A Trojan soldier actually did slide his sword into the horse between the planks in several places to test that there was no one hiding inside. One of the sword stabs did cut a soldier, who stoically remained silent, while another quick-thinking fellow soldier wiped the blood off the blade with his hand so it came up clean when the trojan soldier withdrew the sword. There was also a significant plot point that the soldier they left with the horse didn’t know the men were inside so that they could sincerely say that it was a religious offering and that sincerity is meant to be part of the ploy. Whether you’re satisfied with that or not, they definitely thought through the question and I thought it was plausible enough for a legendary story.
The coolest looking creatures in the film (giant Arthurian knights -go figure) weren’t even in the book. I guess they were supposed to stand in for the Laestrygonians, the giant cannibals who threw boulders at the ships.
As for the horse, it looked like a bronze casting until we get a closeup of the belly. No wheels, either. They made the Trojans work their asses off to get it into the city.
Nolan made a great movie by going where angels feared to tread. The Odyssey is a very hard book to summarize, and make into under three hours of engaging film. Nolan greatly succeeded, even if purists argue about what he added and removed.
I presumed you were talking about a typical cineplex screen, around 25 feet tall or so. Those screens are so much smaller than the IMAX screens that I wonder if the 70mm film is actually distinguishable from a good digital projection. By pixel size, it doesn’t seem to be so at typical seating distances for 4k projectors, but maybe there are other benefits?
This is more a curiosity for me. As while I did entertain the possibility of watching this if my nearby IMAX had a film version, it sadly went digital over 10 years ago. It’d probably cause me motion sickness anyways, filling that much of my field of vision.
On his Sunday morning program on CNN, Fareed Zakaria interviewed a classics scholar about the movie. The scholar pointed out that Nolan showed Odysseus as feeling guilty over the destruction of Troy, including the desecration of the Temple to Athena and the beheading of the priestess played by Zendaya (along with the beheading of the Athena statue). He pointed out that the Greeks of the time wouldn’t have any sense of guilt over any of this.
They didn’t behead a Priestess. Zendaya was an avatar of Athena and they were heading the statue of Athena in the temple which he imagined as them beheading her actual female form as well.
Wait, what? That is not what I thought happened. I thought they cut the head off a priestess, Zendaya, and then he saw Athena as Zendaya in his imagined(?) version of her.
Right. I assumed an actual priestess who looked like Zendaya was beheaded.
That’s my take away as well. And rather than show that very graphic brutality, Nolan cuts away to the statue beheading at the critical moment.
So the question it leaves, in my opinion, is this; is that really Athena appearing to Odysseus in a form that would feel familiar to him, or is it essentially his PTSD conjuring the person that encapsulate all his guilt?
I think if we viewed the film as purists, of course it’s Athena, as the poem itself has the gods appearing to people just all the time. But given the modernist take that some of the rest of the movie seems to hold, it’s simply Odysseus talking to the guiltiest part of himself.
The feeling I got was that Nolan was all in on the monsters but hedged on the gods who are basically a part of the human psyche. Which is a very modern take on the supernatural.
The nearest ‘real deal’ 70mm film and proper screen sized IMAX theater is 3 hours away. Weekends? Forget it. Almost all the remaining decent, and quite expensive seats are already booked. I might not get to see this, but I want to.
If you can see it in any kind of IMAX format, I strongly urge you to go.
Would it not be better to see it in the best possible format than not to see it?
I’ve been Googling for reviews and recaps of the movie to see if people think that the priestess we saw beheaded was real or imagined, as @Quimby suggested. So far, everyone says that she was real.
And another thing. We saw that Helen was scarred on her left cheek. One review suggested that this was done by Menelaus as punishment for leaving him.
I agree, but at the same time, I can also see a position where Zeus and Poseidon were nearly ever present in the movie. Just as an example, there must’ve been a dozen times, at key moments, that thunder rang out, even when the apparent weather wouldn’t have called for it. And I won’t spoil anything by elaborating on the Poseidon claim, but most certainly the crux of the return home depends on Poseidon.
I don’t think the gods ever directly appeared to anyone in the film. Odysseus saw a vision of Athena, not the real goddess. But it wasn’t meant to be ambiguous whether the gods existed or influenced the world - we see their influence pretty clearly, if nothing else through the monsters they create. But it’s pretty obvious that Zeus and Poseidon are hinted at influencing the real world, though since it’s indirect you can make a case that it’s coincidence.
I think you could have either reading of the temple / priestess scene. It’s plausible they did both - killed a priestess of Athena and beheaded a statue, and the priestess they beheaded was the person Odysseus sees in his visions when he imagines Athena. That thematically makes sense. The strongest thing that probably supports this interpretation is that even though Odysseus has visions that a human personification of Athena is with him, he never has a similar vision of Zeus or Poseidon because he doesn’t have a human form to give them the way he does the slain priestess.
The way the cut the was so jarring from the statue to the woman and back is what made me think she was metaphorical (they definitely desecrated the statue). But I could be wrong.
Okay, I think I see our confusion. Much depends on the specific theater in question, of course, but IME most theaters equipped with a standard (non-IMAX) 70mm projector are not the usual small multiplex screens. Many, if not most, are in older classic cinemas like the late, great Uptown in Washington, DC (1936-2020), which had a deeply curved screen 70 by 40 feet (21 by 12 m). It was the largest in the DC metro area, except for the Smithsonian’s IMAX theaters.
In more modern theaters, the 70mm house is likely to be the biggest in the plex, and have the biggest screen, since 70mm was the premium format. So in general, 70mm screens will be much larger than the average multiplex. And the difference in image quality compared to digital is definitely noticeable.
Of course, even the largest 70mm screens are rarely larger in total area than the average classic IMAX film screens (about 60x80 feet) because of the former’s shorter aspect ratio.
One of the problems with film is that, unlike digital, film prints can become scratched or otherwise damaged if not handled carefully. And given that only a tiny fraction of theaters still have film projection of any kind, the number of skilled projectionists is shrinking as they age and die. I daresay Nolan’s Odyssey has brought hundreds of old projectionists out of retirement.
I don’t watch many IMAX films, but I heard that it is highly recommended that this film be seen in the IMAX format. There are two theaters in my state (Connecticut) that supposedly have IMAX screens. Then I saw this thread and the helpful YouTube video above explaining the difference between the different IMAX formats and quickly realized that the theater I was going to see it in was a retrofitted “LieMAX” screen. In fact, it was the lowest quality 2K IMAX Digital Xenon with a relatively small screen. But the IMAX name must be attracting people, since the theater is almost completely sold out until next week.
(Incidentally, I think IMAX is doing themselves and their customers a disservice by diluting their brand this way. It’s also really confusing.)
Once I realized that I had booked a ticket at a subpar “IMAX” theater, I got a refund on that showing and booked a ticket on the Cinemark XD screen at the same theater. This is 4K at least.
Then I saw that that there is an “IMAX with Laser” screen at another theater about the same distance away. This one is 4K and also has a better aspect ratio. So I switched to that for a showing next week.
The nearest 70mm IMAX screen from my house is more than an hour away in Providence, Rhode Island, and I’m not really willing to drive that far to see a 3-hour movie.
Anyway, I hope all this switching around is worth it!
Not to mention the fact that they are completely sold out for every showing I looked at for the next three weeks.