I thought The Odyssey was a masterpiece after seeing it projected in a typical theater on 70mm film. But that was nothing compared to IMAX. An opening shot of the Trojan Horse buried on a beach towered above the audience. An aerial view of Odysseus’s cliffside home in Ithaca took my breath away. As the first Hollywood movie shot entirely on IMAX film, it’s worth seeking out your nearest IMAX 70mm theater to see his complete vision.
The key word is immersion. In a typical theater, like the Tara in Atlanta where I saw the film first, The Odyssey is neatly framed within the screen. Unless you sit very close, you’re always aware that you’re in a completely separate space from the narrative. A true IMAX theater isn’t as kind. 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 right alongside Odysseus’s crew trying to hide from the cyclops Polyphemus, or braving the stormy Mediterranean sea.
Depending on where you’re sitting, IMAX may not be an ideal way to see the movie if you always want to see the entire picture. But even from my second-row seat, I could still keep track of the action and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s composition. I find focusing on the smaller details of the image — rather than the shot in its totality — to be very rewarding, and that’s something IMAX lends itself to perfectly. At the Tara theater, I could barely make out Odysseus’s son Telemachus training along the cliff in an opening shot, but he was easily visible in IMAX.
The beefy sound system at the Mall of Georgia’s IMAX built on the immersion of its enormous screen. I could distinguish the clang of specific weapons during massive battle scenes, and composer Ludwig Göransson’s bombastic score felt like it was being pounded into my spine. One gruesome scene involving men being turned into pigs felt particularly visceral in IMAX: I could see what was happening more clearly and hear their bones being contorted in ungodly ways, whether I wanted to or not.
Beyond the spectacle of seeing beautiful locations and people on an enormous screen, the larger scale also makes it clear how much human effort went into this film. People actually built those ships and sailed them on the ocean. Hundreds really gathered to move a full-sized Trojan Horse off of a beach. 2,000 extras were cast to make the siege on Troy look truly epic and believable.
Lugging huge IMAX cameras everywhere isn’t easy. Building practical sets and traveling the world is far harder than shooting in the Volume, the LED backgrounds used in recent Star Wars and Marvel projects. But the results speak for themselves. We haven’t seen a large-scale epic like this in decades (and no, Gladiator II didn’t cut it). The Odyssey is a reminder of how technology can empower human creativity without replacing it.
Sure, it would be easier to tell a similar story with AI, as the completely AI-generated film Odysseus: The Fall does. But that project has all of the hallmarks of slop: Characters that look inhuman and environments that seem to come right out of a video game.
Not surprisingly, Nolan, a man who doesn’t use a smartphone, doesn’t see much of a future for AI. “The interesting thing with AI is I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected,” the director said in a recent interview with the AFP (via The Guardian). He added: “There’s a sort of disdain for things AI… I think the idea that it replaces human beings wholesale and human creativity, to me it’s a nonsense.”
I realize it’s difficult for most people to see The Odyssey in its full 70mm IMAX glory, as we’ve reported. Even if you can get to a genuine IMAX location, and not a smaller “Lie-Max” screen, tickets are likely sold out for weeks. But, like Odysseus’s journey itself, it’s worth the effort to see it in real IMAX.
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