Even before buying his movie tickets for the opening weekend of “The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited epic, Zach Weible reserved his hotel room.
He could have driven just over an hour to catch an IMAX screening in Orlando. But instead he took a car, bus and train nearly 300 miles from Ocala, Fla., to Fort Lauderdale to watch the film twice in IMAX 70-millimeter, which he called “cinema in its purest form.”
Weible did not encounter a furious Cyclops or narcotic lotus plant on his journey, but he did travel to great lengths to see the movie. And just to see it. Weible is deaf, and IMAX 70mm does not support modern closed captioning systems.
“It’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept,” Weible said in an interview over Google Chat. “The visual experience is too great to miss out on.”
Many cinephiles made their own odysseys to view Nolan’s take on the ancient story about the Greek king Odysseus’ yearslong journey back to his throne, a spectacle with the hype of being a modern “Ben-Hur” or “Lawrence of Arabia.” They traveled on busy thoroughfares and across international borders to reach the 41 theaters worldwide that can screen “The Odyssey” in the director’s preferred format.
“The Odyssey,” the first feature film to be shot entirely on IMAX cameras, can be viewed in nearly 1,900 large-screen IMAX theaters globally. It is the much rarer IMAX 70mm version, which uses film instead of digital projection, that Nolan fans said they just could not miss.
“We are dedicated and willing to go through such lengths,” Weible said, because “we are confident in this man’s track record in delivering an unforgettable experience.”
Nolan won his first Oscars for the 2023 biopic “Oppenheimer,” about the scientist behind the atomic bomb, and has been entertaining audiences for decades with temporal-bending films like “Memento,” “Inception” and “Interstellar.” He has also amassed a legion of fans who cannot get enough of his analog inclinations.
To see “The Odyssey” as big as possible as soon as possible, several pulled out their passports.
Aldo Ruggiero flew from Italy to catch a screening at the British Film Institute’s IMAX theater in London. To his mother’s bafflement, Nickolas Hogan and a group of his friends drove 12 hours from Brookings, S.D., to see the movie in Regina, Saskatchewan. David Erazo, who plans his trips to the United States around movie releases, took a plane from Honduras to Florida.
And for the second time to see a Nolan film, Daniel Reveles drove from just outside Seattle to Langley, British Columbia.
When he made the trip three summers ago for “Oppenheimer,” Reveles was stopped by a Canadian border agent who could not comprehend why he was not seeing the movie in Seattle.
“It was definitely a moment where I questioned my sanity,” Reveles said.
Before Nolan popularized the use of IMAX cameras to record blockbuster action sequences, they were primarily used for nature and space documentaries. The ultra-high-resolution footage transported viewers atop Mount Everest and into NASA space shuttles. But the cameras were thought to be too heavy, loud and expensive to use on a standard Hollywood movie set.
For “The Odyssey,” Nolan challenged IMAX to solve two of those problems: The quieter, lighter Keighley camera was born.
But although it is now easier to make a movie in IMAX 70mm, actually viewing it in that format remains challenging. Like the archipelago of islands visited by Odysseus, the 25 compatible theaters in the United States are often separated by vast expanses.
There are eight IMAX 70mm venues in California, but 36 states do not have any at all. The closest option for an “Odyssey” fan in Kansas City, Mo., is a seven-hour drive to Indianapolis or Woodridge, Ill. Someone in Roanoke, Va., must flip a coin between Chattanooga, Tenn., and King of Prussia, Pa.
Around 27 hours after stepping out of his home in Ocala, Weible arrived at his hotel in Fort Lauderdale with scenes from “Miami Vice” flashing through his head.
Weible’s obstacles, unlike those Odysseus faced, were more laughable than lethal: a language barrier, an ill-timed restaurant closure. He slept for only about four hours but woke up with the energy of a kid on Christmas morning.
From his seat at the theater, Weible felt the bass frequencies of the raging waters tossing the Ithacans’ ship, the battle theme swelling as Odysseus confronted a room of insurgents.
When the credits rolled, Weible clutched his IMAX camera popcorn bucket as triumphantly as Odysseus wielded his bow. The journey had been well worth it.
As “The Odyssey” sells out IMAX 70mm theaters nationwide, fans are hoping that a renaissance is imminent. In preparation for the movie, Cinemark added the bulky film projection systems to three of its theaters.
In June, Kinepolis Brussels announced one such upgrade that led Deniz Cansi to cancel his plan to fly from Copenhagen to London and drive 11 hours to Belgium instead. A fervent collector of 35mm film trailers and Blu-ray discs, Cansi said he did not care what it would cost to see “The Odyssey” in IMAX 70mm.
Nolan describes it as 3-D without the glasses. Cansi finds it harder to articulate.
“It cannot be compared to anything else,” he said.
After a transnational road trip that included three electric-vehicle charging stops across Germany, Cansi reached Brussels. He bought a banana and a bottle of water for the morning and turned in for the night.
By 4:30 a.m., Cansi was too wired to fall back asleep. When he entered the theater around 9 a.m., he caught snippets of French, Dutch, German and English. Fifteen minutes after “The Odyssey” ended, Cansi began watching it for a second time.
“The word epic can’t even describe what this movie is,” he said. In one scene, it felt as though a giant Laestrygonian might reach through the screen and pluck him from his seat.
For many Nolan fans, part of the director’s charm is his attention to technical details.
Sergio Estrada drove with his three children from their home in El Paso, Texas, to see “The Odyssey” in Tempe, Ariz. The six-hour drive was nothing, he said, as sheer anticipation granted him a patience rivaling Penelope’s.
Estrada said he felt as awe-struck seeing Nolan’s earlier movies as he did upon his first exposure to classical European sculpture as a teenager.
“The muscle or the rolls in somebody’s stomach, or the folds in their hands, just looked so real,” he said. It is the same with IMAX 70mm.
Estrada and his fellow enthusiasts said that premium formats offered theaters an edge in the competition with streaming. At home, siren sounds beckoned: a buzzing phone, a purring cat, chatty roommates.
Before he headed back to Ocala, Weible stopped in Orlando for his third screening of “The Odyssey” — this time, with closed captions. With home finally on the horizon, he hoped that the next time Nolan released a movie, he would not have to journey so far.
The post Cinephiles Took Their Own Odysseys to Watch ‘The Odyssey’ appeared first on New York Times.
