The non-linear cross-cutting between Telemachus on Ithaca and Odysseus on Calypso's island also felt like a forced attempts to inject his signature timeline jumps into a story that didn't really need them.

2. Nolan was made for the Trojan War (The Iliad)
If Nolan wanted to tackle Homer, he should have adapted the actual Siege of Troy. Nolan excels at high-stakes military logistics, close-quarters infantry chaos, physical engineering, and relentless tension (Dunkirk proved this). The grounded, brutal reality of bronze-age warfare, the beachhead landings, and the tactical deception of the Trojan Horse fit his exact toolkit without needing fantasy elements to carry the weight.

3. Denis Villeneuve was born to direct The Odyssey
The Odyssey needed an auteur who thrives on atmospheric, brutalist scale and treating the unknown like an alien force. Villeneuve’s work on Dune and Arrival proves he knows how to make landscapes feel oppressive and massive.

- Where Nolan rushes through pacing and continuous motion, Villeneuve lets frame depth and silence build awe.
- He would have made the Mediterranean feel genuinely terrifying, alien, and isolated.
- Creatures like Polyphemus or the island of the Lotus-Eaters/Calypso would have felt like unsettling, colossal forces of nature rather than practical stunt/animatronic sequences.

The story of a lone, weary soldier trying to find his way home through an ancient, monumental world needed Villeneuve's sense of scale and atmosphere. Nolan gave us a solid survival thriller, but it missed the visual majesty the epic deserved.
Curious if anyone else felt the same after watching it, or if his grounded approach worked better for you?