The IMAX 70mm experience

I saw Christopher Nolan's Odyssey last night at the Seven Bridges' Cinemark in Woodridge Illinois. I wrote this on my notes app right after the movie ended to make sure I can jot down everything I felt in the moment.

Cinemark at Seven Bridges, Woodridge IL

The theater is unusually tall with each row slightly closer to the one behind it than usual. The screen is dusty, yet five-stories tall. It engulfs you. You need to move your head to see every corner of it, your peripheral vision still fails as you keep your eye focused in the center of the frame. Nothing important in the scene is ever out of the widescreen subframe, you wouldn't really miss much if you only saw the 16:9 around the main scene. Still, there's enough contextual addition in the remainder of the taller, 1.43:1 screen, be that the bow the hero is holding by his waist, or the waves of the ocean washing over a beach.

Everything is infinite — the sands, the seas. Occasional flashes of lightning illuminate every seat. You feel the sheer verticality of the 70mm film turned to its side. Faces are larger than life, and a giant Cyclops even bigger. The only distractions are the heads of the audience members sitting right in front of you. The screen never goes truly black. Shadows tend to fall into the low greys at best. The depth of field is razor thin, with out of focus parts falling off focus as if from a cliff. Everything is magnified — the grains of dust on the film, tiny strands of hair that slipped in accidentally into the projector. You sense the slight flicker of each frame passing through the projector light, 24 of them every second. You can see when the focus puller missed the mark by a touch, but the moments when the focus is locked in, the sharpness is palpable.

The audio reverberates through your bones. The score shakes the screen. Somehow, it's still crisp enough to tell the dialog apart. You don't need subtitles. You don't want subtitles. They would only pollute the experience.

Is this how it was intended?