I thought The Odyssey it was a masterpiece after seeing it done in a regular theater on 70mm film. But that was nothing compared to IMAX. The opening shot is of the Trojan Horse buried on the beach above the audience. The aerial view of Odysseus’ hillside home in Ithaca took my breath away. As the first Hollywood film shot entirely on IMAX film, it’s worth seeking out the nearest IMAX 70mm theater to see his vision in full.
The main word is immersion. In a regular theater, like the Tara in Atlanta where I first saw the film, The Odyssey it’s built right into the screen. Unless you live very close, you always know that you are in a completely different space in the story. A true IMAX theater has no such genre. At the Regal Mall of Georgia, the screen stands 60 feet tall and 81.5 feet wide. The screen fills your entire field of view. You can’t help but feel like you’re next to the crew of Odysseus trying to hide from the cyclops Polyphemus, or attacking the stormy seas of the Mediterranean.
Depending on where you sit, IMAX may not be the best way to see a movie if you always want to see the whole picture. But even sitting in my second row seat, I was able to keep track of the action and the composition of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. I find focusing on the small details of an image – rather than the whole shot – very rewarding, and that’s something IMAX lends itself well to. In the Tara theater, I couldn’t make out Odysseus’ son Telemachus training near the cliff in the gun opening, but he was easily visible in IMAX.
The beefy sound system at Mall of Georgia’s IMAX built into the immersion of its big screen. I could make out the sound of certain weapons during massive battlefields, and composer Ludwig Göransson’s stunning score felt like it was being driven up my spine. One gruesome scene involving men being turned into pigs felt great in IMAX: I could clearly see what was happening and hear their bones being tossed around in ungodly ways, whether I wanted to or not.
Besides the spectacle of seeing beautiful places and people on the big screen, the large scale makes it clear how much human effort went into this film. Indeed, people built those ships and took them to sea. Hundreds actually came together to remove a full-sized Trojan Horse from the beach. 2,000 extras were added to make the siege of Troy look truly epic and believable.
Carrying large IMAX cameras everywhere is not easy. Building active sets and moving around the world is more difficult than shooting on Volume, the LED backdrop used in recent Star Wars and Marvel projects. But the results speak for themselves. We haven’t seen a big episode like this in decades (and no, Gladiator II he didn’t cut it). The Odyssey it’s a reminder of how technology can empower human creativity without replacing it.
Of course, it would be easy to tell the same story with AI, like a film produced entirely by AI Odysseus: The Fall it does. But that project has all the hallmarks of slop: Inhuman-looking characters and situations that seem straight out of a video game.
No wonder Nolan, a man who doesn’t use a smartphone, doesn’t see the future of AI. “The interesting thing about AI is that I have never seen a technology that has been successfully embraced by Wall Street and investors and technology companies that has been completely rejected by the public,” the director said in a recent interview with AFP. The guard). He added: “There’s a kind of disdain for AI stuff… I think the idea that it’s replacing wholesale and human creativity, to me is nonsense.”
I realize that it is difficult for many people to see The Odyssey in its full 70mm IMAX glory, as we reported. Even if you can get to the real IMAX venue, and not the small “Lie-Max” screen, tickets are almost sold out for weeks. But, like Odysseus’s journey itself, it’s worth the effort to see it in real IMAX.
