Espresso martinis, Greek charcuterie, and a fight: inside my surreal 4 a.m. screening of ‘The Odyssey’
There’s no good time to discover you’ve misread your cinema ticket, but 3:20 a.m. on a Saturday outside the Imax in central London is a particularly bad one.
The film began at 4:15 a.m., not 4 a.m., as I’d previously thought. Those were 15 minutes of sleep I’d never get back, on top of the meager five hours my partner and I had managed before I dragged us across the city in the dark.
“The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic, is the first feature ever shot entirely on Imax film cameras. Only 41 cinemas worldwide can project it as intended, in full 1.43:1 aspect ratio on a 70mm Imax screen.
Three of those are in the UK, and the British Film Institute’s Imax, home to Britain’s biggest screen, is one of them. Hence the round-the-clock screenings, and hence, us, awake before the birds.
Having arrived so early, I was sure we’d find the place deserted.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The atmosphere was electric. The crowd from the midnight screening streamed out, souvenir posters clutched in their hands, rapturous praise on their lips, some drunk, some in a fighting mood.
We bought coffees from the bar and settled in. Looking around the lobby, everyone seemed to have their own way of coping with the hour: caffeine, alcohol, sheer enthusiasm.
In it for the moment
In the bar line, I met Kane and Cameron. For Kane, it was simple: When he booked a few weeks ago, there were “no good options to view it until mid-August,” and, for him, mid-August felt too far away. Three to four hours of sleep seemed a fair price to pay. “Once I’m up, I’m up,” he shrugged.
There was something bigger pulling him in, too. “It’s a Nolan film,” he told me. “There’s one guy that’s doing live sets, real action, real movie making, and it’s this guy.”
“It’s really nice when everybody’s so excited about one thing,” he added. “Moments like this are rare, and Christopher Nolan seems to be in the center of all of these things that feel like moments.”
His friend Cameron had made his own sacrifice to be there. He’d cycled for an hour to reach the cinema.
Method snacking
Elsewhere in the lobby, I spotted Ross and Joseph tucking into a selection of meats and cheese. A bold but deliberate choice. The spread looked Greek, perhaps an homage to the epic poem’s roots, and I told them as much. “That was the thought process, yes,” Joseph said.
They’d booked their tickets on July 1. “We wanted to see it as close to opening as possible, and this was the only screening left,” Joseph said.
As for how they were holding up? Joseph said the hour was “a bit sobering, more so than we thought. But we’re here, we’re feeling energized.”
“Speak for yourself,” Ross joked.
He then clarified that his enthusiasm was undimmed by the early hour. “I’m a big Nolan fan. ‘Oppenheimer’ is one of my favorite films of all time,” he said. “So I’m really excited to see it.”
The no-sleep contingent
Then there were those who hadn’t bothered with sleep at all. Tatiana, Theo, Luke, and Nat were gathered around a round of espresso martinis.
“We’ve been out in Soho,” Theo said. “It’s a fun way to end the night.”
Tatiana said her plan was to “stay up all night and then nap after.”
Expectations were sky-high. Luke had seen ‘Oppenheimer’ at this very cinema, in all its Imax glory, and the group was expecting this one to top it.
Things get rowdy
The early-morning showtime, coupled with what was, for some, an entire night of drinking, predictably led to some excitement. One intoxicated man, who had just seen the midnight show, clashed with a staff member, and a physical skirmish ensued.
The lobby fell silent as everyone watched the fight. The cinema’s staff handled it quickly, and as they escorted the instigator out, he poked his head back through the door to reassure us all: “‘The Odyssey’ was really great!”
I kept forgetting what time it was. The energy was bright, the concession stand fully staffed, the line long. I treated myself to a blue raspberry slushie. Some cinema traditions are sacred, even in the early hours.
Face to face with the big screen
It wasn’t until we found our seats in the third row that the scale of the screen hit me. At 66 feet high and 85 feet wide, it swallowed my entire field of vision. I’d brought a neck pillow, and while craning up at that thing, I was glad I had.
After the trailers, a staff member with a microphone warmed up the crowd. “Who’s ready to see ‘The Odyssey!’” he shouted. We cheered. “You can do better than that!” he shot back. The crowd cheered again.
Then the film started. In my mildly delirious state, with a screen that occupied everything I could see, the boundary between me and the film gave way.
I wasn’t watching “The Odyssey” so much as existing inside it. I have never been so immersed in a film in my life.
So, was it worth it?
When it ended, I stumbled out into the morning light, moved. Moved by the film, by the excitement, by the commitment of my fellow cinema-goers. I was moved, as Kane put it, by the moment.
It may have ruined ordinary cinema trips for me.
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