The Odyssey (2026)

[Marcel Birgelen]

This movie has done well, but I'm glad to see it go. Every single night we've had something weird happen.

<snip>

So yeah, I'm glad to send this one down the road.

Hey, it's called The Odyssey for a reason and everybody has to do their part... So, you got the full immersive experience... But yeah, quite some interesting happenings and all of this in a few weeks. I guess the golden rule with drunk people is generally to refuse them at the door if you spot them. Looking back at all the trouble I had while attending a show during the years, about 50% were just because at least one party involved was drunk.

Actually, when I went to see the Odyssey, we had someone refusing to leave the seat he definitely didn't book (and was obviously taken by someone else). Only after half the room offered to help with the escort out of the room, he decided to vacate his seats. It has been a while since something like that happened.

Maybe this movie is cursed and it attracts bad stuff.

Edit: Coming back to the volume complaints. I know from a few locations that they started to do little intro talks, informing people that the movie was loud, but that if they had complaints, they should send them to the studio. They were playing the movie like the director intended.

I'd personally add: For every 0.1 on the "scale of Dolby" we turn down the fader, Christoper Nolan will kill a kitten. So, it's up to you: bleeding ears and tinnitus or dead kittens.

[Jon Dent]

I hope Nolan's sound crew gets hazard pay and/or wears earplugs.

Complaints won't matter. Nolan's been hearing them (ha ha) ever since Interstellar. He clearly doesn't feel any need to alter his approach.

[Mike Blakesley]

While in L.A. for the Cinema United Fall Summit, we found that The Odyssey was showing at the Chinese Theater in 70mm Imax. So in addition to the four movies we saw as part of the Summit, we decided to take in The Odyssey as well.

I had never been inside the Chinese, but I did see the outside back in the '70s. It's kind of a shame what's happening there...the place still looks fantastic but clearly there are maintenance issues. At least half or more of the light bulbs illuminating all the decor out front were burned out, and the lighting inside the auditorium had a similar number of missing bulbs. Trash cans in the bathrooms were overflowing. The auditorium floor wasn't sticky, but it was definitely dirty, and the seats are way past their lifespan, at least the row we were in. The staffers we dealt with were super friendly and nice, so that was good. But given the money this place must rake in (the showing we attended, on Wednesday evening, was packed), and the level of fame that it has, the state it's in is sad.

The sound was great in the loudness and low-end departments, but the dialog was a little hard to understand. This might have been partly due to our seating location (balcony) or due to it being a Christopher Nolan film, I'm not sure.

One thing I was disappointed in was the picture. Given it was 70mm Imax, I was expecting to see the best picture I'd ever seen. In reality, there was noticeable flicker in the bright scenes, and the image wasn't masked properly -- well it WAS masked, but the masking didn't cover the fuzzy edges of the image. I found myself wishing I was seeing it in my own theater, the picture would have been better, if not as tall.

On to the movie itself. When we played it, we were too busy for me to ever sit down and watch all of it, so I figured it was going to be a dark noisy battle-fest. But I wound up liking it a lot more than I expected to. I thought Tom Holland was impressive in it. It's good to see that he has more range than just playing Peter Parker.

The sound has probably the most low-end I've ever heard in a movie. There has to be at least an hour of the film where the floor is shaking.

The action scenes prove why Christopher Nolan makes the big bucks that he does. The whole thing was pretty riveting. It didn't seem like it was 3 hours long.

I'll give it 3 out of 5 stars.

[Bobby Henderson]

I watched The Odyssey in 15/70mm a couple months ago when I was in Colorado Springs visiting family. My brother and I watched a Tuesday afternoon matinee showing and it was still a nearly packed house. Tickets at the Carefree Cinema IMAX were $25 each. Ouch.

I was thankful the presentation quality was good. A Regal location up the road in Denver was having problems with their 15/70 shows. The projected image had a bit of flicker in some of the brighter scenes; to me that gave it a little bit more of that film projection vibe.

The only complaints I have about image quality involve the very narrow depth of field in so many camera shots. I would have liked to see more "big" scenes that show off the level of detail 15/70 can resolve. It's not easy to see the IMAX film difference in a dimly lit scene where only part of an actor's face is in focus.

Yeah, the movie got pretty loud in parts. The audio in the Cyclops scene was pretty overbearing. It was like the mid range frequencies were overdriven to hell.

Overall I thought it was a decent show. The sequence with the with the witch, Circe, was pretty freaky.