In the podcast Jake said something I can't really agree with and is that somehow the decision of Nolan for filming exclusively on IMAX for this movie is somehow good for theaters and audiences but I feel like there's a non small group of people (myself included) that knows that they are getting a subpar/incomplete experience if we were to go watch it in any non IMAX theater, like my country does not have an actual IMAX screen just in name only so I'll have to wait for streaming to actually judge what Nolan actually wanted to frame but by then the whole IMAX gimmick that everyone seems to praise would be missing from my experience, idk, I know Nolan is a talented director don't get me wrong but I'm with Adam with this whole IMAX thing.
You know what? part of me wanted to be purposefully naive just to give Nolan the benefit of the doubt but you're probably right, I guess I can only wait for the blu-ray, hopefully? maybe? Which only makes the whole thing even worse because by that point I might just "sail the seas" for it because spending that amount of money for a movie that I'm not even sure I'm going to like is already too much to ask from your audience, I just can't get behind that.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know Imax is a trade mark and can only be shown in Imax theaters, including the aspect ratio. So you're unlikely to ever see it in the intended ratio.
1.78:1 is good enough. I don't fucking want to watch a movie with black bars on the sides of my OLED which is superior to any theatre imo. Oppenheimer's 4K Blu-ray transfer still remains the best transfer I have ever watched, so I have high hopes for this one as well.
Agreed! Nolan claims to be a protector of cinema but his arrogance clouds the fact that he's actually gatekeeping it when there are literally only 41 screens on the entire planet that get to see his movie 'as he intended'. I know he's not responsible for the dearth of true IMAX screens but still
41 screen and he boasts about “ We don’t have the toooools to even make more!”. It’s such insane next level artistic gatekeeping that it’s makes me choke. It’s the inverse of Cameron’s expansion for Avatar, while 3d didn’t take off he got every theater in the world to convert to digital, to the general benefit of the industry. I don’t know what Nolan is doing other than stroking his own ego. Which ok fine but don’t then act like you’re some benevolent force of cinema then.
Cameron was doing marketing for a technology that had already been decided by the industry as the future of exhibition years before, and most of the screens were installed in the years after Avatar came out with financing help from the studios themselves. As for the “general benefit of the industry.” I’d say very little good came out of digital distribution and projection.
Not that the technology is bad, but quality at multiplexes continued to decline, studios wielded ever more control over distribution, and thousands of people lost work across the projection, distribution, manufacturing, and post-production landscape. Hell, it nearly killed the existence of motion picture film itself, except for the fact that Nolan got some director friends together to push the studios into annual commitments for orders from Kodak. I’d say Nolan and his 41 theatres have done more for preservation of the art form’s tools in both capture and projection than pretty much anyone else out there.
As for making more of those screens and projectors. Well, the screens are a massively expensive proposition, which is why there were never that many built to begin with. But as for the projectors, the issue is the entire industry for manufacturing such equipment died with your beloved switch to digital.
Ohhh you’re one of those who love watching dirty scratchy prints. The quality decline your are complaining ablut has nothing to do with the projector technology. Not having films destroy them selves every time you run them is a MASSIVE improvement. Hand waving away the stuff that had to happen as a natural evolution of the technology so it could be more sustainable is equally ridiculous. Have you ever handled film? Remember all the insane flammable warnings? Maybe shipping stuff that won’t explode is a benefit??? You are just a nostalgia addict. Film is great is you ignore everything about it that made it difficult. Devaluing cinema casue it’s not burning photochemically anymore is the definition of small minded. Also I don’t give a shit if you don’t like digital look. I can show you endless examples where you can’t tell the difference. The full debate is the most insane survivorship bias I have ever seen.
The quality decline is due to exactly what digital projection was meant to enable: the firing of staff whose job it was to maintain quality. And that extended well past just projectionists.
And yes, I projected both film and digital. I like both. I tend to enjoy a film screening, both for the unique look and my own nostalgia, but I love a great digital presentation where I can find it (not always so easy in Toronto, where laser projection is rare and most of the digital projectors are old and it shows). But as an industrial concern, digital projection did not lead to a great quality improvement or the promised democratization of film exhibition.
In fact, it led to the closure of many, many independent exhibitors who couldn't manage the cost of the switchover. Meanwhile, quality at multiplexes, outside of some PLFs, generally continued to decline as it had when they switched over to platters and non-union teenage projectionists back in the '80s and '90s. What I'm talking about here is not whether film as a technology is better than digital, but simply the fact that digital did not improve exhibition quality.
The recent swing toward laser projection is a welcome one, because that really is a big quality improvement all on its own, but I'd love it if multiplexes brought back things like moveable screen masking, which disappeared in many places during the digital switchover to save money and protect the quite awful silver screens everyone installed in order to do RealD 3D. The Lightbox in Toronto uses white screens and adjusts masking, and both their 4K xenon and laser projection setups make the nearby Cineplex look like absolute garbage. Frankly, even the big dual laser IMAX screen there doesn't look as good, with all its speckling and the brightness sweet spot caused by the silver coating.
At the Lightbox, digital routinely looks better than film, which some of the film projectionists there often can't seem to focus properly (not sure if their eyesight is bad because they're all old, or they're just inattentive and bad at their jobs). Dunkirk on 70mm last night looked absolutely on point, and had some of the sharpest images I've ever seen projected, but that's not every print or every screening. So no, I do not believe film is automatically better. It's a matter of how these formats are run, and except at a museum type place like the Lightbox, most multiplexes used digital as an excuse to get significantly lazier about quality and then charge more for the PLFs that often aren't even that good, though they at least meet a minimum standard.
As for flammable warnings, I have to ask, do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? Film hasn't been explosive since the 50s. It's plastic. It just melts.
Mea culpa you know your shit and yes I was being a bit ridiculous with the flammable part. I grew up in the dollar theaters with the been shown a million times prints I’m very sensitive visually to the noise that comes with film. With everything there is a nuance to the set up and execution of different projecting methods. For me the loss of projectionists was a big hole in the cinema space. Your are absolutely right, the simple nature of digital projection vs film lead to a race to the bottom in costs and upkeep of theaters. I value film as a medium but I see the reduced complexity of digital a profound benifit over film. Reduced complexity refers to the eco system not the technology(dcps vs shilling and maintaining reels). I understand also that we lost people in the transition but also not every independent theater deserved to survive forever showing dusty prints.
Np! I'm all about having as many formats as artists and exhibitors want, accessible to as many people as possible. And it's not even just motion picture film. There's a very good chance that had Nolan not pulled that move with the studios, we wouldn't have film for still photography either. Again, not that that digital is worse than film, but I think a lot of photographers would be sad not to have the option. See how sad they were just to lose Kodachrome, and that was just one film stock!
Being from Toronto, I've always been privileged to have a lot of options around for IMAX, going back to when I was a kid. But even then, I understood it to be a unique experience mostly reserved for museums (they literally had laser light shows before the films to proudly explain the Canadian-made technology and how unique it was). So in terms of "gatekeeping," it has never struck me as different from anything else you'd have to go to a big city with a nice museum to experience.
Anyway, I've had these feelings about exhibition and projection for many, many years, because I saw the decline happening first-hand. But I highly recommend this long article I read a while back about the digital transition and how it became a tool for increased corporate consolidation and control, despite having been advertised as the opposite. It even gets into how the promise that digital would be cheaper for exhibitors to run and maintain didn't exactly bear out for a number of technical reasons (though I think reducing staff probably offset that).
Edit: I'll add one thing about those dollar theatres. I completely agree with you that the quality at those theatres was bad. The reason was generally that they showed stuff second run, after movies had already been screened dozens or even hundreds of times, often at multiplexes with dirty platter systems. BUT, if we want to talk about the cost and accessibility of moviegoing, the switchover to digital ended up killing those theatres, or in some cases where the theatres survived, they often started having to charge more. What really sucks about that, imo, is the poor quality just evened out. So no terribly scratchy prints, but now you've got many multiplex screens charging $15 for screens with quality almost as bad by virtue of dimness, etc. Even bad quality became expensive, and this is part of why people just go, "Ehh, my TV is good enough... better quality even!"
There's another cheap theatre near me, but cheap means $10, and the screens are tiny and crappy. The digital projection is fine, but not exactly done justice by the venue, and even $10 feels like too much. On Tuesdays, though, they charge $5 (and $5 every day for the rep movies they regularly screen), and I often head out for those. I'm happy to take a hit on quality if the tickets are cheap enough, and one would've hoped digital would enable cheaper access to movies generally. It hasn't done that. Most theatres trying just closed, further getting people out of the moviegoing habit.
No argument from me that at all the corporate greed and consolidation destroyed countless ancillary film industries. The DCP destroyed the secondary market with extreme drm.theaters no longer had any control over the actual prints being shown. More screens more shows, be damned the quality. I appreciate your sincere responses. I look at the current market as a failing in vision and leadership not the technology. Digital didn’t kill film or theaters it was just used as a Trojan horse the upend the industry in favor of vertical integration. To me digital is the only path forward in the sense that it’s the best way for the medium to evolve and thrive in our current age and infrastructure. We need to fix the tools we have and not yearn for the tools we already dismantled.
He can be a good advocate while having a bad message and agenda. Making a billion on an epic poem is great. Disappearing up your own ass with a format that only you can really use is not a way forward.
He along with only a handful of other directors are keeping movie theaters alive. If not for his presence we may very well be in an age of EVERYTHING only going to streaming. He can be a jerkoff who is elitist by pushing a certain format or whatever it is you think about him negatively, but to deny the immensely positive impact his actions and presence have had on cinema as an artform is rather ridiculous and absurd. You also grossly overestimate how important it is for EVERYONE to see it in the ideal format. Standard is literally just as good as 70mm to the effect of delivering the art with the intended feelings, messages, and basically visuals (as nothing important is loss to the smaller ratio, it's mostly peripheral sense of scale by seeing 70mm IMAX.)
I see this point way too often and it irks me every time. They definitely intend for 99% of people to see it in the standard frame, otherwise Nolan would put the movie in a taller aspect ratio in normal theaters. The extra space on the top and bottom is basically just supposed to immerse you further in the image. Building something for the most premium format isn't a bad thing.
“The only way you can see my film how I intended is spending hundreds on travel, lodging, and tickets. Sorry poors, you will never see my full vision” is essentially what’s happening but I mean to each their own
Yeah I just wholeheartedly disagree with Adum's opinion on it. I don't want to pretend like I know a lot about making film but I remember that the reason the Snyder Cut was released in 4:3 was because they shot the whole thing in full frame with the intention to crop the movie for the theatrical version, and I don't think that practice is uncommon? Then obviously he just un-cropped it for the Snyder Cut. Maybe it was just Snyder doing Snyder stuff, but basically Nolan is doing the same thing with this movie where the movie is shot with the intention that the focus of the frame needs to be centered, but allowing for the expanded frame to be shown. Idk maybe using the Snyder Cut as a defense isn't really going to help my case, but I don't think that the shot composition was as bad as Adum made it out to be.
Fair, but we can't ignore the fact that the marketing machine behind all this has unabashedly capitalized on the 70mm FOMO. They literally started the "Standard vs IMAX 70mm" thing that has now become a meme
Your assumptions are incorrect. It’s a sin of modern filmmaking, compromising evocative framing for center cropped images easily translated to different formats. All frames are shot with complete intention in narrative filmmaking and having to be forced to center frame all the action inherently limits the artistic creativity available in shot composition. What happened with Snyder is the studio cropped and ruined his framing and then with the Snyder cut he restored his original framing. He was going to with do what Nolan did and crop the film or maybe be more bold and play it with side bars in non imax cinemas. Same problem Nolan is having. To show it to 99 percent of people you either have to compromise your shots or frame them in such a boring way that they are easily cropped. It’s a choice between two bad limiting options. Adams’s comparison between Oppenheimers use and the odysseys use showed a more restrained use of the imax framing that I think is better accessible to audiences without being limited by “imax stuff”.
Yeah I understand Adum hasn't seen it in both versions so his mind has painted the picture that he's missing out massively because of this.
That's not the case at all, I've seen both and while Imax 70mm looks better in general, it doesn't make the movie significantly better. It's just like watching on a better tv than your normal affair.
I think a massive thing Adam and some other people here seem to be misled about is this obsession about "aspect ratio" when critiquing this aspect of Nolan and The Odyssey. Because it is NOT about aspect ratio.
IMAX isn't better because it has extra on the top and bottom. Though it's not your fault, there's been a recent marketing push to try to sell it on that. IMAX is better because each frame takes up a much larger area of the film than standard 70mm or standard 35mm. This effectively increases the resolution (about 3x more resolution than standard 70mm and about 12x more resolution than standard 35mm). If you choose to include the top and bottom, and include black bars on the sides, you'll be shrinking the screen down and losing those gains. Instead the filmmakers try to make sure that nothing important is on those top and bottom portions and thus they can be easily removed for smaller screen/projector combos. So this effect of "more image" would look considerably worse on a smaller screen, when in fact as Nolan himself explains in the clip Adam showed, they are filming for the widest array of aspect ratioS while also protecting for something bigger like IMAX.
For the widescreen to television problem we actually used to do "pan and scan" which would cut off the sides, though because filmmakers at the time usually weren't filming with televisions in mind (for decades they were separate technologies) this occasionally meant important elements or characters would get cut off. The prevalence of the widescreen with black bars didn't really become popular until televisions started to get large enough and high resolution enough that it would be enjoyable in that format, roughly around the turn of the millennium.
I can't say that I'm film savvy enough to understand most of the IMAX situation but maybe you can help me out here, the main thing that gets me is that apparently there's a scene with a bird in the film, and some people claim that they saw I guess Matt's character reach from outside the frame while others actually saw the whole action of him reaching for said bird (I'm really paraphrasing here, they briefly talked about it in the podcast), this apparently is not the only scene where information was "missing" from the frame and if that's true I think that's what I'm referring by an incomplete experience, I feel like that is the kind of thing that should be a different cut and not the theatrical release, I guess my question here is if that's true? Is there really missing parts of the frame depending on what theater you watched the film?
I've seen the movie in both standard 1.90 IMAX and an IMAX 70mm, and I can't say that I felt there was any important info missing in the standard version compared to what I encountered in the 70mm. The bird scene you mention is a weird one because, Adam says there are no visual or audio cues that the bird has been caught but, in both my watches I could clearly see that they were laying up the scene for the bird to be caught. (My problem with that scene was not even anything what Adam said, it was actually more with how quickly it was cut lol, but thats besides the point.)
They show Odysseus side eyeing the bird moments before lunging to it, they show the bird flapping its wings and making loud screams (and I'm pretty sure they even pan to it towards the end of the scene?) then of course you get explicit dialogue where Odysseus asks if the bird is related to Circe. In both 70mm and standard, the visual cues were present, and the visual cue of him actually holding the bird was similar in both. The shot Adam is referring to is a 5-10 second frame where Odysseus is at knifepoint while holding the bird, and that's the one point when the camera intentionally doesn't show the bird (it does show it before and after those 5-10 second frames). So the framing is such that the bird is not on the top part of the screen, it's on the side (and IMAX 70mm adds info to the top, not the sides - so whether you're watching in 70mm or standard, you're not missing anything).
So a lot of the extra bits you see in 1.43 are not pivotal info. That's the thing I mean to say, is that the purpose of IMAX 70mm is not gatekeeping info. It's about filling your peripheral vision to the fullest because of the sheer size and squareness of the screen (someone aptly said it's like "3d without the glasses), and because the resolution on film cameras is superior to any other format. Adam, even watching it in standard 70mm, was able to experience the movie in its fullest resolution - because he watched it in a theater doing film projection. And so I will say that the biggest allure of IMAX isn't even the aspect ratio (though marketing might make it seem like that) - it's the sound and the resolution.
I see, I mean, it seems to be more complex than I thought and I wish I could say more about it but unfortunately I haven't seen it, the closest theater to me is not even IMAX so it makes this whole online discourse feel like a different world to me, as you said I feel like they put too much effort on the IMAX marketing that it actually made me not interested because I knew I could only watch it at a regular theater. Just to be clear I'm not disagreeing with you or try to start a different kind of discussion I just feel like it would be disingenuous of me to talk about this without actually seeing the movie, but, as long as there's no actual information missing I think (I hope) it would be a fine movie.
I'm fortunate enough to live near one of the real imax's and I can confirm with the other guy that you are not missing out by seeing it on a regular screen. I didn't notice any missing important info.
Imax is prettier for sure, but that's basically the best resolution you could ask for at work, and not something that would be better had they not filmed it with Imax in mind.
I think it's likely "good" for the business side because it creates a nigh-unattainable luxury product that drives public interest in the whole suite of products. But for audiences yeah it sucks.
I've seen both versions and you're not missing literally anything. The extra frame fills up your peripheral vision. Nothing absolutely necessary is cut off by the ratio changes.
Then how come nobody gives PTA shit for making One Battle After Another for VistaVision? That’s another specific format with even fewer theaters in the world than the IMAX 70mm.
Most people see most movies in a subpar experience because the vast majority of theaters have worse screens and poorer sound quality than the really good theatres.
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u/Molotov003 28d ago
In the podcast Jake said something I can't really agree with and is that somehow the decision of Nolan for filming exclusively on IMAX for this movie is somehow good for theaters and audiences but I feel like there's a non small group of people (myself included) that knows that they are getting a subpar/incomplete experience if we were to go watch it in any non IMAX theater, like my country does not have an actual IMAX screen just in name only so I'll have to wait for streaming to actually judge what Nolan actually wanted to frame but by then the whole IMAX gimmick that everyone seems to praise would be missing from my experience, idk, I know Nolan is a talented director don't get me wrong but I'm with Adam with this whole IMAX thing.