(back)

At the Movies
with Mark Moorehead
IMAX's 3D redux bound to amuse, amaze

SOS Planet

General Audiences: C

Running time is 45 minutes. Entertaining and animated lecture tour on the need to “save our earth” from impending environmental disasters. Not a date movie. Children are the target audience.

Family Audiences: B

Short and sweet animated visit to exotic locales with cute animals and wild plants that leap off the screen and into your lap. Visual illustrations of  environmental disasters may or may not resonate with kids, but the realistic 3-D experience on the giant IMAX screen is so cool it will blow them away. 

Global warming, marine depletion and deforestation are serious subjects. However, the consequences of these destructive processes are abstract and remote for most of us, particularly children.

SOS Planet clears the fog by painting a colorful, moving picture for youngsters to illustrate the consequences simply and directly.

From steamy rainforests of Borneo to the frozen Artic of the North Pole to the rich coral reefs at the ocean’s bottom, children witness the reactions of animals to mankind’s non-stop harvesting of the world’s greatest and finite resources.

Digitally animated animals serve as personal guides for the young viewer as the camera roams the world. One such guide is a snake, and this guy moves right off the six-story IMAX screen and slithers directly to your head.

That’s almost too personal and a little scary if you don’t like snakes. Fortunately, the rest of the animal guides are loveable and funny.

Polar bears, sea turtles, a gibbon (tree-dwelling ape) and an orangutan slide, swim and fly through the air with the greatest of ease in a 3-D format that is certain to generate lots of ohs and ahs from kids of all ages.

What is most striking about this short, 45-minute film is the 3-D experience itself. It’s been decades since I enjoyed my first 3-D experience, but it was an experience I never forgot.

Most memorable was turning around in my seat to see a theater full of people with these funny looking glasses on. I was only seven years old, and it was a horror film.

Not surprisingly, I have little recollection of what the film was about, but I’ll never forget closing my eyes in fright as things leapt out of the movie screen and into my face.

SOS Planet’s 3-D format took me back down memory lane and now I want my child to have this same experience.

In the first moments of the film, a 3-D earth slowly pulls away from this gigantic screen and comes toward you closer and closer until Mother Earth, about the size of a basketball, is spinning directly in front of you.

Every viewer in the theater instinctively stretches out a hand to hold this spinning globe.  Earth seems so fragile when you’re holding it in the palm of your hand.

At this moment you’re thinking of the possibilities of 3-D and Cosmos-type space travel.  Wow, would that be cool!

Back on earth, the viewer is assisted in this film with narration by prime-time news icon Walter Cronkite.

Unfortunately, Walter is a little monotone in his delivery, and probably not the best choice to narrate SOS Planet considering children, not octogenarians, are the audience.

Patrick Steward (Star Trek: The Next Generation) would have been my choice.

But, we can’t have everything. In this case, it’s the message, not the messenger, that’s important.

Pecan Grove Estates resident Mark Moorehead writes regularly for Wrangler News.    

(back)