-You probably won’t like it much, no. Its visual style is very spare for the most part, but not as, to use your word “desiccated” as Villenueve’s Dune. I didn’t find it that interesting visually.

-The movie almost disappointed me by cutting out the sack of Troy. After the gates are open someone (John Leguizamo I think) says “you know the rest” or something like that, but we get the real sack later, which I admit is better than the 2004 Troy sacking, but it’s because it’s less hammy. Visually, it looks almost exactly the same as that 2004 film. The music does this charging-Shepard tone thing that I like during the sack. I still miss the shot of smoke rising out of the burnt city from the cheesy 1997 miniseries!!! There’s a shot of some gray smoking ruins the next morning but it’s nothing great.

-The Circe scene is mostly dumb, probably the low point as far as I know in any Nolan film (save maybe for all the weak writing in The Dark Knight Rises, or Topher Grace getting punched out by Casey Affleck in Interstellar.) It starts with Circe encountering Odysseus’ men and screaming in terror at which one of them confronts her and yells (I am not making this up) “Okay! Okay! We’re not gonna hurt you!” or something like that. Just took me out of the film something horrible and I didn’t mind any other inaccuracies or anachronisms–Internet trolls can scream about Eliot Page or Lupita N’yongo (who between them have about seven minutes of screen time anyway)–but I have yet to hear a single one of them complaining about this. It’s sort of cool when Circe begins grabbing the men’s heads to turn them into pigs but you have to hear them slurping and slopping away at their food in a really stupid manner and when the scene ends and they’re not pigs anymore, they all just file out of the place like nothing happened. DUMB DUMB!!!!!

-The Scylla/Charybdis scene was almost a fuckup too–Matt Damon mentions what Charybdis is, then suddenly it’s right there on screen a second later, then we go into the strait and the tension works because we know what Scylla looks like, but Scylla ends up looking like some hasty CGI turd-textured sock puppets and disappears back into the rock after about ten seconds. Was expecting a bit more for a film that cost $250 million.
BTW, the Scylla scene in the 1997 film is ASTONISHINGLY gory for a TV movie that aired on NBC…big splashy buckets of blood all over the place!

-Zendaya needs a second facial expression and fast.

-The confrontation at the end with the suitors probably goes on a a bit too long. I didn’t mind Robert Pattinson (I don’t think he’s a bad actor at all actually, but I never watched Twilight) but it goes on a bit too long. So does the movie in general. I’m really losing my patience for 2 hour 45 minute movies.

-I think I’d rank this like seventh or eighth on the Nolan list. It was okay but unlike Oppenheimer I don’t think it’d make a very appropriate Best Picture winner if that’s what’s going to happen again.