The Odyssey IMAX 70mm Review: Worth It at BFI Waterloo?

Last updated: 9 August 2026

By Tristan · Arts, exhibitions and creative culture

This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author's own and do not constitute professional advice.

This article contains affiliate links. If you buy through them I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not affect my editorial view.

Cool Factor: 4/5

This Odyssey IMAX 70mm review comes from the Friday night screening at BFI Waterloo on 7 August. That detail matters more than it usually would. After all, only three cinemas in the country can project a 15-perforation celluloid print, and BFI IMAX is one of them. So I saw Christopher Nolan's film the way he actually built it, rather than a compressed approximation of it.

The short version: it is the most physically overwhelming thing I have sat in front of in years. Visually it is also the most beautiful film Nolan has made. However, it is badly cast in two roles that the story cannot really spare. All of that is true at once. Consequently an honest Odyssey IMAX 70mm review has to hold it together rather than pick one line and run with it. One surprise before we start: the sound, for once, is not the problem.

What The Odyssey is, and what Nolan has done with it

First, the source. Homer's poem is roughly 2,700 years old and runs to 24 books. It picks up after the Iliad. Troy has fallen, and Odysseus spends ten years trying to get home to Ithaca. Meanwhile his wife Penelope fends off a house full of suitors who assume he is dead. Along the way he blinds a Cyclops and loses men to a sorceress. Then he sails past the Sirens, and a nymph holds him for years. It is the founding road-trip story, and almost every survival narrative since owes it something.

Even so, adaptations have been surprisingly thin on the ground. Kirk Douglas played him in Ulysses in 1954. Armand Assante took the role in a 1997 television miniseries. Meanwhile the Coen brothers made the best-loved version by not adapting it at all. Instead they transplanted the bones into Depression-era Mississippi for O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000. James Joyce did something similar in prose in 1922. Later, Emily Wilson's 2017 translation, the first into English by a woman, brought a fresh readership to the poem itself. More recently, Daniel Mendelsohn published his own translation in 2025.

Why nobody had filmed it straight

What nobody had done was play it straight at blockbuster scale. That is the gap Nolan spotted, and he has said so directly.

"There's a bit of everything in it. I mean, it truly contains all stories. As a filmmaker, you're looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven't been done before."

His version runs 172 minutes. Furthermore it carries a BBFC 15 certificate for strong violence. Universal distributes, Syncopy produces, and the budget reportedly reached $250 million. It is also the first commercial feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras. Previously Nolan escalated steadily: 28 minutes on The Dark Knight, roughly 65 on Interstellar, around 79 on Dunkirk. This time, however, he went the whole way.

BFI IMAX Waterloo, and why the venue is part of the film

The world premiere on 6 July was, unusually, a two-venue affair. First, the red carpet and the gala ran at the Odeon Luxe in Leicester Square. Simultaneously, Nolan came to BFI IMAX to introduce the screening here. What he said in this room is the reason the venue matters.

There, he dedicated the film to David Keighley, who died in August 2025 aged 77. Keighley was IMAX's first Chief Quality Officer, and he oversaw post-production on more than 500 IMAX films. Moreover, he was the man who first put an IMAX camera into Nolan's hands, on The Dark Knight. They met in this building.

"This was the first place I ever met David, in this theater, and we embarked on a more than 20-year journey. I confessed to him my secret desire to shoot Hollywood films on Imax, and he very gently and very skillfully brought me along and helped out."

Fittingly, the new camera built for this production is named the Keighley. In addition, the end credits carry a card reading "For our friend, David Keighley". Consequently you feel that lineage in the room. The screen runs roughly 20 metres by 26, and the auditorium seats 493. Crucially, the print fills the full 1.43:1 frame rather than letterboxing it.

One thing this Odyssey IMAX 70mm review should flag before you book. BFI IMAX ran two different formats. Standard screenings used the 70mm film print. However, the subtitled screenings for D/deaf audiences were projected in IMAX with Laser instead, which is digital. So if you specifically want celluloid, check which listing you are booking from.

First impressions: what a 70mm print actually gives you

The opening ident flickers. Then the image simply keeps climbing upward. That is the honest first sensation. In short, your peripheral vision runs out before the frame does.

Meanwhile, grain is the second thing you notice. Digital IMAX is cleaner. By contrast, film has weight and a slight restlessness. That restlessness suits a story about salt, weather and exhaustion. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots faces enormous, and the format rewards him. Indeed, a close-up here carries information that a normal screen throws away.

Sound is the surprise, and not in the direction I expected. More on that shortly.

The set pieces, and the Circe scene above all

Nolan built almost everything for real. Consequently it shows in ways CGI cannot fake.

The Trojan Horse is an actual object: twelve metres tall, four tonnes, constructed rather than rendered. Meanwhile the Cyclops sequence uses a 60-foot puppet hauled into Nestor's Cave in the Peloponnese. Bill Irwin performs Polyphemus in the tight shots. Irwin previously voiced and operated TARS in Interstellar, which tells you something about how Nolan casts machinery.

"Everything about the Cyclops sequence is aimed at trying to imagine: what would this be like in real life? Not approaching it from a storybook or cartoony point-of-view, but really trying to be in there with Odysseus and his men. It's a horrifying situation."

He is right, and it is. However, the Cyclops is not the scene that got under my skin.

Instead, it is Circe. Samantha Morton feeds Odysseus's starving crew a cursed stew. Then she watches them fall into a frenzy of hunger, and turns them into pigs in front of you. Of everything covered in this Odyssey IMAX 70mm review, that sequence is the one I cannot shake. Crucially, the transformation is practical: prosthetics, moulded animatronics, Morton physically working the puppets in shot. Because the bodies are really there, the horror lands somewhere in your stomach rather than your eyes.

Elsewhere the commitment borders on absurd. For instance, Charybdis is a genuine whirlpool, generated with jet skis. Scylla plucks men off the deck using six ratchets and stunt performers. Similarly, the Sirens are people on real rocks in real weather, not floating digital figures. Consequently the sea sequences have a nauseous physical logic that no green screen has managed.

Because the bodies are really there, the horror lands in your stomach rather than your eyes.

Göransson's score, built without an orchestra

This is Ludwig Göransson's third Nolan collaboration, after Tenet and Oppenheimer. Furthermore it is the most radical of the three. Notably, Nolan gave him one instruction: no orchestra.

"It's not like the orchestra existed back then… It was a challenge and also an opening to try to make something unique."

So the score instead runs on ancient Greek instruments, gongs and scrap metal. The result is percussive, tuned slightly wrong to modern ears, and properly strange. Furthermore, it does real narrative work. The metallic textures make Ithaca sound like a place worth suffering for. Meanwhile the sea passages clang and scrape rather than swell. There is even a track called "Circe" featuring Samantha Morton in character, which is a lovely piece of thinking.

For my money it is the best thing about the film after Damon. The closing credits carry "When I'm Home", the only track with guest vocalists. James Blake supplies a ghostly hook, while Travis Scott raps the verses. Göransson then steers it with production that builds slowly across five minutes. Nolan has a co-writing credit. In effect Blake is cast as the Siren of the song, which is a neater idea than the film's actual Sirens manage.

Matt Damon holds the centre

Fortunately, Damon is superb, and the film depends on it. He plays Odysseus as a man corroded rather than ennobled by cleverness. Moreover, he resists every opportunity to make him likeable. There is a stillness to the performance that stops the spectacle floating away.

He described the shoot to the BFI in terms that show up on screen.

"It felt more like an expedition than a movie… If you were cold and wet, everybody else was cold and wet. A few feet away from you, Chris Nolan was cold and wet."

The casting, from best to worst

This is the part of the Odyssey IMAX 70mm review where the praise starts to run out. The ensemble is enormous, and the quality swings wildly across it.

Where it works, it works beautifully. John Leguizamo, as the swineherd Eumaeus, is the warmest thing in 172 minutes. Furthermore he grounds the mythic register in something like an actual working life. Elliot Page gets limited screen time as Sinon, yet makes every second land. Morton's Circe, as covered above, is extraordinary. The blind seer who talks Telemachus through swordcraft is another small, perfectly judged piece of casting, and he quietly walks off with the only scene he is given.

Two roles do not work at all. Both, unfortunately, are load-bearing.

Anne Hathaway's Penelope answers a twenty-year criticism

Nolan has been carrying one particular charge for most of his career. Specifically, that his women exist to service the men around them. Rachel Dawes in Batman Begins functions as a moral prop. Mal in Inception is a guilt hallucination. Kitty Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock in Oppenheimer both orbit a man's crisis rather than owning one of their own. The criticism is fair, and it did not stop at the door of this film either. Rolling Stone Philippines argued that several key women here still "feel squandered", and that there is "just no excuse for not getting a woman in the writer's room".

On Penelope, though, I think he has finally answered it. Hathaway is playing twenty years of holding a position under siege. Moreover she plays it almost entirely through restraint, which is far harder than playing grief loudly. She is not waiting. She is negotiating, stalling and calculating, and you can watch her doing the arithmetic.

The camera is her co-conspirator. Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema keep shooting her through things: doorways, loom threads, the shoulders of men who want her house. That sliver-thin IMAX focal plane means the obstruction stays soft while her face stays sharp. Consequently you feel watched and watching at the same time, which is exactly the position Penelope occupies for two decades.

None of that was really available to Nolan before. The old IMAX cameras were too loud for quiet dialogue and too unwieldy for intimate work. Now he can hold a whisper in a giant close-up. Predictably, he does it constantly, and the Ithaca scenes carry a tension the voyages sometimes lack because of it.

Robert Pattinson's Antinous belongs in a different epic

Pattinson is a fine actor having a strange night. His Antinous reads less like a Greek suitor and more like a Roman villain who wandered in from Gladiator. Everything is smirk, sprawl and appetite. He arrives, you dislike him instantly, and the film has told you everything it intends to tell you about him.

To be fair, that is partly by design. The suitors have to be hateable, otherwise the slaughter in the hall plays as murder rather than justice. Together with the way he is staged, the reading does its job. It is simply obvious, and obvious is not what you cast Robert Pattinson for.

What gets lost is the specifically Greek crime. In the poem the suitors are not merely rude. Rather, they are violating xenia, the sacred bond between host and guest, which is why the gods sanction what happens to them. Nolan's version files them as thugs in better clothes. Consequently Pattinson has viciousness to play, but no theology, and he never gets the scene that would justify the casting.

Tom Holland's Telemachus, and the sword lesson that goes nowhere

Telemachus is the film's real problem. Honestly, it is hard to separate the writing from the performance, and both are at fault.

Holland plays him boyish to the point of infantile. There is a modern anxiety in the voice that never sits inside the bronze age, and too often the emotion reads as insincere rather than young. He is meant to be discovering his own capacity for violence. Instead he seems to be discovering that he is in a very expensive film.

The arc is the bigger failure. Early on he cannot fight, which is fine and true to the poem. Then the blind seer gives him a single piece of advice: leave your stomach open and draw your opponent onto the blade. Almost immediately afterwards, he is competent. That is an enormous amount of weight for one line to carry.

Worse, he then forgets it. Repeatedly. During the slaughter in the hall he ends up throwing pots at armed men, which belongs in a horror film where the teenager empties the kitchen drawer at the monster. He does land one genuinely good moment, cutting down Amphinomus as the suitor charges. Nevertheless the cumulative impression is of a boy playing with swords.

That matters, because the film needs us to accept him as the future king of Ithaca. I did not. Frankly, if there were a sequel, it would open with him being deposed inside a week and replaced by somebody who can hold a blade. In fairness to Holland, this is a brutal part to be handed. The character is underwritten, the register is impossible, and no amount of talent rescues a lesson the script forgets it taught.

Zendaya's Athena never quite becomes a god

Zendaya has the harder assignment, since she has to play divinity rather than a person. Nevertheless the performance stays human-scaled, which steadily undercuts Athena's authority. As a result, the film's temperature drops slightly whenever she appears.

Some of that is structural rather than personal. Nolan writes Athena as a goddess of wisdom, and largely drops the war and strategy that make her the most interesting deity in the poem. She turns up, she advises, she leaves. That is precisely the pattern the Rolling Stone piece objected to, and here I think the objection lands.

Why some people think The Odyssey looks out of focus

Visually this is the most beautiful film Nolan has made, and it is not particularly close. The Aegean sequences alone justify the format. Faces, rock, rope, salt and firelight all arrive with a density that digital capture flattens.

However, a complaint has trailed the film online. Namely, that faces look soft, and that shots drift out of focus during close work. There is a real technical explanation, and it is worth knowing before you decide it is sloppiness.

An IMAX 65mm negative is enormous, so depth of field is shallow to start with. Furthermore the production used modified Panavision Primo 65 lenses carrying anamorphic elements, which reduces it again. Longer focal lengths were then needed to get normal-looking fields of view, and much of the film sits in low light where you simply cannot stop down. Digital Camera World called the result a focus puller's nightmare, noting that "very little movement from the actor in question will throw everything out of focus".

Knowing that, I read the softness as a cost rather than a mistake. Nolan chose the largest frame available, then shot it in firelight and weather. So a sliver of focal plane is the price, and on a proper 70mm screen the trade is worth it. On a small screen it will look like a fault. That is one more reason to see it properly.

Nolan's sound problem, and why it did not show up here

Nolan is notorious for burying his dialogue. Moreover he has never really denied it. He has said plainly that "I actually got calls from other filmmakers who would say, 'I just saw your film, and the dialogue is inaudible'", and that he was "a little shocked to realise how conservative people are when it comes to sound". Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises and Tenet all drew the same complaint.

So I went in braced. In the event, I did not lose a single line at BFI IMAX.

What the Keighley camera changed

The camera is the reason, and this is the underrated story of the production. IMAX film cameras have always been deafening, which is why Nolan historically shot his IMAX footage without usable dialogue and filled the gaps elsewhere. The Keighley runs 15 to 20% quieter. Van Hoytema described the difference as the gap between "an unhinged lawn mower" and "a nicely lubricated sewing machine". Consequently the crew could record real dialogue in places that previously demanded a 240-pound soundproof blimp, including small boats in heavy seas. Nolan's own explanation is characteristically dry: "Because people were projecting [their voices] in those scenes, [the camera] didn't fight it."

That unlock is why the Penelope scenes exist in the form they do. For the first time he can shoot an intimate conversation in the full 1.43:1 frame and keep the words.

One honest caveat, though. My experience was a purpose-built IMAX room with a dedicated mix, and that is not what most viewers will get. Erik Kain's four-star Forbes review still flags Nolan's habit of letting the sound editing turn "a bit murky or a bit too loud at times while the dialogue sinks into the sonic muck". Reports from standard screens have been mixed. In other words, the venue may be doing more work than the mix.

Odyssey IMAX 70mm review: what didn't work

Four genuine problems, then, in rough order of seriousness.

First, Telemachus, as set out above. He is the emotional spine of half the film, and the spine does not hold. Everything the ending needs from him, from the reunion to the succession, rests on a performance and a script that never earn it.

Second, and this is the odd one: the CGI is weak in places. Nolan has spent the entire press tour explaining how little of it there is. Paradoxically, that exposes the digital work rather than hiding it. The Cyclops puppet is enhanced digitally. So in wide shots on a 70mm print you can see where the practical object stops and the render starts. Charybdis has the same problem. When the surrounding footage is real fire, real water and real rock at that resolution, mediocre compositing has nowhere to hide. A lesser format would have concealed it.

Third, the structure. Specifically, the film is told in flashback, framed through the bard and through Calypso's island. Occasionally that framing obscures rather than deepens. You spend energy locating yourself in the chronology. Frankly, you would rather spend it on the characters.

Fourth, and this is structural critique rather than a flaw. The spectacle is so total that the interior journey gets crowded out. The poem is about a man finding out who he is. Nolan, by contrast, is more interested in what that costs than in what it reveals.

To be clear, none of this is fatal. Even the film's warmer notices tend to call it uneven while praising the ensemble. That is roughly where I land too.

Why The Odyssey matters right now

Mainly because it is an argument, not just a film. Nolan has spent a decade insisting that scale is a legitimate artistic tool rather than a marketing one. Here, accordingly, he has staked $250 million on it.

Certainly the market answered emphatically. The film has passed $1 billion worldwide. It is only the 65th film ever to do so, and Nolan's first since The Dark Knight Rises. Moreover, the UK and Ireland is its single strongest territory outside North America. It sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 97% audience score. Metacritic users, though, are notably cooler at 5.5. That gap tells you something about the difference between the people who queued for 70mm and the people who caught it on a standard screen.

Culturally it sits in a long line of retellings. So if the film sends you back to the source, our page on Ulysses by James Joyce covers the most ambitious reworking anyone has attempted.

Read it, or hear it

Good films send people back to books, and this one really should. Two routes are worth knowing about.

The obvious one is Daniel Mendelsohn's 2025 translation, published in the UK by Penguin. It is the newest full English version of the poem, and it landed with enough scholarly weight to sit alongside Emily Wilson's rather than beneath it. Furthermore, buying it through Bookshop.org sends money to independent bookshops instead of a warehouse.

Get the Mendelsohn translation

The better route, though, might be your ears. The Odyssey was composed to be performed aloud, by bards, to a room that already knew the story. Nolan clearly understood that, which is why he framed the whole film around a bard telling it. So listening is arguably closer to the original than reading ever is.

Listen on Audible

If audiobooks are already your thing, our Audible guide covers how the credits actually work before you commit to anything.

Value for money

Happily, BFI IMAX prices adult tickets from £12. On top of that sits a £1 online booking fee per ticket, capped at £3 per transaction. Members, meanwhile, save £2.50 a ticket and skip the fee altogether. Premium seats in rows L to N and VIP seats in rows P to Q cost more. Predictably, those vanished first.

Nevertheless, price is not really the obstacle here. Instead, availability is. You are not paying for a film so much as for a format that exists in three UK buildings. The queue reflects that.

For comparison, the Science Museum's Ronson Theatre starts from £14 for the same 70mm print. Meanwhile Picturehouse screenings of the standard 70mm version start from £21.75. In other words, the true IMAX presentation is also the cheaper one, which almost never happens.

Would I travel across the country for an ordinary blockbuster? No. For this, yes, once. Anyone reading an Odyssey IMAX 70mm review is probably willing to make the trip anyway. In this case, making it is the correct call.

Practical info: seeing it in IMAX 70mm in the UK

BFI IMAX sits at 1 Charlie Chaplin Walk, London SE1 8XR, directly outside Waterloo. Access to the auditorium is step-free, and there are four wheelchair spaces. In addition, the BFI listing carries a photosensitive epilepsy warning for sequences of flashing lights.

Realistically, booking is the real obstacle. BFI IMAX has run a long unbroken run of sold-out 70mm screenings. Moreover, every extra date released so far has gone within the hour. As of late July, all three UK 70mm venues were sold out into early September. IMAX is nonetheless keeping the film on those screens well past that. Resale tickets have appeared online at several hundred pounds. That is not a purchase I would encourage anyone to make.

The other two 70mm venues are IMAX: The Ronson Theatre at the Science Museum in South Kensington, and Vue Printworks in Manchester. Finally, if you are building a wider culture habit around trips like this, our National Art Pass page covers a cheaper way to do it.

Odyssey IMAX 70mm review: the verdict

Cool Factor

★★★★☆

4 out of 5

Ultimately, go, if you can get a 70mm seat. Accept, though, that two significant performances will irritate you. Accept too that some faces will sit slightly soft, and that this is the price of the format rather than a failure of it.

Overall, a solid 4/5 Stone cold. The Odyssey earns it on sheer craft. Damon is magnificent, while Hathaway and Leguizamo are perfectly judged. Göransson's orchestra-free score is the boldest music in a blockbuster this decade. Above all, the Circe sequence is the most visceral thing I have seen in a cinema in years, and visually the whole film is beyond beautiful. It misses Ice cold for three reasons. Holland's Telemachus is asked to carry a succession the performance and the script never earn. Zendaya's Athena stays stubbornly human in a role that needs to feel divine. Finally, the digital enhancement lets the practical work down in a handful of wide shots, precisely because everything around it is so real. Here is the twist, though. Nolan built the most advanced camera in cinema history, and the thing it fixed was the fault everybody expected to complain about. The sound is clean, the dialogue is there, and the poetry survives. He solved his sound problem and then handed the future of Ithaca to a boy throwing pots.

The Odyssey IMAX 70mm review: FAQs

Is The Odyssey worth seeing in IMAX 70mm?

The short answer from this Odyssey IMAX 70mm review is yes, provided you get a ticket at face value. The 1.43:1 frame and the celluloid grain give the film a physical presence that standard screens simply flatten out.

How long is The Odyssey?

The official runtime is 172 minutes. However, BBFC records the classified length as 173 minutes and 23 seconds including credits.

What certificate is The Odyssey in the UK?

It carries a BBFC 15 for strong violence, classified on 9 July 2026. Therefore under-15s cannot be admitted, even with an adult.

How much are tickets for The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm?

BFI IMAX starts at £12 for adults, plus a £1 online booking fee. Meanwhile the Science Museum's Ronson Theatre starts at £14. BFI members save £2.50 and pay no booking fee.

Why does The Odyssey look blurry or out of focus?

Mostly physics rather than error. The IMAX 65mm negative, the modified Panavision Primo 65 lenses, longer focal lengths and low-light shooting combine to give an extremely shallow focal plane, so faces can drift soft.

Is the dialogue hard to hear in The Odyssey?

Not in IMAX 70mm, in my experience. The new Keighley camera runs 15 to 20% quieter than previous IMAX film cameras, so far more dialogue was captured cleanly on set. Reports from standard screens, however, have been more mixed.

Is Tom Holland good in The Odyssey?

Not in my opinion. His Telemachus reads too boyish for a character who has to become a king, and the script gives him an arc that appears and disappears without much logic.

Did Christopher Nolan use CGI in The Odyssey?

Very little indeed. The Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, Circe's pig transformation, Scylla and Charybdis were all built or staged practically. Digital work was used mainly to enhance rather than replace.

Who plays Circe in The Odyssey?

Samantha Morton plays Circe. Meanwhile Charlize Theron plays Calypso. Confusingly, some early listings mixed the two up.

Who sings the song at the end of The Odyssey?

"When I'm Home", with James Blake on the hook and Travis Scott rapping the verses. Ludwig Göransson produced it and co-wrote it with Christopher Nolan.

Where can I see it in IMAX 70mm in the UK?

Three venues only. Those are BFI IMAX in Waterloo, IMAX: The Ronson Theatre at the Science Museum, and Vue Printworks in Manchester.

Are BFI IMAX subtitled screenings shown on 70mm film?

No. BFI confirms that subtitled screenings for D/deaf audiences are projected in IMAX with Laser, which is digital.

Is it better than Oppenheimer?

Not in my view. Rather, Oppenheimer is the tighter, more intellectually controlled film. The Odyssey, by contrast, is the more overwhelming one.

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