Why am I so captivated by The Odyssey, while Marvel has lost its excitement?
How come I feel practically nothing when I watch a new Marvel trailer these days, all while feeling so moved by The Odyssey? The answer has surprisingly little to do with superheroes.
Over the last few years, I’ve been confronted with a certain question a fair few times. One I actually thought I’d figured out a long time ago: why don’t I get excited about Marvel films (and many blockbusters in general) the way I used to?
Pondering the question in an article, I reasoned that it was probably an age thing. I was in my early twenties when the Marvel Cinematic Universe really started to take off. Back then, I’d look forward to every new trailer, analyse every post-credits scene and discuss what might happen next with my friends. Each film felt like a new milestone in an epic journey with a yet-unknown destination. Until Infinity War and Endgame eventually turned it into a pop-culture phenomenon – one you had to have experienced first hand to truly grasp just how big it once was.
Now, watching the trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, I see everything that would’ve made 20-year-old me go wild. Explosions. Superheroes. Dystopian worlds. Laser beams. Entire cities and landscapes rising up, only to crumble away before my eyes.
And the me of today? I sit there, look at the screen and feel astoundingly little.
For a long time, I chalked this up to superhero fatigue – the sense of oversaturation created by a decade packed with superhero films. Or the fact that, after Endgame, Marvel lost that narrative thread that once made the MCU so irresistible. Or maybe my taste in films simply changed. After all, that’d be the most natural thing in the world. When your job involves thinking and writing about films every day, you do inevitably start to see them in a different light eventually.
Then, I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and was just as blown away by it as my colleague Patrick Vogt. Suddenly, I found myself wondering whether I’d been looking for answers in all the wrong places.
When anything is possible, nothing is impressive
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t supposed to be a critique of Marvel. Or CGI. Quite the opposite, in fact. Computer-generated images revolutionised cinema.
When Steven Spielberg made a Tyrannosaurus rex emerge from the rain in Jurassic Park in 1993, we saw something that had never been seen before. In The Lord of the Rings, tens of thousands of warriors clashed outside Minas Tirith. Pirates of the Caribbean turned Bill Nighy into a man with a living kraken for a face. James Cameron took us on a journey through the bioluminescent forests of an alien moon in Avatar, then, years later, through its oceans in The Way of Water.
CGI broke down the physical barriers of filmmaking.
Suddenly, an ancient city no longer had to be built in order to exist. An army no longer needed 10,000 extras. Spaceships could battle each other in an ultra-realistic way, something that wasn’t possible in Star Wars in 1977. (Yes, there were spaceship battles. You know what I mean). Things that were previously impossible due to a lack of money, materials, safety or simply the laws of physics were now being created on a computer.
And we just couldn’t get enough of it.
The problem is, we’ve now seen quite a lot of this. Too much of it. Paradoxically, that’s precisely where the problem lies. A photorealistic space battle is no longer a sensation. Nor is an exploding city. When a superhero is flying through a wormhole as three multiverses collapse behind them, we no longer automatically think, «How the heck did they do that?»
We know the answer: with a computer.
Our brains probably release less dopamine than they used to when we’re watching a pixel-on-pixel battle for the umpteenth time. After all, if spectacle can be scaled at will, it loses its appeal. That’s certainly not to downplay the work of the thousands of artists involved in producing these images. Some of the work they do is insanely labour-intensive. But for those of us watching in cinemas, the limits of what’s possible have disappeared. And with it, part of that sense of wonder.
This has become all the more obvious since I started writing about it professionally. I can now easily spot a green screen. My eye has been trained to spot the difference between the harsh, controlled lighting of a studio – often somewhere totally different to where the film actually claims to be – and the soft, unpredictable lighting of a real filming location.
Take a look at the two images from The Last of Us below. In the first one, it almost seems as if the characters and the background are on two separate layers. The actors’ silhouettes are clearly visible, even though the sun is low in the sky behind them and the sky is almost burnt out. At the same time, the background looks like a massive backdrop that, while impressive, barely interacts with the characters. There are hardly any transitions, hardly any elements between them and the skyline.
Source: HBO
In the second image, it’s exactly the opposite. The landscape and the characters mesh together. The light falls unevenly on their clothes and hair, the grass reflects green and the sky impacts the overall colour temperature of the scene. Rather than looking like a backdrop, the hill looks like the characters could actually walk up to it. Nothing about it looks perfect or controlled. Which is exactly how you can tell it wasn’t filmed in a studio.
Source: HBO
In productions that use LED walls instead of green screens, I sometimes even notice the boundaries of the studio. Despite the fact that a landscape is supposed to be stretching for miles into the distance behind them, the characters appear strangely crowded together in the foreground. In the image below from Avengers: Doomsday, I swear I can tell where the set ends and the LED wall begins: roughly at the characters’ hip level.
Source: Marvel Studios
Once you start paying attention to it, it’s hard not to see it. While the spectacle is still massive, it feels small-scale nonetheless. This has made me think that we aren’t, in fact, experiencing superhero fatigue. It’s more of a weariness with a certain kind of spectacle: the kind that stops our brains from searching for the boundaries of possibility because it knows there aren’t any.
And then there’s The Odyssey.
How Nolan creates spectacular scenes without computers
For years, Christopher Nolan has been known for shooting as much as possible on set. Not because CGI is bad in and of itself. But because he’s convinced that the physical reality of an image can’t be fully simulated. In The Odyssey, he’s followed this philosophy to the point of absurdity.
The film was shot over 91 days on location in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland and other places. The mountains are mountains. The caves are caves. The beaches are beaches. And the sea really is the sea. What’s more, The Odyssey is the first feature film ever to be shot entirely on 70-millimetre IMAX film. New, quieter IMAX cameras and a special soundproof case were developed to allow dialogue scenes to be filmed in IMAX for the first time. In total, about 640 kilometres of film ran through these cameras.
And we haven’t even covered that ship yet.
Source: Universal Pictures
In the film, Odysseus and his men don’t sail on some studio set. Instead, Nolan had the «Draken Harald Hårfagre» refitted. As the largest modern Viking ship of its kind, it’s 35 metres long, made of oak, sports a 24-metre mast and has a sail measuring 260 square metres. The modern elements of the ship were removed for The Odyssey, transforming it into an ancient Greek warship. Some members of its actual crew even starred in the film – someone had to sail the thing, after all.
Incidentally, this is by no means historically accurate. After all, a Viking ship isn’t a Mycenaean ship. But that apparently wasn’t what mattered to Nolan. He was more concerned about its ability to float. To sway. To creak. To react to the wind, water and waves.
You can feel exactly that when you’re watching.
When Odysseus and his men are sailing across the sea, there’s no artificial floor beneath their feet. No digital storm rendered against a green backdrop, with sprinklers simulating rain. The ship genuinely is sailing and being steered by the men you see in front of the camera, struggling and groaning because the ship’s movements can’t be controlled frame by frame. And right in the middle of it all? An IMAX camera weighing 180 kilogrammes.
Nolan himself described the on-sea shoot as almost primal. And he was onto something. Suddenly, this massive Hollywood spectacle has regained something that modern blockbusters surprisingly often lack:
Resistance.
Digital images can do anything, physical ones need to win over the audience
The crux of the matter is: the technical work behind CGI may be enormous, but its limitations aren’t. Reality, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. Ships can capsize. Waves don’t come on command. The wind changes direction. The rain stops just when you need it most. Climbing over scree and trudging through wet sand take a lot of energy. IMAX cameras are seriously heavy, take up a lot of space and force the crew to come up with solutions. Not to mention the fact that you can’t just move a real mountain three metres to the left just to make the composition look better.
In short, reality creates resistance – and that’s precisely why spectacles aren’t scalable at will. The audience feels that resistance, even without watching countless making-of and behind-the-scenes videos. And in my view, that resistance is the very thing we’ve been longing to experience again. The thing I’ve been longing to experience again. Because it gives value to images. It makes them «cost» far more than just money. Suddenly, I’m interested in that one question again:
How on earth did they do that?
Take the clip below from 1917, for example. They could easily have computer-animated 80 per cent of the soldiers. They even could’ve used CGI to double the number of soldiers. But director Sam Mendes chose not to do so. To him, «bigger» didn’t simply mean more computing power. It meant more people, more logistics, more planning, more risk and more improvisation. The physical, resistant world sets limits – and good filmmakers have to get creative to overcome them. The result? One of the most memorable shots in cinematic history.
By the way, this isn’t some nostalgic call to get rid of computers in cinema. That’d be nonsensical. Lord of the Rings worked so well because Peter Jackson seamlessly blended miniatures, masks, real landscapes, motion capture and CGI. One doesn’t have to replace the other, nor should it ever have to. But somewhere down the line, Hollywood forgot why this mix was so important.
CGI was once the tool filmmakers used to expand reality. Today, reality is simply replaced – sometimes even by a single prompt…
This is why The Odyssey feels so grand
Let’s go back to Avengers: Doomsday for a second. I’m looking forward to the film. Genuinely. I love these characters; I’ve spent a considerable part of my life reading their comics, watching their movies and writing about them. When Doctor Doom appears on the big screen and the Avengers reunite, my inner teenager will definitely be punching the air.
The thing is, Marvel can do 100 times more on the big screen today than it could back in 2008 with Iron Man – and yet, to me, it often feels like less.
Maybe it’s not because the superhero format is on its last legs. Or because I’ve gotten older. Nor is it purely because Marvel lost its narrative bearings after Endgame. Maybe the things that inspire a sense of wonder in me have simply changed.
You see, I’m no longer impressed by the impossible, just because someone can depict it digitally. I want to feel that someone could’ve failed at depicting it. That at some point, wind, water, weight, light, materials or simply the laws of physics said, «No. You can’t do that.» And that someone managed to find a solution anyway.
Source: Universal Pictures
In my view, this is precisely why The Odyssey is more than just a triumph for Christopher Nolan. The film also serves as a reminder of what once made cinema so exciting. Not the scale of the picture, but the seemingly impossible physical effort it takes to create it.
CGI once broke down the boundaries of cinema. That was its great revolution. It allowed filmmakers to create worlds that had previously existed only in their minds. Hopefully, a new phase is beginning now. One in which boundaries will become valuable again. After all, in an era in which you can generate any image you want, it’s not the impossible that’s the greatest spectacle.
It’s authenticity.
I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.
This is a subjective opinion of the editorial team. It doesn't necessarily reflect the position of the company.
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