I guess this is going to be a series now.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has two different discourses surrounding it: the very-dumb one about Woke, and then the also-still-kinda-dumb one about the fact that it is the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX70mm film, yet only 41 theaters in the world are able to project it that way. When tickets actually went on sale, the AMC app basically went down nationwide because people were trying to get tickets to one of the four AMC theaters on that list: I felt bad for literally every other movie (and moviegoer) out there.

Hell: As I write this, an additional week of screenings just posted and they are already gone: the only available seats at 10AM and 10PM weekday shows alike are the wheelchair seats, which aren’t seats at all but also aren’t going to be filled by people in wheelchairs but people who bring in their own foldable chairs because nothing else is available.

I was lucky enough to get physical tickets during that initial run, but damn dude it was a whole thing. So sure, it makes sense that people find it all kinda irritating — that there is a website where you can watch the trailer in all of the different formats/aspect ratios — because for the vast, vast majority of them, there is actually only one option: the standard 2.39:1 DCP that shows essentially half of the “full” image at any given moment… but obviously Christopher Nolan and co. like that version. It’s the format you see on the YouTube trailers!

Shooting on IMAX film is not merely a gimmick: there is a level of clarity to the image that is truly unrivaled by any other method of motion picture capture. You can see it in every other feature with IMAX footage — how dramatically the fidelity degrades when the filmstock switches. And that clarity comes through no matter the size of your screen.

But projecting 4:3 might be a gimmick… sometimes. Like, The Odyssey is framed for that 2:39:1 release… and mostly the stuff that's going to be in that frame is in the middle of the screen, so when you've got a shot of someone talking? Man that's a whole lot of sky you're seeing.

And for as much as it can add to a moment like that, it also distracts from what what you're supposed to be looking at. There's so much there there, but there isn't always very much there in the there, ya know?

Not to say there's nothing, like, there. This is The Odyssey, after all: the epic tale of a king who left his castle (and his wife and child) and then did the Trojan Horse and then he journeyed trying to get home, and we see pieces of that journey in flashback while also seeing what has become of his home and wife and child, who all desperately want him back. And given Nolan’s obsession with powerful men dealing with the consequences, how could he better follow the American Prometheus than with the absolute OG?

The problem, of course, with telling the epic in a film is that 173 minutes is not a very long time. And you feel that most acutely in the transitions between scenes, which are almost whiplash-inducing at times. Nolan has cut this to the very bone, and I won't pretend like I didn't wish it was longer. I would have gladly sat through another hour or more. I don't even need more action: the man who directed Oppenheimer has proven that he is capable of directing conversations that have all the propulsion of a chase through the woods, and an extra hour or three to dig into this quite-large cast of characters would have been welcome.

But it's hardly a requirement. This is spectacle after all, first and foremost. And I'll admit that people sitting around chatting isn't really spectacle… which is presumably why virtually every conversation is interrupted by shots of some other, more intense thing that usually happened years prior.

Though those intense things are, at least for a while, pretty unserious. The selling points — the cyclops (seen in the trailer) and the Big Boys (shown on the posters) — were basically amusement park rides that I had fun watching but could really see the construction on. Like, the cyclops eye looking like a human eye turned 90-degrees so it's asymmetrical makes the whole thing feel faker rather than more real.

(Nolan should have used a digital nuke in Oppenheimer… or blown up a real one ♥️)

It’s all made somewhat more distracting thanks to the PG-13-ass violence in what I only realized in the final 45 minutes was actually an R-rated movie. When Matt Damon says “fuck” early on, I was like “Lol that’s a funny time to use a PG-13 movie’s one instance of that word,” and for the next two hours I didn’t think about it until a guy says “fuck” twice in a row and I thought “Wait is this movie rated R? Why does it look like this if it’s rated R? Why would you depict the destruction of Troy with at most a thimble’s worth of blood if it’s rated R?”

This isn’t just my own bloodthirst! Odysseus is haunted by the things that he has seen and done, but the “things he’s seen and done” are child’s play. This is a problem with Oppenheimer as well, and I had arguments with people at the time about whether Nolan should have shown some kind of aftermath other than that quick vision of stepping into a charred corpse. In both case, this Thing is so overwhelming to the character, but the audience doesn’t really get to experience it alongside them.

And that creates a disconnect, because he is clearly reacting a horror that we are being shown as weirdly sanitized. It is not clear why a soldier would have those reactions to this kind of violence. Honestly, The Dark Knight is more shocking than The Odyssey is. If it's gonna be R, make it R.

Still, the arrival of Circe marked a turning point for me. Perhaps because her own bit of spectacle happens in an extreme close-up that finally gave us something to look at on every part of the enormous screen, though perhaps because it’s the first time there’s really like character behind that spectacle… but either way, once it happened I locked in and never checked out. I continued to think about the IMAX of it all, and about what sort of technique they may have used to do this or that effect, but it was all in appreciation for the magnitude of this achievement.

And it is absolutely an achievement, and for those of us who got (and get) to see it projected the way it was captured, it is a cinematic experience unlike any we've ever had. This is going to be an experience we all remember, a high we're going to chase with every blockbuster maybe for the rest of our lives.

Movies are the best.