IMAX - An Oudated Movie Experience (General comments)

Name: charliebrown

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Product:	General comments
Date:	19/11/01 (113 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: huge screen, specially shot documentaries

Disadvantages: repeated over and over again

I was recently in Canada - the home of IMAX cinema, which is supposed to be the ultimate in movie experiences. Yeah, right!

The concept is simple, get a screen as big as possible, make it almost square, and use the largest projector in movies together with an IMAX camera to film the movies in, and you will have an exceptionally clear very large scale movie, which people will flock to.

The problems are obvious: no-one films for IMAX. IMAX is a patented special film size which requires special production techniques. So no mainstream movies are ever produced in IMAX, as they would not be possible to show in the normal cinemas. So they rely instead on documentary-style films which have been shot to take advantage of the screen size, normally consisting of sweeping views from a helicoptor of the Rockies, deserts, the Nile and so on.

This is fine in itself, and some fo the IMAX films are quite interesting (if short - 40 mins average) affairs, but there are very few new ones being made. This means that at my visit to the small handful of IMAX cinemas around Toronto, they were showing the same films that I had seen in Britain, at Bradford, several years previously. And to boot, the huge screen was no advantage, as it was merely showing up the many scratches and imperfections in a print that had obviously been shown over and over again for months.

IMAX is a great concept, but what's the point of going to a cinema that shows the same films month after year after month. Stop at home and watch the BBC for that!

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