After seeing Christopher Nolan The Odyssey for the first time early last week, I came away impressed, but somewhat conflicted by two excellent pieces of film. While those scenes were well-constructed and wonderfully acted, there was something a little off about the way they caught my eye. I spent days wondering what, exactly, wasn’t working for me during the first theatrical viewing, and I thought it might just have been splitting hairs. But it wasn’t until I saw the film again over the weekend — this time in IMAX — that the issue became clear.
Although I had heard all the talk about it The Odyssey being the first feature shot entirely with 70mm IMAX film cameras, I thought much of it was a clever effort intended to entice Nolan’s cinephile fans. I hadn’t thought about how watching a movie in a larger format can make you look dramatically different. But The Odyssey It’s definitely a movie that needs to be seen in IMAX if you want to get a true sense of the story Nolan is telling.
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers The Odyssey (which, to be fair, is based on Homer’s famous poem that is nearly 3,000 years old).
There are many scenes throughout The Odyssey which look best when the film is shown in 35mm format. Amazingly, the wide shots of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men at sea make you appreciate the expanse of the Mediterranean, and you can hear the tension of the soldiers as they hide inside the Trojan horse. Even though you can see that the film has been cut, Odysseus’s fateful encounter with the Laestrygonians gives you a sense of how big they are compared to the wandering Ithacans. But The OdysseyScenes involving some of the story’s more exotic monsters take on a different gravitas when shown in IMAX because of the vast amount of visual information that can be captured.
When I saw The Odyssey in 35mm – projected in widescreen, 2.39:1 aspect ratio – I knew Cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) was more than the people who marched into his cave looking for food. But when I saw the standard IMAX screening of the film — whose 1.90:1 aspect ratio is smaller than 70mm’s 1.43:1 ratio — I had a clearer understanding of the creature’s stature and the subtle nuances baked into Irwin’s bodywork. Because the IMAX screening showed a very long shot, I was able to spend a lot of time taking in details that were easy to miss the first time around, like the way Polyphemus has to hunt to keep his head from hitting the cave ceiling.
The big difference between the two screens became very apparent when I saw the Cyclops chasing Odysseus and his men down the mountain for the second time. At 70mm, you can see the upper body of this monster as it slashes through the trees in just the right amount of rage, bringing an added sense of danger and urgency to the scene. I had the same experience when I saw soldiers rowing past a whirlpool unaware that they were drifting towards the sea monster Scylla. The 35mm test shows you that Scylla is a funny person, but the real estate of the IMAX test makes it easy to understand how she manages to snatch her victims before any of them realize she is hiding on the cliffs above them.
By shooting The Odyssey shot entirely in 70mm, Nolan has made a film whose size and visual detail can make it feel immersive in ways that many contemporary features don’t. But he also chose a format that made it difficult for most theatergoers to see the film in its most dramatic form. Because there are only about 40 theaters around the world (25 in the US) that can show 70mm IMAX films, most people probably won’t get a chance to catch them. The Odyssey as Nolan intended. This and the fact that regular IMAX screenings are more expensive than regular movies have caused some to accuse the director of being against art and contributing to a culture of obsessive format purism.
One could also argue that Nolan uses The Odyssey to show IMAX and theater owners that there is a real public demand for films shot in 70mm. The current shortage of 70mm screenings of The Odyssey it’s because IMAX couldn’t produce new projectors. Talking to VarietyIMAX CEO Richard Gelfond explained that the company is very focused on refurbishing old projectors, but there aren’t many movie theaters willing to take on the construction costs that would be needed to build the 1.43:1 screens needed to show 70mm films. If IMAX and the various theater chains were willing to pony up the cash to upgrade the projector unit and expand the space, 70mm screenings could become more common. But for now, the industry seems comfortable using the lack of format as an effective marketing tool.
That marketing strategy worked The Odyssey – the most anticipated project from one of the most respected filmmakers in the world. But Nolan’s star power clearly has a lot about the film’s box office success. There aren’t that many other directors that can make people travel across the country to see one of their features. It also helps that the movie is definitely worth seeing, especially in IMAX.
