Christopher Nolan’s larger-than-life vision for The Odyssey is ironically restricting people’s enjoyment of it. His obsession with IMAX has undercut one of cinema’s fundamental purposes — making stories accessible to everyone.
Most audiences watching The Odyssey are forced to see a cropped version of the film because there are only around 40 theatres in the world capable of projecting it in its full 15/70mm IMAX format—and eight of them are in California. In India, there isn’t a single theatre that can present the film in its complete format.
Creating a film in a format that most people can never experience as intended is not how an auteur of world cinema should work.
Homer wrote The Odyssey, but the story survived because it was passed down orally for generations before it was documented. The tale of King Odysseus and his warriors became an epic not because it belonged to kings, but because it belonged to everyone. The same story was heard by rulers and common Greeks alike. Literature and art have always erased social divisions by making stories equally available, and that accessibility is precisely why The Odyssey has survived for centuries.
Nolan’s The Odyssey, however, reverses that idea. The film becomes “epic” only for those privileged enough to afford a 15/70mm IMAX screening and lucky enough to live near one of the handful of theatres capable of showing it.
Nolan has long championed analogue filmmaking and the theatrical experience. But when the ideal version of his film can be seen by only a tiny fraction of the audience, who is The Odyssey actually being made for? The experience he has created is exclusive rather than universal.
Also Read: Why some Indians are convinced Nolan’s Odyssey is inspired by Ramayana
Two films in one
Nolan has used IMAX in films such as The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer, but The Odyssey is his first feature shot entirely in the format.
No, he understands the film business better than almost anyone. He knows how few true IMAX screens exist, so it is difficult to believe he was unaware that most audiences would never see the complete frame. When a filmmaker makes a complicated narrative, cinephiles celebrate it as a masterpiece because everyone still watches the same film. Here, however, audiences are not even watching the same image.
Watching The Odyssey in most theatres means watching a compromised version of the film. It is comparable to seeing a lower-quality copy from the internet, not because of picture quality, but because a significant part of the composition is missing. During the Trojan Horse sequence, much of the vertical frame disappears. In images from the 15/70mm presentation, the sky dominates the composition. Audiences elsewhere see a cropped image. They are literally watching different films.
A viewer unfamiliar with IMAX or aspect ratios may simply assume Nolan has framed the scene awkwardly, cutting off bodies and parts of the composition.
With his favourite toy, IMAX, Nolan has created a cinematic hierarchy in which the complete visual experience is reserved for a handful of theatres and regions. Perhaps The Odyssey should not be released in theatres around the world at all. It should play only in compatible venues and stay on the festival circuit for rarified audiences.
The Odyssey as a story will continue to transcend geography, class and generations. The same cannot be said of this cinematic adaptation, with a division built into every frame.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)