Christopher Nolan's Odyssey opens on Friday, and as I write this on Wednesday lunchtime there is not a single published review of it anywhere. I checked, because the gap seemed worth checking. Rotten Tomatoes has counted one critic review and no percentage, and its audience meter reads zero verified ratings. The full review embargo lifts at nine this morning in California, which is five o'clock this afternoon here. Everything written about this film so far has been a tweet.

That gap is engineered. Universal skipped the influencer screenings most studios now use to front-run their own reviews, a decision The Hollywood Reporter broke and working critics were audibly pleased about. Critics saw the film after the London premiere on 6 July, and the social embargo let them post immediately, in tweet-length, with one condition: no score that would feed the Tomatometer. Paul Tassi put the caveat plainly in Forbes while rounding up the raves, noting that early reviews can often be more positive than final ones.

The raves are real and they are close to unanimous, which is the part worth pausing on. Fandango's Erik Davis called it a crowning cinematic achievement, and IndieWire's Anne Thompson called it the best picture contender to beat. Unanimity nine days out isn't a verdict, though. It's a sample, drawn from people who were flown to a premiere and handed 280 characters, and 280 characters has nowhere to put the word but.

The teaser tells you what to value before you've seen a frame: a marble head in embers, and above the title, set in the same cold blue as the director's credit and given equal billing, the line SHOT ENTIRELY WITH IMAX FILM CAMERAS. The negative is the star. That's the pitch, and it happens to be the one claim a tweet can carry intact, because a format is a fact you can state on the way out of the cinema. Whether 2 hours and 52 minutes of it holds is not a fact. It's a judgement, and it takes the length of the film to earn.

Which is where the dissent lives. Not in the outrage, in the qualifiers. IndieWire's chief critic David Ehrlich found the IMAX obviously immense but the film "too clunky to be S-tier Nolan", allowing that the last act rewards the journey. Out-of-theatre reactions have muttered that the first half drags. That is close to the whole of it, and the thinness is the tell: a reservation is the first thing to go when you're writing to a character limit on the way out of a premiere.

The louder argument never got near any of that. It has run for months on casting, on Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, on Elliot Page as Sinon, on a script that says daddy instead of father. Nolan told The Telegraph it comes with the territory, and that these conversations that happen before people see the film are always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet. He's right, and he should look at where his own sentence lands. It doesn't distinguish between the people who have spent nine days calling his casting a political act and the people who have spent nine days calling the film a masterpiece. Both are describing something they haven't sat through. The difference is that only one group is guessing in his favour, which is why only one group is ever going to hear from him about it.

Sources: