Cinephiles took their own odysseys to watch ‘The Odyssey’

To see Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” an interpretation of an epic journey in his preferred IMAX 70mm format, admirers packed their bags and took out their passports. (Neil Webb/The New York Times)

By MALIA MENDEZ

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 through Florida from Ocala to Fort Lauderdale to watch the film twice in IMAX 70 mm, 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 70 mm 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 70 mm 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, South Dakota, 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 70 mm, 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 70 mm venues in California, but 36 states do not have any at all. The closest option for an “Odyssey” fan in Kansas City, Missouri, is a seven-hour drive to Indianapolis or Woodridge, Illinois. Someone in Roanoke, Virginia, must flip a coin between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

As “The Odyssey” sells out IMAX 70 mm 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, Denmark, to London and drive 11 hours to Belgium instead. A fervent collector of 35 mm film trailers and Blu-ray discs, Cansi said he did not care what it would cost to see “The Odyssey” in IMAX 70 mm.

Sergio Estrada drove with his three children from their home in El Paso, Texas, to see “The Odyssey” in Tempe, Arizona. The six-hour drive was nothing, he said, as sheer anticipation granted him a patience rivaling Penelope’s.

Estrada said he felt as awestruck 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 70 mm.

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.