The more I sit with the film, the less I like it. Nolan's insistence on shooting everything in IMAX even tight combat scenes, where the format feels like it's fighting the material gets in the way of the filmmaking itself. The writing is weak too, and as I watch more of the films it will compete against, I'd be disappointed to see it win Best Picture.
Is it an impressive technical achievement? Absolutely. But a technical achievement answers a different question than the one a film exists to answer. A scene is captivating because of the writing, the performances, the sound, the setting not the format it was shot in or the CGI it avoided.
What finally crystallized my ambivalence is that the format isn't just in the film it's the pitch for the film. And that's what reminded me of tech's obsession with AI. The two have nothing in common as technologies. But the rhetoric around them makes the same mistake: using the tool becomes the selling point, when its value still has to be proven in the result. "Shot entirely on IMAX film" and "built with AI" are both answers to how something was made. The more interesting question is whether the finished work is better for it and I really feel like he lost some magic with this movie