It’s a particularly interesting time for The Odyssey to come out. With roughly three thousand years separating Homer’s original epic poem and Christopher Nolan’s IMAXed adaptation, this latest version has, in a sense, brought human creativity full circle. It also may come to represent the artistic peak of both Nolan and, unfortunately, humanity.

Nolan is famously all about the “pure” process of filmmaking. He only uses production-recorded dialogue, he eschews a second unit director, everything that can be practically realized (effects, props, sets, etc.) is, and, of course, he shoots actual analogue film. His first feature, Following, was shot on black and white 16mm. His subsequent films were shot on 35mm. Starting with The Dark Knight, he began incorporating 70mm IMAX for certain sequences. With Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, he used a combo of 65mm and 70mm IMAX. With The Odyssey, he’s finally been able to go full-IMAX.*

In order for the latter to be possible, he, like many innovative filmmakers before him (Stanely Kubrick, George Lucas, James Cameron), developed new technology. In his case, he created a special mirror system for the actors and designed a sound-proof blimp for the massive and noisy IMAX cameras so that he could record dialogue at the same time the camera was running 24 frames of 70mm IMAX negative past its gate every second. This dedication to the hands-on effort of filmmaking, especially at this scale, becomes particularly admirable, even poignant, when you consider that we’re currently ankle-deep in the soulless, cultural sewage that is generative AI.

Okay, but what about the movie itself? In short, I loved it. It’s gorgeous and epic and rousing and moving. I honestly don’t know what else you could possibly want from a cinematic adaptation of The Odyssey.

* Though The Odyssey is the first feature-length IMAX-shot film that also recorded synch audio during production, it is not the first narrative shot on IMAX, as Wings of Courage, a 45-minute fully-IMAXed film directed by Jean Jacques Annaud, came out thirty-one years ago, way back in 1995 (I saw it then, in the Canada Place IMAX theatre).

** Case in point, a fully AI-generated version of The Odyssey, called The Odyssey: The Fall, was also just released.