IMAX IS BIG

IMAX is big! It's so big you can see Peter Parker's contact lenses in the IMAX release of Spiderman 2. Oooops, wasn't he supposed to ditch those glasses for the improved eyesight afforded by his new superpowers? I feel betrayed by the super sizing of standard films, blown up to Brobdingnag proportions for the big big screen.

I can remember when the IMAX theater was built here in St. Augustine. Didn't really know what was going in the rest of the World Golf Hall of Fame building, but boy you could tell which end was the IMAX—that great conspicuous box of architecture could be none other than the magic it would project inside—six-story-high film screen and a sound system of complete immersion. Then they dropped the temperature about 100 degrees and brought in filmmaker, David Brashears, to introduce Everest, the inaugural film. You felt like you were there, no doubt about it. (Also, Brashears nearly fell off his presentation platform in an ironic folly which only enhanced the Oh my, how did he ever survive it! effect.) Brashears filmed in IMAX with IMAX cameras and made his subject as big as it could be. He took cinematography to the summit and didn't settle for standard gage to take on the largest mountain in the world.

Then along come these conversion films, the Disney classics up-scaled into a flock of grainy color dots which come across like a documentary on Technicolor locusts. The montage scenes of Beauty and the Beast capture the sweeping grandeur of animation and simultaneously distract from it with a mosaic of still characters that stare rudely unblinking from the background. They are people as wallpaper, though I daresay we never noticed their lack of movement at the scale for which they were designed.

The modern style computer animation translates well. The Polar Express, for example, was a no brainer, but it was a no brainer to start with.

Here's hoping the conversion technology improves to take standard movie format into the IMAX arena. Or at least let's hope Daniel Radcliffe has a real close shave before he appears next as Harry Potter, this time in IMAX.