Viewed a second time, this time in 70mm IMAX across the street from IMAX HQ in Mississauga, which was an excellent viewing and audio experience. (Bar none my favourite way to see a movie.)
A pity that the film doesn’t hold up a second time around. Nolan almost refuses to use the best parts of the epic genre: there are very few wide panoramic views, instead often opting for medium distance shots and close-ups of faces. This renders the aspect ratio of IMAX largely moot and pointless; the additional breathing room in the frame didn’t aid the film in any measurable way. In fact, it rendered most scenes far more claustrophobic than they ought to be.
The wooden dialogue hampers nearly every performance, and the expository nature of Nolan’s filmmaking makes it feel like there’s no real connective tissue between most sequences. The theme is provided via exposition, rather than given the gentle tough of a proper writer. Charlize Theron basically just keeps asking “And then what happened?”, which is an amateur’s way to tell a story. The entire thing is edited as though each scene is the pivotal conclusion or preamble to some other film, rather than a clear part of piece of this film. Nolan’s scripts could often benefit from the help of a punch-up writer, and The Odyssey is no exception.
I’ve seen some critics say there’s no time to breathe. That’s not true. There’s plenty of time to breathe. The film is nearly three hours long. But there is no visual space to breathe in this film’s diorama. The widest shots are all establishing shots. There are no moments when we examine something in the distance. In a story that features a cyclops, a witch, giant knights and tree traps, a sea monster, sirens, the destruction of Troy, and hell itself, we ought to see more of the landscape, more of the world itself. Nolan shoots the entire thing as though he’s still shooting the familiar streets of Chicago and calling it Gotham, but we’ve never been the world of The Oydssey before, and we ought to see it in a larger scope.
It just doesn’t feel very epic. It’s revealing that Nolan continues to haphazardly slap the loosely-kerned Gotham typeface onto every project, as though the same typeface that worked for Obama in 2007 is perfect for his retelling of Homeric classics. I think Nolan has a Michael Mann-influenced style that works great for crime capers like The Dark Knight and Inception, but absolutely terribly for fantastical epics.
There are a number of things here that work very well. Despite the poorly lit sets, the third act is stupendous. Matt Damon is excellent; Anne Hathaway excels. Pattinson’s performance is a miracle. And the muscular filmmaking is impressive at times, even while it is limited in its scope. The Hades sequence is wonderful filmmaking.
I am sure this will go down as one of Nolan’s more beloved modern works, and I can imagine it being as popular with this generation of young filmgoers as Interstellar is. But unfortunately for me, I didn’t find Interstellar rewarding either, for many of the same reasons.
I loved getting the opportunity to see a couple minutes from Dune 3 in IMAX before the movie, though. I will readily admit that seeing Villeneuve’s filmmaking, which makes great use of wide photography, just before The Odyssey, probably soured me towards the latter. But I can’t wait to return to IMAX 70mm to see Dune 3 this Christmas.