Reel Politique: Movie Review, Omnimax’s Antarctica
A close friend of mine is an Antarctica nut, and so hitting OMSI’s exhibition, “Ends of the Earth” (about the earth’s two poles) and seeing the Omnimax film Antarctica (co-produced by the National Geographic Society) were high priorities. In addition, I’d never seen an Omnimax film, and this critical lapse needed remedying.
The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is now located, in case you didn’t know, underneath the Hawthorne Bridge (1945 SE Water Avenue). We arrived around 12:30, leaving enough time to take in the exhibit before the movie. Since it was a Tuesday, we figured that there would be fewer kids, but no dice; the place was crawling with the out-of-control monsters, who raced from display to display banging the buttons with their fists before dashing off to beat up the next display and then the next, leaving a trail of their diseased snot and saliva on every activating button. The booths that required quiet and concentration, such as the one that offered three movies about polar exploration, were usually empty.
In any case, we endured this hubbub the way Shackleton endured the blast of cold polar air, and then retired to the Omnimax Theater, a huge globe that looks like a synagogue from the outside. The show started at two-thirty. The waiting area had a roped maze, from which one could observe the projectionist behind a glass wall, like a character in an old Star Trek, a specimen from another planet isolated for study. The projection booth itself was amusingly gargantuan, like the inside of Dr. Who’s TARDIS. After a series of warnings (turn off phones, et cetera) that were reiterated inside, and then again in a voice-over prelude to the film itself, we were ushered inside. The huge globe was dim and the stairs up the raked seating steep, taxing to heart attacks waiting to happen. We sat up high but to the left, which turned out not to be optimal. If you go, be sure to sit directly above and behind the projector (which rises in the middle of the room) for the optimum effect of the visuals and the speakers. The goal of the Omnimax screen is to preoccupy your peripheral vision, the way that the curved screen of the old Cinerama was supposed to do. The Omnimax screen is taller, but gradually you realize that the ultimate effect is to simulate the shape of the eye; looked at without perspective, so to speak, the shape of the screen recedes to a flattened oval.
The documentary itself was good, probably because it eschewed talking heads; instead it was a succession of unnerving glimpses into the hidden world of the South Pole. We were warned that the Omnimax movie can sometimes make viewers sick or dizzy, but it was the shots of the frozen caves beneath the ice at the bottom of the world that terrified me. The movie was 45 minutes long.
For the heck of it, we also took in Black Holes, the planetarium show, which was a brief-feeling 30 minutes. Liam Neeson narrated it clearly, and the computer generated effects were graspable, yet coming out I still didn’t understand what black holes were. Also, instead of using the half-globe ceiling, as I remember the planetaria of yore used to do, this film was basically set up like a regular movie, but with a large curved screen. In fact, it felt like a leftover Omnimax film. In any case, though the unspooling came off without a hitch, one did notice that the image isn’t terribly sharp, neither in the Planetarium nor in the Omnimax. Numerous artifacts also affect the Omnimax screen, such as tiny blips that you think at first are suppose to be birds, or tiny question marks appearing out of nowhere. Overall the screen just didn’t feel bright enough, which is odd, since a cooling system that looks like the back of the Alien’s head is employed to let it get as bright as possible. It’s possible to envision Omnimax employed for a traditional Hollywood action film, though it might cause a run in vomit bags, but only if the image were brighter and there is more optimum good seating instead of the 25 or 30 chairs behind the projector head.