Oppenheimer launched a new debate about ‘true IMAX’ — but does the format matter?
Christopher Nolan said it himself: Watching his movie Oppenheimerwill basically ruin your life, and might even make you feel like you’re being blown up. If Nolan fans really want that kind of overwhelming experience, they likely want to watch the film in Nolan’s preferred format. His biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who spearheaded the development of the atomic bomb, asks the audience to stare the destroyer of worlds right in the face, and Nolan thinks the best way to do that is in 70mm IMAX film — or as some die-hards call it, “true IMAX.”
The director calls IMAX film “the Gold Standard of motion picture photography” and suggests that it’s the best way to see his movies. TheIMAX website promotes 30 screens across the world that are showing the explosive film in IMAX 70mm for a limited time. (For contrast, there are roughly 39,000 screens in America.) But 15 years after Nolan’s The Dark Knight introduced Hollywood to the format, which was previously used primarily for science, education, and showcase movies, it seems as though it’s getting harder and harder to parse what “true IMAX” really means.
There are three aspects to the label. IMAX is a mode of presentation: the specific proprietary projection and sound systems that the IMAX company uses to display a film. As Nolan states, it’s also a mode of motion picture photography — specific types of cameras and film stock typically used to capture spectacular imagery. And finally, IMAX is a brand — a corporation that has changed its self-definition over time, whether through the digital medium’s takeover of cinema or as IMAX has expanded across the world, engaging in the grand capitalist tradition of offering an increasingly diluted product in exchange for an
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