The “Big” Odyssey Film
- Ma Guanghui
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
The Odyssey is a thoroughly “big” movie. Its bigness extends far beyond the silver screen.
Even outside the film itself, the scale of the conversation it has generated is unprecedented. The film was dated for release and put on advance sale as early as a year before its premiere. This is hardly standard practice for a film. It is more reminiscent of a sold-out Broadway or West End musical, or a Taylor Swift-level stadium concert. Live performances have always possessed an inherent scarcity: they can only take place in one location at one particular time. Film, by contrast, is different. A movie can open simultaneously in tens of thousands of cinemas around the world. By definition, it could never suffer from the same scarcity.
And yet The Odyssey has created precisely this kind of concert-like scarcity through its IMAX 70mm version, supposedly the “ultimate format” for cinema. Only 40 cinemas worldwide are capable of screening this so-called “complete” version. As a result, some audiences have taken trains, even planes, simply to experience it. The screenings at London’s BFI IMAX have been almost continuously sold out through September, with only seats in the corners of the first two rows remaining. In France, some viewers have driven hundreds of kilometres to Montpellier simply to see the film at the country’s only cinema capable of screening the “complete” version. Before it became a “big” movie, The Odyssey was first and foremost a “big” cinematic event.
If we look back at film history, we find that “big” has never been merely a question of size. In the 1950s, CinemaScope used anamorphic lenses and widescreen projection to show audiences more, but it expanded horizontally. Widescreen eventually became the dominant format in cinemas today. With IMAX 70mm and IMAX GT digital projection, however, “more” has shifted vertically. One is wider; the other is taller. How are we supposed to determine which one is “more”? This is no longer simply a technical question. It is a question of who has the authority to define what “big” means, and to define how a film ought to be seen. Christopher Nolan and the media discourse surrounding him have transformed IMAX from a technical format into a standard of viewing. Their voices are like the Sirens’ song, luring audiences toward IMAX cinemas.
In recent years, the release of a Nolan film has always been accompanied by this kind of “format chaos.” The Odyssey exists in at least three aspect ratios, from “big” to “small”: 1.43:1, 1.90:1 and 2.39:1, with the latter two cropped from the former. The 40 cinemas worldwide capable of screening IMAX 70mm film, together with a small number of IMAX GT cinemas supporting the 1.43:1 ratio, can show the so-called “complete” version. The remaining tens of thousands of cinemas can only screen the cropped versions. Traumpalast in Leonberg, Germany, has the largest IMAX screen in the world, yet it can only show the cropped 1.90:1 version. And so we return to the same question: what, exactly, counts as “big”?
Another question follows. Leaving aside whether such aggressive vertical cropping actually affects the perspective of the image, there is nothing inherently impossible about projecting a 1.43:1 image onto most widescreens. The only problem is that the image cannot fill the entire screen, leaving blank space on either side. At least in Europe, many older cinemas still have motorized curtains in front of their screens. These not only provide the ceremonial pleasure of the curtain slowly opening at the beginning of a film; they can also physically adjust the effective size of the screen, allowing it to accommodate different aspect ratios. In other words, the screen adapts to the film, rather than the film adapting to the screen.
The difference becomes particularly apparent at film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice. The same screen may show dozens of films over the course of several days, possibly each with a different aspect ratio. The curtains can be adjusted from film to film, giving every aspect ratio the full space it deserves. Respecting the integrity of the frame is also a way of respecting the film itself. The paradox of The Odyssey, however, is that Nolan has gone to enormous lengths to shoot with IMAX film cameras in pursuit of an image that reaches “from floor to ceiling,” yet only a tiny fraction of audiences will ever see that image in its entirety. For the vast majority of viewers around the world, what they see is a cropped Odyssey.
Another aspect of The Odyssey that became a talking point long before its release was its casting. Discussions surrounding the casting of a “Black Helen” and transgender actors as Greek soldiers had already become heated well before the film opened. A simple analogy might be this: can a non-Western actor play a character in Shakespeare, a ballet by Tchaikovsky, or an opera by Puccini? The answer has long been self-evident. In opera alone, the Chinese soprano Hui He has performed across Europe for years in Madama Butterfly, Turandot, Tosca, La Bohème and Aida, playing Japanese, Chinese, Bohemian and Ethiopian characters respectively.
In recent years, opera has also seen an increasing number of transgender performers. The American transgender singer Lucia Lucas is a typical example. She presents as a woman and has a baritone voice, and therefore frequently performs male roles in opera, such as the bullfighter Escamillo in Carmen. So why does similar casting in film still provoke such controversy? Perhaps because film is a more mass-oriented art form? And perhaps the “bigger” the film, the more it is expected to represent some notion of “popular” identity, history and culture.
As a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan can no longer make “small” films. From Oppenheimer to The Odyssey, he first used the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, to tell a story about the end of civilization, before travelling back to the period in which The Odyssey is set—the origins of Western civilization. Yet, as many critics have already pointed out, The Odyssey is undoubtedly a continuation of Oppenheimer at its core. Nolan has achieved a curious synthesis here: using an epic about the origins of Western civilization to tell a story about the destruction of civilization. That destruction begins with the violation of Zeus’s law. And the violator is none other than the “great hero” Odysseus.
Odysseus spends more than twenty years slowly making his way home, enduring one ordeal after another and overcoming each through his ingenuity. In The Odyssey, however, Matt Damon’s repeated “tricks” trigger wars and conflicts that result in the deaths of civilians and Greek soldiers. The “great hero” therefore seems perpetually steeped in sorrow, as if he had wandered in from a Terrence Malick set.
At this point, the anti-war impulse of Nolan’s The Odyssey becomes unmistakable. Naturally, it is easy to read this as political allegory. Odysseus could be Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, or even Musk. But obviously, none of these “great men” are going to change because of a film. The true recipients of the film’s message are therefore still ordinary people like us, who have no ability to influence the course of events.
What The Odyssey offers us is a form of spiritual consolation: through an entirely safe, lowest-common-denominator anti-war narrative, Nolan, himself a member of the cultural elite, places himself alongside the masses. Nolan clearly believes in the righteousness of anti-war sentiment, and there is of course nothing controversial about that righteousness. Yet the ending of The Odyssey inevitably reminded me of the ending of Spielberg’s Disclosure Day: Emily Blunt is about to reveal to the world the existence of extraterrestrial life, and Spielberg seems to have such faith in the universality of this revelation that he has the entire world watching the livestream simultaneously.
Nolan is, of course, not quite that single-minded. After an exhausting and chaotic indoor fight scene, he has Odysseus and Penelope speak to each other through a closed door. This is not a monologue but a dialogue; not a declaration addressed to the entire world, but an almost private act of self-examination. Through Odysseus, Nolan says what he feels he must say, but those words do not, and cannot, extend beyond the realm of confession and atonement.
In the famous interview Nolan did with a Chinese influencer, he defended the film by arguing that even if you recognize the conventions of a movie, that does not mean those conventions invalidate themselves. Of course. This is a familiar, success-manual style piece of rhetoric, grounded in the fact of his own already proven success. Or perhaps, from Nolan’s perspective, it is simply the way an elite figure attempts to communicate with the masses.
But it is precisely these conventions that make the film feel bland. Alongside this blandness, the film attempts to generate tension through action sequences in which one man takes on dozens. The problem is that such tension is almost impossible to sustain, because audiences either already know, or have already anticipated, that Odysseus will not die here.
Anne Hathaway’s performance is similar. She appears spicy, even faintly feminist, but the performance is relatively one-dimensional. At the moments when the audience is supposedly meant to empathize with her, it is precisely the attitude she projects—that of someone who seems to believe “the whole world owes me something”—that blocks the emotional connection. Matt Damon may claim that he got into much better shape for The Odyssey, but his Odysseus is a character lacking both charisma and the traditional aura of a hero.
And so this “big” movie finally manages to justify itself: it has an enormous production scale, an enormous cast of stars, an enormous screen, an enormous market, and an enormous theme. In the end, all these forms of “bigness” converge on a very safe, very familiar moral conclusion.
Yet The Odyssey is not without its memorable set pieces: the terror of the Cyclops’ cave; the visceral horror of Circe, played by Samantha Morton, turning soldiers into pigs through practical effects; the flashes of humor that Robert Pattinson’s Antinous occasionally brings to a film otherwise steeped in tragedy; and Charlize Theron’s Calypso, who has the goddess-like glamour of a perfume advertisement, though that quality will undoubtedly divide audiences. Circe in particular—the bodies, skin, food, fur and animal hides, and the tangible, unclean physicality of her contact with the men—made me realize something: images that are truly alive do not necessarily have to be the biggest ones.
That is also why, after watching The Odyssey, I found myself missing “small” films. Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid is one of them. It too is an adaptation of a literary classic, and it too possesses a strong sense of modernity, yet it is much “smaller.” It does not attempt to represent civilization. It does not attempt to become a global event. Nor does it require some supposedly “ultimate format” to prove that it is worth watching. But it is closer to our lives, and closer to our history.
Amid flashes of brilliance and an overwhelming sense of blandness, the nearly three-hour journey of the simplified Odyssey came to an end. The Odyssey is, of course, a great product of the film industry. It has given audiences around the world a reason to reconsider the cinema. It has allowed a somber blockbuster, one not particularly driven by entertainment, to earn more than a billion dollars at the global box office. And it has once again made the cinema a place worth making a special trip to. This is Nolan’s gift to cinema.
Three weeks after its German release, on a weekday afternoon, I went to see a non-IMAX digital screening. The aspect ratio was 2.39:1, in an ordinary cinema.
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