Despite the extensive, 3,000-year-old source material, and Christopher Nolan at the helm, The Odyssey runtime clocks in at less than three hours – and there’s a technical reason why it’s shorter. Based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey ultimately centres on Odysseus’s (Matt Damon) long and perilous journey home after the Trojan War to return to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Given the poem spans years of battles, monsters, gods and entire civilisations, we were all expecting Nolan’s adaptation to be his longest film yet. The Odyssey runtime couldn’t go over three hours The movie clocks in at two hours and 53 minutes, making it shorter than Oppenheimer’s three-hour-long runtime. This does still make it Nolan’s second longest film, so no complaints there. But it would have run for more than three hours had it not been for the practical limitations of the IMAX 70mm format Nolan chose to shoot the film on. You see, The Odyssey is the first feature to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm with IMAX cameras, and this did come with its limitations. Firstly, there are only 41 theatres in the world capable of screening the film as Nolan intended it. Secondly, it meant it had to stay under three hours long. As Nolan revealed in a conversation with Letterboxd, he previously challenged IMAX engineers to make larger platters or develop a system that would allow longer film prints – but it just wasn’t feasible. “David Keighley, my IMAX mentor of 20 years, who passed very sadly after he finished his work on The Odyssey… dragged me into the booth to show me the final limitation of this three-hour limit on the film prints. “Over the years, I’d challenged him to enlarge the platters or come up with a clip system to hold the film end when it got a bit bigger than the platter, that kind of thing. But there’s a particular arm that would require an entire rebuild of the projection system to get beyond that. So I finally said to him, ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll stay under three hours.’” Credit: Universal Pictures This information has left some fans feeling robbed, although it was seemingly raised in response to prejudice aimed at The Odyssey’s cast. As one Redditor wrote, “The fact that The Odyssey’s runtime has to be limited because of the IMAX projectors bothers me way more than the stuff people complain about on social media. “I think they shot around 90 hours of footage. If analog projectors didn’t have capacity limits, the movie would run way longer than 2h 52m.” Even then, other fans aren’t too unhappy about the outcome. “The movie is shorter than Oppenheimer, they still had several minutes of runtime to play with, it’s not like they shaved everything they could to squeeze it into three hours,” another replied. “In all the footage they shot, they found the best and most efficient version of the story that is exactly as long as it should be. All art has limitations, there’s always tradeoffs and compromises when it comes to filmmaking. “Nolan chooses to prioritise the physical film projection equipment of a handful of theatres worldwide as a tradeoff for length and he seems happy to do so.” Christopher Nolan explains why the sacrifice was worth it Wherever you stand on the debate, it appears the tradeoff is worth it in terms of the level of detail Nolan achieved through this process. Even if you can’t get to an IMAX 70mm screening, a regular IMAX viewing is going to be epic. “If ever there were a film that we wanted to do entirely on IMAX, this is the movie to do it with,” Nolan explained. Thanks to newly developed IMAX cameras, he was finally able to shoot every scene in the format, from sweeping landscapes to intimate conversations. “It’s really about taking the IMAX canvas and using it to let the imagery play out on that larger than life screen,” he added. The director said that the format isn’t just about the epic shots either. “The insert shots, getting these extreme close-ups sometimes of the detail of something… are absolutely thrilling on IMAX the same way a giant landscape is as well.” In other words, while The Odyssey may be slightly shorter than it otherwise could have been, Nolan believes audiences are getting a far richer visual experience in return. For all the latest film and TV updates and hot takes, like our Facebook page. Featured images credit: Universal Pictures Post navigation Next story
