Imperfection in The Odyssey (Spoilers)

There’s a scene in Nolan’s The Odyssey where Odysseus makes a raft out of the broken pieces of his ship and finally leaves the island of Calypso. Out in the breaking waves he gives up his fate to Zeus, to the fury of the storm. There’s a line that Matt Damon speaks about having to “give up control” in order to (maybe) get home.

I think this scene is a key to understanding, not only a theme of the film, but also aesthetic decisions that Nolan makes in the film, decisions that have gotten him a lot of hate online.

Oceans of digital ink have been spilled on Twitter and Threads complaining about shots in The Odyssey that are out of focus or underexposed. But I think these treatises miss an intentional creative decision Nolan is making. He gave up perfect image control to the analog medium of film.

We live in a world of highly controlled digital images. Every shot in most feature films is color-graded to perfection. Directors and producers are the gods of their images, they can have pixel-perfect instant control over the edit, color, contrast, iso, and exposure. Every copy of a piece of media has the exact same number of bits and bytes as its clone. And yet somehow many of our modern movies feel lifeless.

In a world moving towards sameness and clinical perfection when it comes to images, Nolan went in the opposite direction. He gave up the fate of his images to the beautiful, but imperfect, chemistry of analog film. When you watch the movie, projected on 70mm, there’s a significant portion of it that never touched a computer. You’re only seeing the imperfect “miracle” of chemistry and light. Every print looks a little different. Every shot a little different front the rest.

This is how all movies used to be. I recently went to a showing of Misery at The New Beverly. It was a packed house. I asked for extra butter on my popcorn. The film print we saw projected was an original from 1990. It looked amazing, but it also looked imperfect, more like a dream than a piece of content. There was a rawness to it, a poetic quality that’s hard to put into words. Kathy Bates and James Caan were glowing. It wasn’t clinical. There weren’t DaVinci Resolve “power windows” around ever character’s face trying to fix lighting mistakes (which I’m pretty good at if you need help with that). The filmmakers trusted in the robust qualities of their medium, like a painter would trust in the colors of their oil paints.

I’m sure Nolan is a demanding director, you must be a perfectionist to make the films he does, but he’s also a poet, and in this film it seems he embraces his own themes, giving the image over to “fate”, to a medium he can’t fully control. And I think we have a better film for it. I welcome more of this embrace of imperfection. God knows we need it.