The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan made this the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, which imposed hard limits on set. A magazine holds 2.5 to 3 minutes of continuous shooting before reloading, and the camera is too loud for dialogue, so it went into a soundproof housing weighing over 300 pounds. The housing stood between the actors like a wall, wrecking their eyelines. The fix was analogue: a mirror rig let them look each other in the eye through the machine, and Matt Damon says he never felt it there. The telling is not chronological. It opens on the Trojan horse and returns to it; the wait in Ithaca, Odysseus recounting his voyage and the years after the war fold into one another, with Travis Scott as the palace bard. In the last stretch Nolan drops the time puzzle and runs the homecoming and the reckoning with the suitors straight. Shooting spread across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Western Sahara and the US. A good fit if you know the poem well enough to track what Nolan foregrounds and what he cuts, and do not mind the first half jumping around. Not for viewers who want the voyage in order from first island to last; the film breaks that order and parcels the route out through whoever is telling it.