Why Christopher Nolan Will Never Make an IMAX Epic of Karbala

The drums are still in my body. I have just walked out of a cinema in Kathmandu, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has not released me. The timpani still shudders somewhere behind my ribs.

The great groaning wood of the Trojan Horse still slides through breached gates at the edge of my vision.

On screen, for nearly three hours, Matt Damon’s Odysseus moved through a world of monsters and gods and long, punishing exile, and I sat there, in the dark of a multiplex in a Himalayan city, utterly captured. I admire Nolan. I have for years.

There is something almost stubborn in his commitment to the physical -- the rotating hallway in Inception was not digital trickery but a set built to spin, the cornfield in Interstellar was actual corn planted for the shoot, and for Oppenheimer he recreated the Trinity test not with a real nuclear blast, as many assumed, but with conventional explosives, magnesium flares, and forced perspective.

No CGI. Just craft. The result felt so viscerally true that audiences left theaters convinced they had witnessed the sublime horror of the bomb.

This is his gift: Making the impossible sensorily present, giving spectacle the weight of lived experience. Watching The Odyssey, I felt the wine-dark sea. I felt the Cyclops’ eye resist, then yield.

I understood, in my body, why his cinema commands the devotion it does. But something else stirred beneath the admiration, a restlessness I could not name until I stepped outside.

Into the Kathmandu evening. Into the dust and temple bells and the distant, snow-bearing silence of the Himalayas. Into a city that holds its own living epics, its own unbroken traditions of narrating the sacred.

I pulled out my phone. A United States president was threatening to bomb mountains in Iran. Not metaphorical mountains. Real ones.

The language was casual, posted as though announcing a product launch, and the threat was not against a military target alone but against the deep time of a civilization -- the strata of poetry and philosophy and prophecy layered into rock over millennia. A threat of erasure, delivered in the grammar of a tweet.

I stood there, my body still vibrating with Homer by way of Hollywood, and felt the two images press against each other: The epic of the West, rendered in IMAX glory, and the civilization the West now openly threatens to annihilate.

What connects them? What does it mean that one story gets the full sensory apparatus of global cinema -- the drums, the frame, the budget, the distribution -- and another story, equally vast, equally foundational to millions of human beings, remains outside the multiplex entirely?

The Odyssey is often called a foundational text of Western civilization. But lately, a sharper reading has emerged.

The historian Bret Devereaux, writing in Foreign Policy, argues that Nolan’s film is not a straightforward celebration of heroic violence but a conservative, almost Burkean critique of civilizational collapse.

In this reading, Ithaca before the suitors was a wholesome society, its order sustained by long-standing norms of reciprocity and obligation.

The catastrophe comes not from structural injustice but from the violation of those norms -- the suitors’ rapaciousness, their cruelty to strangers, their rupture of the bonds between men.

Nolan, Devereaux writes, self-consciously positions himself as speaking for Western civilization and its literary canon, using Homer’s story to indict the very ruthlessness and machismo that now threaten us from within.

“We are the sea people,” he concludes, “who, with our inhumanity and rapacious greed, have become the barbarians at our own gates.” It is a sophisticated argument, and it captures something genuine in the film.

Nolan is no crude celebrant of slaughter. His Odysseus is haunted, his violence heavy. The film mourns what is lost. And yet -- notice the shape of the mourning.

The catastrophe, in this conservative lament, is the violation of norms. The solution is their restoration. We must return to the bonds that once held us, remember the old ways, rebuild the fence that the suitors tore down.

The frame remains entirely internal to the West’s self-understanding: We have betrayed our own traditions, and our salvation lies in reclaiming them.

What if the traditions themselves are the problem? What if the fence was never just? What if the hero’s task is not to restore Ithaca but to witness against it?

I want to tell you about another story. It takes place on a desert plain in Karbala, in the year 680 of the Common Era. The Euphrates glitters in the distance, close enough to see, deliberately blocked by an army of thousands.

Inside a small encampment of tents, seventy-two companions -- men, women, children -- wait with a man named Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. He has traveled here knowing what awaits.

The army facing him demands his allegiance to a caliph he believes illegitimate, a ruler whose claim to power rests on brute force rather than justice. Hussein refuses.

He has been refusing for days. His water supply has been cut. His children are thirsty. The army is immense, well-armed, impatient. And still he does not kneel.

What happens next is not a battle in any conventional sense. It is a slaughter, and Hussein walks into it with open eyes. He does not believe he will win.

He believes that bearing witness against tyranny with his life is itself the victory. By sunset, his body will lie on the sand, and a story will ignite that has burned for fourteen centuries, a story that millions carry as a living template for how to stand against overwhelming, unjust power.

Every year, pilgrims walk toward his shrine in numbers that dwarf any gathering in the Western world. They weep. They beat their chests. They recount the thirst, the waiting, the broken bodies, the head raised on a spear.

They do this not because the story is tragic but because the story is true, and the truth it carries is that power and legitimacy are not the same thing, and never have been. This is Karbala.

And Christopher Nolan will never make an IMAX epic of it. He won’t. He can’t. The word that matters is incapable -- not as a judgment of his talent, which is immense, but as a diagnosis of the aesthetic and ideological machinery he has mastered.

Think of what Nolan’s cinema is built to do. It takes time and bends it into architecture. It takes the hero’s interior journey and projects it outward as spectacle.

It builds toward climaxes that resolve, that restore, that give the audience the deep satisfaction of seeing order emerge from chaos. Even in his darkest films, there is a narrative pay-off.

You leave the cinema full. Karbala does not fill. Karbala empties. Its time is not psychological but liturgical -- it does not ask what will happen next, because the audience already knows.

The tension is not in suspense but in witness, in the unbearable accumulation of what is certain: the thirst, the waiting, the inevitability, and the choice to remain. The hero does not triumph. The hero loses, willingly, and the loss is the point. The camera, in the traditions that have filmed Karbala -- in Iran, in Lebanon, in Turkey -- does not swoop and drive.

It lingers. It gazes. It holds the frame long enough for the viewer to become not a spectator but a participant in grief.

The aesthetic is devotional, not spectacular. The climax is not a resolution. It is a rift in history that remains open, weeping, demanding justice across centuries.

Now imagine the studio notes. Can we make the battle more even? Give him a fighting chance? A rousing speech before the charge? A last-minute rescue that almost works?

The entire machinery of Hollywood narrative would conspire to turn Hussein into Odysseus -- to turn witness into suspense, to turn martyrdom into a problem to be solved by a clever third act.

And in doing so, it would destroy exactly what makes the story sacred. The form would hollow out the content, or the content would shatter the form. There is no third option. This is not a flaw in Nolan.

It is a limit written into the civilizational operating system. The West can tell the story of the clever hero who suffers and returns and slaughters his enemies because that story confirms its deepest assumptions: That order is good, that violence in service of order is justified, that the hero’s perspective is the one that matters.

Even when it mourns its own brutality, as Devereaux rightly sees Nolan doing, the mourning takes the shape of a longing to restore what was lost -- a return to the old norms, the old bonds, the old fence.

Karbala offers no such comfort. Hussein does not call for a return to wholesome tradition. He calls for a witness against a tradition that has become tyranny, a social order whose norms are themselves the violence.

The sea people are not at the gates. They are on the throne. And the hero’s task is not to restore Ithaca. It is to testify against the palace, even with his life, and to call the loss victory.

The American president threatens to bomb Iranian mountains. He can do this, in part, because the culture he speaks from has spent millennia learning to narrate its violence as restoration -- and, when necessary, as a tragic but necessary defense of civilization against the barbarians at the gate.

The bombs are always, somehow, a homecoming. The suitors always deserve to die. Nolan is not a propagandist. He is a supreme artist of the mythic infrastructure that makes the unspeakable speakable, that nourishes the aesthetic soil in which empire’s violence grows as naturally as olives.

His Odyssey does not cause the bombing threats. It makes them feel, to the civilization that issues them, like the natural order of things—even when it weeps for the bloodshed.

I am writing this from Kathmandu. This is not a decoration. It is the vantage point that makes the argument possible.

From here, the West’s cultural machinery looks different -- not universal, but provincial. Not the default setting of humanity, but one tradition among many, one that mistook its own reflection for the world.

This city holds epics I cannot claim to fully understand. It holds living relations with the sacred that predate and will outlast the multiplex. The eyes painted on the stupa at Swayambhunath look out in all four directions simultaneously -- not at you, but through you, at the vast interdependent web of suffering and liberation that includes you without centering you.

That gaze is the opposite of the IMAX frame. The IMAX frame pulls you into its center; the eyes of the stupa decenter you, gently, relentlessly.

To imagine a post-Western world is not to erase the Odyssey from cultural memory. It is to place it in a larger gallery. To see its frame. To notice what the frame excludes. And to realize that the exclusion is not natural but constructed, maintained, and, when necessary, violently defended. The drums have stopped.

Outside the cinema, the evening settles. On my phone, the news cycle churns. And I am thinking: What would it take for the multiplexes of the world to screen an epic where the hero loses, willingly, and the loss is the victory?

What would it take for the West to see itself not in the returning ship, sails full of divine wind, but in the thirsty, outnumbered, witnessing dead on the plains of Karbala? Christopher Nolan will never make that film.

He is incapable of it -- not as a personal failure, but as a civilizational one. The incapacity, laid bare, reveals more than a hundred Odysseys ever could.

The silence that follows this recognition is not empty. It is a space. It is the space where other epics breathe, where other ways of seeing wait to be acknowledged, where a post-Western world might begin not with a bang, but with the quiet, devastating realization that the frame was never as large as it claimed to be.

Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst, and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His email address is [email protected].