I waited weeks to watch The Odyssey on IMAX 70mm, but didn't expect one big surprise

More IMAX for me, please

04 Aug 2026, 17:00 by Max Freeman-Mills · T3

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I pride myself a little bit on my ability to navigate online queuing systems. If that sounds like quite a faint bit of self-praise, I'd remind you how often hot tickets require running that gauntlet. I didn't expect getting IMAX tickets to be my toughest challenge of 2026, but nabbing an IMAX 70mm for The Odyssey did prove pretty tricky.

After a lot of refreshes and a few false starts, though, I did eventually grab a booking at the BFI IMAX near Waterloo here in London, and saw the movie at last this week, after being forced to wait for a couple of weeks by the impossibility of getting earlier tickets.

I've got plenty of thoughts on the film, now that I've been able to digest it, and plenty of disagreements with that semi-viral Emily Wilson review, too. Nolan's interpretation of a classic story is full of interesting choices, and while I don't think they're all the same decisions or omissions that I'd have made, I can understand the reasoning behind most of them pretty easily.

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What I didn't expect, though, because I guess I'm not paying quite as close attention as I thought, was a surprise before the film even started. It turns out that if you can track down an IMAX 70mm screening of The Odyssey, you'll also get a few minutes of an IMAX 70mm preview from Dune: Part Three before the movie starts.

The preview opens with a thank you from Denis Villeneuve to Christopher Nolan, then dumps the viewer into what can only be a sequence from the intergalactic crusade that Paul and his men embarked upon as the second Dune film ended. It sees Stilgar, one of his most devoted followers, leading the assault on a rain-drenched planet.

In terms of imagery, it's a very clear and deliberate echo of the D-Day landings, made so famous by Saving Private Ryan, as waves of landing vehicles are met with enormous amounts of machine-gun fire and resistance, and it makes the task of being one of Paul's soldiers look frankly terrible.

It also confirms that Dune: Part Three will be just as mesmerising to look at as its predecessors, with CGI that's designed so carefully that it looks photoreal. In this case, a giant defence ship, erupting from the ground and then spraying death, is a great example of how focus and visual design can help the eye see something as genuinely there.

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It looked nuts, basically, and confirms that I'm going to have to try to get another IMAX 70mm booking for Villeneuve's film before the year is out. That said, when The Odyssey began, it was a stark reminder of how expert Nolan is with the format by now – the detail in the frame, and the lighting it employs in certain sequences, is really quite breathtaking.

The stark light in the Calypso scenes, in particular, makes me confident that The Odyssey will be a staple testing 4K disc for TVs when it comes out later this year, with the night-time scenes of Troy's destruction fulfilling the same brief but for darkness and contrast.

Its soundscape, too, is likely to be a good one for soundbar and surround sound testing, with all of the din of the sea and battle, but also some delicate moments. Even in an IMAX screening, it was hard to make out the Cyclops' crooning once wounded, for instance, and I look forward to revisiting it.

So, that two-week wait for a screening feels worth it right now. Laughably, though, the amount of demand for this highest-fidelity IMAX still way, way outstrips the supply. I recently booked another screening of The Odyssey, in the same format but this time at the Science Museum (the other venue with a compatible projector in London), for my second viewing. When? Late October, naturally, and it's still selling out fast.