“this summer brings another potential savior from cinema’s yesteryear—the wide release of the director Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk on 70-millimeter film.”
“Nolan, Hollywood’s pre-eminent king of the widescreen epic, has long experimented with photographing his films in the biggest formats possible.”
“Beginning with The Dark Knight in 2008, Nolan has used IMAX cameras to shoot certain sequences in each of his following movies (except for Inception), harnessing the much larger film stock used to capture vistas of Mount Everest or NASA space missions for set pieces like The Joker’s bank robbery in The Dark Knight or Bane’s plane heist in The Dark Knight Rises.”
“The Dark Knight contained 28 minutes of IMAX footage; The Dark Knight Rises had more than an hour, as did Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic Interstellar. Dunkirk, which runs 106 minutes, was entirely shot on large-format film, and will be released in 70-mm projection in 125 theaters around the country—the biggest such release in decades. It’s a major gamble on an old-fashioned way of shooting and projecting movies, one that was standard for epics like Lawrence of Arabia but has long since passed into near-oblivion as theaters transferred to digital-projection formats.”
“The main problem is that 70-mm projection is expensive, and getting cinemas to come around to expensive technology can be difficult.”
“Dunkirk, a World War II film chock-full of aerial battle sequences and daring naval rescues, is much better suited. And if audiences bite, it could be the beginning of a real revival for the format. So far, 70 mm has remained the domain of the auteur; Nolan, Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson (who filmed The Master in 70 mm) have been the only ones to recently embrace it.”
“But there’s no reason it couldn’t become the norm for many an action epic in the future, which, coupled with a comfortable seat, would justify a ticket-price upcharge.”
“Whether or not 70 mm finds wider success, the simple fact is that 3-D, in its current format, is no longer the answer. “We blew it on 3-D,” the former DreamWorks Animation chair Jeffrey Katzenberg said last year.”