Realising his dream of shooting an entire film on 70mm IMAX stock, Christopher Nolan adapts Homer’s ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, a vast mythological epic and one of the foundational works of Western literature. We haven’t seen it in full IMAX but IMAX Digital, the pretender to the IMAX name that nonetheless offers the best screen in Birmingham, which for three hours immerses us in the story of a war hero’s attempt to return home and handle his past.
Other than the film’s tempo and structure, which tell the story swiftly and non-chronologically, but without ever losing us, we don’t agree on much. For José, it’s beautiful to look at; for Mike, the visual pleasures are few and far between. José likes the performances across the board; Mike expresses serious reservations about some of them. We also discuss the disappointment of the final action scene, the extent to which the film treats the Greek gods as real, Zeus’ law and how well the film represents ancient Greek culture and ways of thinking, and whether its explicit contextualisation of the story as a metaphor for PTSD is earned.
My first impressions after seeing THE ODYSSEY for the second time, the first in IMAX 70mm, is that it’s more richly a film about morality for immoral times. The 1.43 IMAX 70mm ratio and the huge screen make it a more intimate epic. One is immersed in these faces, often shot in two-shot, medium close-up, close-up. It’s amazing to see the preponderance of these shots in an epic. One is instantly immersed in these thinking, feeling beings. Focus pull doesn’t seem easy in this format and often the frame goes in and out of focus when in movement, which adds to the lack of clarity in the character’s understanding. There is a lot of shooting through screens, particularly in the scenes with Penelope, which have a similar effect. Mike was telling me the other day that in an interview with cinematographer with Hoyte van Hoytema, he discusses the compositional restrictions of the format, how everything important has to be shown in the centre of the frame, and this viewing experience confirms it. The screen is so huge, and one is so immersed, everything important happens at the centre of the frame. Of course this the begs the question of the experience in digital widescreen IMAX and whether that’s a diminished experience, and if so how.
In this viewing I particularly appreciated Travis Scott as The Bard in the opening; the calm, elegant strength of his bearing and the way he says the opening lines:’ “A face… a fleet… a war… a man… a thought… a trick… a trick to break the walls of Troy… and burn it screaming to the ground!”, and which reinforces my disagreement with those accusing the film of being tokenistic with people of colour (including Wilson).
Maybe because of the format, I also found the film more moving (Leguizamo on Odysseus’ return; the exchange between father and son, coded and clear; the husband’s return, each emotional beat achieved by the actors at their peak; and I liked Tom Holland much more this time around, the callowness, lack of strength, powerlessness, etc being part of the character, though I do think the final exchange in that scene of recognition could have been better handled. But this is quibbling. A serious film about our times, beautiful, delicate, exciting. The image of the cyclops clearly taken from Goya’s Saturn Devouring his son becomes even more potent this time around. Also seeing it at the BFI’s IMAX brought out all the sound work on the film, a work of art on its own, a sharpening of feeling. I think it a better film this second time around and now want to see it once more.
Third time seeing The Odyssey, in yet another format, 70mm. at London’s Picturehouse Central. It becomes clear that the only design proper in relation to composition is in the IMAX 70mm format, the rest is mere cropping, with some of the beauty and story-telling lost in translation to other formats. I still loved seeing it, now with other episodes eliciting emotion, this time, for example, those last lines of the siren scene, ‘What you want most is what you can’t have, and what you can’t have is what you already had and lost’, which seem straight out of a noir. What comes into sharper focus on this third viewing is the ingeniousness of the structure, the telling and re-telling of the Trojan Horse scene, by different people and at different times, its play with time, point-of-view, reliability, and then re-told again to Penelope at the end, just at that moment and related to the scene where Odysseus return Antinous his shame, just as he’s acknowledge, perhaps by confessing to Penelope, unburdened himself, of his own. And doesn’t that whole set up with Penelope, the way, she’s photographed, now convey both cloister and confessional? I find it brilliant. It does now seem that when most people refer to the weakness of the script they’re really saying they don’t like the dialogue, primarily Tom Holand saying Mom and Dad. I’ve noted no references to structure, imagery or sound design when detractors reference a script. Sometimes, as Richard Brody commented recently, the process of translation encompasses translating written words into sounds and images, sometimes images and sounds are part of the script, and the process, perhaps more of realisation in another medium, which I suppose is also a process of translation, if of another type or degree.
