Photo: Pacific Science Center/Facebook
Pacific Science Center opens its renovated IMAX Theater with a splash, with the screening of Humpback Whales 3D. The screen, updated with the newest laser technology, is six stories high and 80 feet across; the whales are 40- to 50-ton behemoths. Together they’re spectacular.
The small digital cameras allowed filmmakers to get close so that we can watch the animals interact in slow-motion underwater ballets and burst to the surface with a roar of sound. The large screen with the world’s highest resolution shows us every bump on the whales’ skin, every look in their eyes, every bubble in the water.
We see rare footage of mothers and calves together, and track with the curious youngsters as they explore their world with small fish clinging to their bellies. As the filmmakers follow migrating herds from Tonga to Hawaii to Alaska, we see amazing interactions, including a long line of whales breaching and slamming their flukes in unison and a group of six males herding herring to the surface so that they can feed on them.
It’s a typical environmental education script about how a species is almost wiped out, and now we’re saving them, and how we can help. The footage of people is less compelling than simply showing the giant mammals, although a sequence of rescuers freeing a whale entangled in fishing lines is fascinating.
With the IMAX Theater’s new 12-channel immersion sound system, the songs of the humpback whales are truly haunting. I would have preferred more of them and less pop music. Humpback Whales 3D opened May 4 and runs through the summer.
A variety of documentaries and feature films run concurrently at IMAX; The Avengers is the current blockbuster feature film. The advantage of the new IMAX technology is the whitest whites, the blackest blacks, the least bleeding of colors and the most vivid contrast available, along with clear, sometimes deafening sound. For children, this provides an almost total immersion in the world of the filmmaker (especially if you sit near the center of the theater). There’s nothing scary or violent in Humpback Whales, but be aware that if a movie is intense, the huge format and “visceral” surround-sound may be too much for some children.
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