three masks

materialist-scumbag

So the thing to understand about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is that IMAX has 41 screens in the world that can run 70mm film, and last summer Universal sold out every seat on all of them a full year before the movie existed as a finished object. July 17, 2025, tickets went on sale for July 17, 2026 showings, and by that evening scalpers were flipping them for three and four hundred dollars. For a movie nobody had seen. For a movie that was, at that moment, still shooting.

The scalpers were pricing the projector. Oppenheimer grossed $975 million and made over $190 million of that from IMAX screens alone, off a base of only 30 film-capable locations, and everyone in the industry looked at that number the way a prospector looks at a nugget in a streambed. IMAX built eleven more 70mm installations specifically ahead of this release. Kodak got an order for over two million feet of 65mm stock. The $250 million budget, the biggest of Nolan's career, is partly what it costs to shoot an entire feature on cameras that until this production were too loud to record dialogue near.

And you have to price in the institution that is Christopher Nolan, because at this point he's less a director than a vertically integrated heritage-technology concern. Same wife-producer since the 90s, Emma Thomas, running Syncopy. Same cinematographer since Interstellar, Hoyte van Hoytema, who co-developed the new quieter IMAX cameras for this shoot. Same editor since Tenet, same composer since Tenet. A repertory bench of actors who come back film after film — Elliot Page was his Inception architect, Himesh Patel his Tenet fixer, Bill Irwin his Interstellar robot, all recalled for duty here. When Warner Bros put its 2021 slate on HBO Max day-and-date, Nolan denounced them in the trades and walked, and the deal he extracted from Universal for Oppenheimer — final cut, a cut of first-dollar gross, a guaranteed 100-day theatrical window, a marketing commitment, and a blackout period where Universal wouldn't open competing films — is the closest thing a working director has had to the old studio-founder terms since the United Artists days.

Every studio in town bid. He is, functionally, the last person for whom the theatrical system will reorganize itself, and the year-early ticket sales were the system demonstrating that it knows it.

And nobody built the scarcity on purpose, which is the funny part. IMAX spent the 2000s and 2010s trying to kill 15/70 film — the "LieMAX" digital retrofits, the corporate exit from a format they'd judged commercially dead — and the projectors that survived are museum pieces requiring trained operators who mostly aged out of the workforce when everything went digital, so there's now a small revival trade in men who know how to thread a platter system. Nolan is the reason the remnant exists at all; he was one of the directors who lobbied the studios into propping up Kodak's film stock production back in 2014, when Kodak was in bankruptcy and ready to shut the coating lines, which at the time looked like sentimental preservationism and now looks like a man quietly securing his own supply chain. So Universal inherited a scarcity nobody planned, and then monetized it like they'd planned it: premium formats took 53% of the domestic opening, 58% of the second weekend, and the 25 US theaters running actual 70mm film pulled $29.6 million of a $123.5 million opening frame. A version of the movie that physically cannot be replicated at home or, mostly, in your own city, and airline-pricing logic doing the rest.

People drove across state lines. The meme economy around "seeing it in the right format" did more marketing than the trailers did.

Second weekend came in at $84.5 million, down only 32%, the best second frame Nolan's ever had, better than The Dark Knight, and the analysts who predicted a 60% drop because presales had "burned" the core audience were wrong for an instructive reason: they modeled it as a movie, and it was behaving like a pilgrimage site with limited capacity.

Now, where the movie was made. Troy is Aït Benhaddou, the fortified ksar outside Ouarzazate that has been renting itself out as Everywhere Ancient since Lawrence of Arabia — Gladiator shot there, The Mummy shot there, Game of Thrones shot there. The production added sixty temporary structures including a pillared Temple of Athena and covered two and a half acres, then burned the city down with carefully contained real flames supplemented by banks of portable LEDs. There's a whole Moroccan regional economy, Ouarzazate as "Ouallywood," built on the fact that pre-industrial Mediterranean architecture survives better in the Atlas foothills than in the actual Mediterranean, where people kept living in their cities and renovating them. Ithaca is Favignana, off western Sicily, plus a fifteenth-century castle on a mountaintop that required the crew to climb 900 feet every day for two weeks while helicopters shuttled the equipment. The underworld is Icelandic black sand. The Cyclops lives in a cave in the Peloponnese. A Viking longship replica called the Draken, built in Norway for entirely different heritage-tourism purposes, played the hero boats, with reshoots in the Falls Lake tank at Universal Studios Hollywood, the same tank everything water-related has shot in since the studio system.

(Draken, as in dragon. Which, I dunno, itself feels like a callback to the theory that the Trojan horse was a boat that had the classification "horse.")

And yes, the tax credits: Morocco rebates 30% of qualifying spend, Italy runs one of Europe's most generous production incentives at up to 40%, Greece offers 40% cash back and has been openly advertising itself as a filming destination on the strength of it, Iceland is at 35% for large productions. The itinerary of Odysseus's wanderings, as realized in 2025, is a map of Mediterranean-adjacent states competing to subsidize Hollywood location work. Homer's geography was shaped by Bronze Age trade routes; Nolan's is shaped by finance-ministry rebate schedules. Same sea, same logic, different paperwork.

There was one properly old-fashioned imperial note: some scenes shot in Dakhla, in Western Sahara, which the UN classifies as non-self-governing territory under Moroccan administration, and an open letter signed by Javier Bardem and Pedro Almodóvar among others called for those scenes to be cut as whitewashing the occupation.

They weren't cut. The Trojan War movie has its own small annexation subplot in the credits.

On the movie itself — and I'll cop to this being outside my usual beat, but the material reading and the textual reading converge here in a way I find funny. Nolan cut the "Nobody" trick. The single most famous verbal maneuver in Western literature, the pun that's the whole point of the Cyclops episode, gone. Odysseus gets three ships instead of twelve. Sinon, the liar who talks Troy into taking the horse, is played by Elliot Page as a true believer who doesn't know the horse is full of men, gets betrayed by the commanders he worshipped, and dies, and Damon's Odysseus spends the rest of the film wrecked about it. He watches a girl beheaded in the sack of Troy and hallucinates her for ten years as visions of Athena. The civilizational dread running under everything is the "sea peoples" who sack cities — which the film eventually shows you is the Greeks themselves, is Troy, is the thing Odysseus did. Calypso's seven years become trauma convalescence. Charlize Theron as a residential treatment program with a beach.

Every one of those changes is the same change. Homer's Odysseus suffers because gods are capricious and the sea is big; his cleverness is morally neutral, admired the way you'd admire a good knife. Nolan's Odysseus suffers because of what he did, and the voyage is expiation, and the visions are guilt, and homecoming is contingent on working through it. That's a Christian architecture — sin, penance, absolution — poured into a pagan mold, and before anyone acts scandalized, this is a hundred-year-old renovation project and Nolan just installed the final fixture. Kazantzakis published a 33,333-line Odyssey sequel in 1938 that turns the hero into a spiritual pilgrim. Walcott moved the whole apparatus to a Caribbean fishing village. Louise Glück ran it through a divorce. Madeline Miller gave Circe an interior life and a bestseller, and Emily Wilson's translation was marketed largely on its moral reappraisal of what the poem does to women and slaves. Every generation since the Victorians has caught Odysseus, sat him down, and made him answer for himself, and the people currently shocked at Nolan's guilt-ridden penitent — whether they're mad about it from the classics side or the culture-war side — are a century late to a process that was already finished. What Nolan adds is the current dialect: the trauma plot, which is the secular penance plot, therapy-speak being what confession sounds like after the metaphysics got repossessed. Nolan needed a version of the story a 2026 mass audience would read as morally serious, and "clever man outwits monsters" doesn't scan as serious anymore, and "man destroys a city and cannot forgive himself" does.

The sea peoples reveal is my favorite piece of this, for reasons regular readers can guess. I wrote a whole thing (https://materialist-scumbag.tumblr.com/post/816876109489684480/the-sea-peoples-late-bronze-age-eastern) about how the "Sea Peoples" are basically Ramesses III's press release — a set of uncoordinated symptoms of systems collapse that one Egyptian victory monument bundled into a single barbarian coalition, which we've been citing as a report ever since. Nolan's film does the twentieth century's move in reverse: where Egyptology spent decades mistaking propaganda for an external enemy, the movie makes the external enemy explicitly a projection — the sea peoples the characters dread turn out to be the Greeks themselves, the sack of Troy, the thing Odysseus did. Which is closer to the actual historiography than the textbook version, honestly, the raiders as symptom of what the civilized parties were already doing to themselves. But the film gets there by routing it through one man's conscience. The Bronze Age collapse, an actual cascading failure of trade networks and climate and palace economies, gets conscripted as a metaphor for the protagonist's guilt. Even the fall of civilizations is interior now.

The audience skewed male, 56% overall and over three-quarters of ticket buyers above 25, half the crowd between 18 and 34 — the demographic that's supposedly unreachable for three-hour literary adaptations, out in force for one, provided it was framed as a technical event and a masculinity story. Jon Bernthal's Menelaus, playing the old warrior as a rage case in a marriage that's a live grenade, is by most accounts walking off with the picture, which fits: he's the one character permitted to be what the epic's characters all originally were, a man wholly unembarrassed by violence. The film needs one of those around so the rest of it has something to repent.

The worst thing in it, and there's some consensus forming here, is the climactic fight. Two hours and fifteen minutes of tactile, sun-scoured, shot-on-actual-rocks filmmaking, and then the finale plays like a Marvel third act with Damon's face composited onto the choreography — the weightless blocking, the churned coverage, violence as content. Which has its own material explanation: the fight-scene supply chain is now a global standardized industry, the same previz houses, the same stunt coordination pipelines, the same second-unit grammar servicing every studio tentpole, and a director can control his lenses and his locations and his film stock and still end up buying his climax from the same vendor as everyone else. Nolan spent a quarter billion dollars escaping the digital default in every department except the one where the industry keeps its muscle memory. The suitors die like henchmen.