Does the Epic Adventure of ‘The Odyssey’ Really Demand an Epic Format Like IMAX?

I first became a large format junkie back in 1983, when at the age of 11 I saw “Return of the Jedi” projected in 70mm. The clarity of the image and the immersive surround sound made all my previous moviegoing experiences, even the most powerful ones, feel a bit underwhelming — and when I managed to catch 70mm presentations of “Blue Thunder” and “Superman III” later that same summer, the honeymoon period of my lifelong love affair with 70mm officially began.

None of those movies had actually been shot in 70mm, which was the case for every 70mm film I went to see throughout most of the 1980s. (The first time I was able to see a 70mm print struck from a genuine large format negative was in 1989, when a restoration of “Lawrence of Arabia” opened nationwide.) Until Ron Howard resurrected the idea of capturing on 70mm film (technically, 65mm since 5mm was used for the soundtrack) with “Far and Away” in 1992, all of the Hollywood studios’ 70mm releases were actually blow-ups from 35mm negatives.

Even so, the presentation was superior. The picture tended to be sharper and brighter in 70mm, partly because the system only required the projectionist to focus one lens (as opposed to anamorphic 35mm’s two), and partly because theaters that even had the capability to project in 70mm tended to keep their equipment up to date and in better shape than your typical multiplex.

Where 70mm really differentiated itself from 35mm, however, was in the sound. 70mm’s six discrete channels of magnetic sound had a power and sense of detail totally lacking in 35mm optical tracks, and the stereo separation was astounding. I can still hear the enveloping crowd noise in the music numbers and the thunderous CRACK! of the sledgehammers in Walter Hill’s “Streets of Fire” over 40 years after I first saw the movie, and even though I still don’t fully understand the appeal of “Top Gun,” I’ll never forget the sound of those jets roaring over my head.

The irony is that in the same era when I was discovering films by favorite directors like John Carpenter, Joe Dante, and Michael Mann in 70mm, I was also consuming their work in the most degraded and degrading format in the history of movie consumption, VHS cassette. Although I got to see Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China” the way the Lord intended, in 70mm six-track Dolby on an enormous screen, for about ten years the only way I watched his classic “Halloween” was on panned-and-scanned tapes that chopped off over half of the image and flattened cinematographer Dean Cundey’s vibrant colors to a kind of murky gray smear.

And yet…somehow the greatness at the heart of “Halloween” was so embedded in its cinematic DNA that I felt it even in the worst presentation possible. The fact that about half my time during my most formative moviegoing years was spent in hallowed movie palaces watching masterpieces such as “Out of Africa,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and “Born on the Fourth of July” in 70mm and the other half was spent in my basement watching movies on a 19-inch TV has always made me wonder: how much does format really matter? Does a great movie transcend its presentation, or is it blasphemy to watch “Rebel Without a Cause” on TV with commercials?

I thought a lot about the topic this past week when Christopher Nolan‘s “The Odyssey” became the latest film to hit theaters in 70mm since Paul Thomas Anderson revived the format in 2012 with “The Master.” At that time the last movie commercial theaters had run in 70mm was Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” in 2001; as an exhibition format, 70mm had more or less died due to digital soundtracks making its superior magnetic sound less of a novelty.

“The Master” was an arthouse success though, and once Anderson got his financiers to give him the 70mm treatment he opened the door for other cinephile auteurs to give the format a full-on revival. Christopher Nolan released “Interstellar” (and every subsequent movie he would direct) in both standard 70mm and 70mm IMAX, and Quentin Tarantino went as far as to shoot “The Hateful Eight” in Ultra Panavision 70, the same super-wide format used to create epics like “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and “The Fall of the Roman Empire.”

‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’Courtesy Everett Collection

There’ve been several other 70mm releases since Anderson brought it back with “The Master,” including his own “Inherent Vice,” “Phantom Thread,” and “One Battle After Another” (which had 70mm prints struck from a VistaVision negative, reviving an even more extinct format); just a few weeks ago, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” had a 70mm engagement at Tarantino’s Vista Theater, a venue that has also hosted 70mm runs of “Dune: Part Two” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon.”

The great thing about this revival is that it seems to have introduced a golden age of celluloid projection, an art that was in danger of disappearing when all the multiplexes converted to digital in the mid-to-late 2000s. When “Interstellar” came out in various film formats in 2014, the presentation was pretty inconsistent — I went to see it in 35mm, 70mm, and IMAX 70mm, and all of them had issues with focus or framing or registration. Ironically, the clearest and most absorbing version of the movie I remember seeing was the standard 2K digital projection.

Now, 12 years later, the frequency with which audiences have begun to crave 70mm and IMAX 70mm seems to have inspired the emergence of a large number of projectionists with the skill and temperament to treat large-format projection with the care that it deserves. At the same time, multiplexes have been upgrading their digital projection systems and installing more and more Premium Large Format screens in formats like Dolby Vision, 4DX, and RPX in an attempt to lure audiences away from their phones and into theaters — an effort that seems to be working, if opening weekend grosses for “The Odyssey” are any indication.

Given the multitude of formats that “The Odyssey” is playing in and my own curiosity about the effect format has on one’s perception of a film (not to mention my undying love for Christopher Nolan and desire to justify seeing all of his films as many times as possible), I decided to repeat an experiment I had conducted for both “Interstellar” and “One Battle After Another”: to see “The Odyssey” six times in six days in six different formats. Starting in Nolan’s ideal format of 70mm IMAX and ending with digital IMAX, I also watched and heard the movie in 35mm, 4DX, standard 70mm, and Dolby Vision — and I was more than a little surprised by what I discovered.

The discrepancies between my experiences were far subtler than when I tried the same experiment with “Interstellar” and “One Battle,” which I attribute to a few different factors. One is simply that Nolan’s palette is more muted than Paul Thomas Anderson’s; while the colors of “One Battle After Another” varied depending on how they interacted with the chemical processes of various formats, “The Odyssey” didn’t look too different from one format to another aside from slightly more vivid oranges and blues in the two IMAX incarnations.

Another factor, I presume, is that aforementioned renaissance of projectionists who really know what they’re doing when it comes to projecting film. In terms of detail and clarity, the various formats of “The Odyssey” were pretty comparable; the softest was the 35mm presentation I saw at the Los Angeles Alamo Drafthouse, a result of both the properties of the film gauge and the fact that it was the widest aspect ratio in which the movie was projected.

Director Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon, and Zendaya on the set of ‘The Odyssey’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

Nolan shot “The Odyssey” in 70mm IMAX with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1, whereas the 35mm anamorphic print had a much wider width to height ratio of 2.39:1. Thus the image is both cropped at the top and bottom and blown up in a way that increases the grain and softness. Does that mean the 35mm presentation is inferior? Not really, just different. The softness actually gives the movie a pleasingly dated quality, as though you’re watching a film from Hollywood’s peak age of epic historical spectacles at a revival theater — it’s easy to feel that “The Odyssey” is part of that tradition that included “Fall of the Roman Empire” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” watching it in 35mm.

And oddly, losing the information at the top and bottom of the frame doesn’t result in a drastically different viewing experience. After seeing the movie six times, I can say that the various versions in which some of the image is cropped — which is basically all of them except for the 70mm IMAX — aren’t missing anything vital, which I think speaks to the tricky balancing act Nolan mastered when composing his film. Without making the IMAX versions feel like they have too much headroom, he’s clearly left space to accommodate the other formats, and in terms of image I wouldn’t say that any of them are vastly superior — just different.

The closest to each other are the two IMAX versions; while the 70mm IMAX is 1.43:1, the digital IMAX is slightly wider at 1.90:1. In both cases, as with those 70mm prints I used to devour as a kid, the real benefit is the sound. The IMAX presentations were by far and away the best sounding versions of “The Odyssey” that I saw, with layers of atmosphere in the mix that were much clearer and more powerful than in any of the other editions. I found the two IMAX screenings I attended to be more or less equally immersive, and to be the most immersive versions of “The Odyssey” overall thanks to that IMAX sound.

But the good news for Nolan fans who don’t live near an IMAX theater (or who can’t find a decent seat thanks to the fact that so many of the IMAX showtimes are still selling out) is that the other versions aren’t significantly less immersive. While the sound is slightly less layered and thunderous, all of the versions of “The Odyssey” tend to guide the viewer’s eye in a way that one gets completely sucked into the screen regardless of the aspect ratio.

The IMAX versions are more vertically oriented, but either way the frame is so dense with information that you’re either feeling the image bleeding over to the sides of your vision or above and below it; and since Nolan has been careful not to crop anything essential from those 70mm (2.2:1), 35mm, and Dolby Vision and 4DX (1.85:1) versions, the movie preserves its visual and emotional power across the different iterations.

Interestingly, I probably found the 4DX version, in which your seat weaves up and down and side to side while water, wind, and other elements get sprayed at your head, to be slightly less immersive — I was so worried about my drink flying out of my hands that I found it more difficult to get lost in Nolan’s expertly choreographed action. That said, it was pretty fun when Odysseus and his men entered Hades and the ashes of hell started falling from the ceiling.

At the end of the day, my main takeaway from the 18 hours I spent watching “The Odyssey” is that, like “Halloween,” its greatness is inarguable regardless of the format. That said, I wouldn’t want to watch it on a panned-and-scanned VHS tape like I did Carpenter’s slasher film all those years ago — for that matter, I wouldn’t recommend waiting for the admittedly far superior home video formats we have now. This is a movie that demands and rewards theatrical viewing. Luckily, no matter what format you go to see “The Odyssey” in on the big screen, Nolan has made sure you’ll be entertained.