The Odyssey 2AM Screenings in Imax 70mm: Inside My All-Night Adventure

The weather was mythical.

Ninety-something degrees in Manhattan, with Canadian wildfire smoke painting the sky a hazy orange. It smelled like a barbecue of rotten onions; the air was a spritz of acid to the eyes. “Stay inside,” warned the weather app.

The gods hath forsaken us, I thought on the opening night of “The Odyssey,” washing me and 650 other castaways onto the shores of the Upper West Side, where a 2 a.m. screening of the Christopher Nolan epic in Imax 70mm was playing to an entirely sold-out room.

If staying up all night at the movies sounds crazy, then the Lincoln Square AMC was a psych ward. It should be noted that this screening was not a novelty — a one-off, all-night experience for Nolan nerds and Classics majors. No, AMC has set up 2 a.m., 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. screenings through the film’s fourth weekend to meet the demand for Imax 70mm. The theater chain is showing the three-hour film six times a day in the premium large format, which is only available in 25 cinemas in the U.S.

These tickets, in other words, were hard to get. (According to Imax, this multiplex has sold “essentially every single seat for all showtimes scheduled between midnight and 3 a.m.”)

Around 1 a.m., as I socialized with the other insomniacs outside the theater, it became apparent that while “The Odyssey” is what brought them here, the film projection technology was the real star. Asked why they chose to forgo sleep on a week night to experience the Homer adaptation, the first words out of everyone’s mouth were not “Christopher Nolan” or “Matt Damon” but “Imax 70mm.” More important than the cast or the logline was the fact that “The Odyssey” is the first movie ever shot entirely on Imax film.

“I need to see the movie the way Christopher Nolan intended it to be seen,” said a 30-year-old New York resident named Christian. “Even though this is going to fuck my Friday.”