{"id":19162,"date":"2026-08-16T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T10:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/?p=19162"},"modified":"2026-08-16T07:12:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T11:12:47","slug":"odyssey-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/odyssey-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Odyssey Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’ve heard plenty about the latest moving picture version of Homer’s Odyssey<\/em> since its July 17 release. I probably heard plenty about it before its release but wasn’t paying attention. Information was certainly out there. I’ve learned that 95% of the tickets for pre-release screenings of the movie in select theaters were sold within an hour\u2014one year in advance! The movie made it onto my personal wish list last week when some members of my trivia team said they had seen it and were impressed. They echoed what I’d already heard: You want to see this in the theater no matter how big a screen you have in your living room.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Not to worry. I am not going to attempt to review this movie. There are lots of professionals who have already done that, and many more who will do so far into the future. Although I can’t avoid talking about the movie entirely, I intend just to describe my own experience. Clues in the opening photo suggesting I did not attend a theater showing in my local Ohio neighborhood may not be obvious. Clues in the picture at left are harder to miss.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My trivia teammates had seen the movie at a nearby IMAX theater, and thought that was a pretty good choice. Those select theaters hosting the pre-release showings had all been IMAX theaters. But they weren’t just any IMAX. They were all showing 70mm film. I felt that the 70mm to digital switch at the Cincinnati Museum Center’s OMNIMAX Theater had been a big improvement, if for no other reason than it eliminated floaters caused by dust on the film. Now the experts, including the movie’s director, were telling me that this was the ultimate way to watch Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Apparently what they really mean is 70mm film with 15 perforations per frame (a.k.a. 15\/70mm IMAX). That produces a 1.43:1 aspect ratio, which gives you a really tall picture. 41 theaters worldwide support this format. There are 25 in the United States; None in Ohio. The closest to me is at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>News articles that discuss the different formats, particularly those that mention the near-instant sellout of pre-release viewings, usually also note difficulty in getting tickets to 70mm showings. Indeed, if you go to the IMAX website<\/a> and select the Indiana State Museum Theater, it will show as sold out beyond next week. But for some reason, clicking the IMAX link on the museum’s website<\/a> might reveal some available seats. At least it did on Monday, when it showed a few front-row seats open for most of the week’s showings, despite appearing to access the same page as the IMAX site. Not long ago I accidentally ended up in the front row of a theater where the reclining seats made it tolerable. I hoped for something similar here and purchased the third-to-last seat for Tuesday’s 11:00 showing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>My seat is just beyond the left edge of the picture I snapped when I entered the theater. Not as close as I feared but mighty close. The second picture shows the view from my seat. The projected images in both pictures are just a fraction of the real thing. When the movie starts, it fills that entire wall. Top to bottom; side to side. It was definitely closer than I\u2014and obviously every other ticket purchaser\u2014would prefer, but it was still quite acceptable. The big action that filled the big screen was matched by the big sound that filled the theater. I was more challenged by the seat-shaking rumbling that accompanied most action scenes than by the giant men and beasts projected in front of me. The sudden quiet after a storm or slaughter was always welcome.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>After seeing the newest and probably loudest of the many movie adaptations of the Odyssey, I checked out the oldest and almost certainly quietest. L’Odissea<\/em> is a 1911 Italian silent film. The music used in the YouTube version linked in the image at right has been identified by SoundHound as Edward Elgar’s Symphony No. 1<\/a>. Brightly colored talking, clanking, and booming movies are nice and all, but some of these 115-year-old special effects are, in my opinion, pretty darned cool and are certainly impressive for a time when movie cameras were cranked by hand. Neither the oldest nor the newest nor any of those in between are completely true to the original poem. Every one of them leaves out something, although it seems that no one wants to leave out the Cyclops scene.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Everybody knows that it took Odysseus ten years to reach home after the war ended. Not everyone realizes that the majority of that time was a very unstressful seven years with Calypso. Still, three years of actual travel time is certainly considerable. To be fair, that was approximately 3,200 years ago. Things have changed. This trip was made just the other day, in a modern vehicle, on a land route that was not available to Odysseus and his companions, and from which sirens, cyclopes, and most other monsters have been cleared, in about half an hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve heard plenty about the latest moving picture version of Homer’s Odyssey since its July 17 release. I probably heard plenty about it before its release but wasn’t paying attention. Information was certainly out there. I’ve learned that 95% of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[100,154,50],"class_list":["post-19162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-event","tag-indiana","tag-movie","tag-ohio"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1WE0S-4Z4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19162"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19191,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19162\/revisions\/19191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}