A really big show

“The Odyssey” is one of the most-hyped movies in years. We’ve been hearing about it for months, and it finally opened last weekend in Storm Lake and across the nation. The three-hour epic starred Matt Damon and was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who has made some blockbuster movies in recent years, most recently “Oppenheimer,” the 2023 story of the development of the atom bomb.

“The Odyssey” packed movie theaters across the nation during its opening weekend, so we showed up a half hour early at the Vista Theater Saturday evening. But the crowd for the 7:20 p.m. show was smaller than I expected — about 30 people — leaving us plenty of good seats from which to choose in the main auditorium.

The movie was spectacular in its scope. It had to be big to do justice to the 12,000 line poem written by the Greek poet Homer around the 8th Century B.C. We studied it as sophomores in Sister Bernardine’s English class at St. Mary’s but that was 60 years ago so my memory was a little faded when it came to recalling the plot. Basically, the Ithacan king Odysseus heads off on a 20-year adventure fighting the Trojan War and various other death-defying encounters. I won’t spoil it for you by telling what happens, but I might suggest if you know nothing about it, the story takes a lot of turns so it might by helpful if you read a synopsis on Wikipedia before you see the movie.

As for the movie, with ads and previews plus the feature, the total run time was three and a half hours. In the old days, when I was a projectionist at this same theater during the 1960s, these epic movies were known as road shows. If they ran longer than two and a half hours, there would be an intermission two-thirds of the way through the feature so you could answer the call of Nature.

No such luck with Odyssey. We old geezers endured almost as much as Odysseus did during his 20-year adventure. I managed to stay in my seat, but I had to foresight to empty out just before the movie started and only took two sips of water the rest of the night.

Most movies should be able to tell their stories in 100 minutes, but in the case of “The Odyssey” it would be tough to condense 20 years of wandering around the world in less than three hours.

One of the most impressive aspects of this movie is that director Nolan doesn’t like to use computer graphics, so everything you see on screen was photographed without special effects — and it’s pretty amazing stuff, particularly the ocean scenes. Matt Damon, who played the lead role of Odysseus, said it was the most physically demanding work he had ever done. And Damon played the lead in the Jason Bourne action movies. By the way, Damon still looks pretty fit for a 55-year-old father of three.

Most movies nowadays look just fine on modern hi-def TV screens, but for an epic like “The Odyssey,” you need to see it on the Big Screen to do it justice.