It’s not a good time to discover you’ve misread your movie ticket, but 3.20am on a Saturday outside the Imax in central London is a particularly bad time.

The movie started at 4:15am, not 4am as I had previously thought. It was 15 minutes of sleep I would never get back, on top of the scant five hours my partner and I had managed before crawling across the city in the dark.

“The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic, is the first feature film shot entirely with Imax film cameras. Only 41 cinemas worldwide can project it as intended, in a full 1.43:1 aspect ratio on a 70mm Imax screen.

Three of them are in the UK, and the British Film Institute’s Imax, which houses Britain’s largest screen, is one of them. Hence the 24-hour screenings, and hence why we wake up before the birds.

Having arrived so early, I was sure we would find the place deserted.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The atmosphere was electric. The crowd attending the midnight screening came out in droves, souvenir signs in their hands and enthusiastic praise on their lips, some drunk, others in the mood for a fight.

We bought coffees at the bar and settled in. Looking around the lobby, everyone seemed to have their own way of coping with the hour: caffeine, alcohol, pure excitement.

In this for the moment

In line at the bar, I met Kane and Cameron. For Kane, it was simple: when he booked a few weeks ago, “there were no good options to see him until mid-August” and, for him, mid-August seemed too far away. Getting three to four hours of sleep seemed like a fair price to pay. “Once I’m up, I’m up,” he shrugged.

There was also something bigger that attracted him. “It’s a Nolan movie,” he told me. “There’s a guy who’s doing live sets, doing live action, doing real movies, and it’s this guy.”

“It’s really nice when everyone is so excited about something,” he added. “Moments like this are rare, and Christopher Nolan seems to be at the center of all these things that feel like moments.”

His friend Cameron had made his own sacrifice to be there. He had pedaled for an hour to get to the cinema.

Snack method

Elsewhere in the lobby, I saw Ross and Joseph eating a selection of meats and cheeses. A bold but deliberate choice. The page looked Greek, perhaps an homage to the roots of the epic poem, and I told him so. “That was the thought process, yeah,” Joseph said.

They had reserved their tickets on July 1. “We wanted to see it as close to opening as possible, and this was the only screening left,” Joseph said.

As for how they were handling it? Joseph said the hour was “a little sobering, more so than we thought. But we’re here, we feel energized.”

“Speak for yourself,” Ross joked.

He then clarified that his enthusiasm had not diminished since early morning. “I’m a big Nolan fan. ‘Oppenheimer’ is one of my favorite movies of all time,” he said. “So I’m really excited to see it.”

The contingent that does not sleep

Then there were those who hadn’t bothered to sleep at all. Tatiana, Theo, Luke and Nat were gathered around a round of espresso martinis.

“We’ve been to Soho,” Theo said. “It’s a fun way to end the night.”

Tatiana said her plan was to “stay up all night and then take a nap.”

Expectations were through the roof. Luke had seen ‘Oppenheimer’ in that same theater, in all its Imax splendor, and the group hoped this one would top it.

Things get loud

The early morning showtime, coupled with what was, for some, an all-nighter of drinking, unsurprisingly generated some excitement. A drunken man, who had just seen the midnight show, collided with a staff member and a physical skirmish ensued.

The lobby fell silent as everyone watched the fight. The theater staff quickly took over, and as they escorted the instigator out, he stuck his head out the door to reassure us all: “‘The Odyssey’ was really great!”

I kept forgetting what time it was. The energy was brilliant, the concession stand was full of staff and the line was long. I treated myself to a blue raspberry slushie. Some film traditions are sacred, even in the wee hours of the morning.

Face to face with the big screen

It wasn’t until we found our seats in the third row that I realized the scale of the screen. At 66 feet tall and 85 feet wide, it swallowed up my entire field of vision. I had brought a neck pillow, and as I craned my neck toward the thing, I was glad I did.

After the trailers, a staff member with a microphone warmed up the crowd. “Who’s ready to see ‘The Odyssey!'” he shouted. We applaud. “You can do better than that!” he responded. The crowd applauded again.

Then the movie started. In my slightly delirious state, with a screen that took up everything I could see, the boundary between the movie and me gave way.

I wasn’t watching “The Odyssey” but rather existing within it. I have never been so immersed in a movie in my life.

So was it worth it?

When it was over, I stepped out into the morning light, moved. Moved by the film, by the excitement, by the commitment of my fellow film buffs. I was moved, as Kane said, by the moment.

It may have ruined my regular trips to the movies.