Review
MISADVENTURES IN 3-D: MORE 3-D MANIA
Featuring
Directed by
Now playing
Calgary Science Centre Discovery Dome
To me, there’s something indescribably… well, "neato" about seeing a 3-D movie on a really big screen. I think the attraction breaks down into three categories. As a student of film history, I’m interested in seeng film as the big, non-narrative spectacle it was back in the early days of the Lumiere Brothers, I’ve always been a sucker for gimmick movies and I never completely grew up.
If any of the above applies to you, you’ve got a rare chance to see cool stuff fly right past your chin at the Calgary Science Centre. MisAdventures in 3-D: More 3-D Mania will be playing through the winter until February 2005 and it’s pretty darn neato. Little more than a demo reel for nifty effects, MisAdventures has a dispensable plot concerning a lost professor (Stuart Pankin) and his sassy robot sidekick. Nobody watches this sort of thing for the plot, so it doesn’t come up much. More time is spent educating the audience about depth perception and the like. You never have to wait very long for snakes, lightning bolts, bubbles, etc. to fly out at you.
This is all really cool, but the presentation is marred by some pretty serious technical problems. First of all, this movie is hard to see. The coloured glasses considerably darken the already quite-dark images on the screen. In a film that’s all about visual splendour, that’s quite an issue. Worse, the picture is blurry. After several minutes of fidgeting, I gave up on ever being able to see these remarkable images in pin-sharp focus. The provided 3-D glasses fit comfortably over my prescription specs, but the image on the screen itself just wasn’t that clear. In some long shots, I could barely tell that the professor’s mouth was moving while he spoke. Some viewers are definitely going to find this a frustrating experience.
Still, the experience of 3-D on a huge curved screen is remarkable. When a dark, blurry robot floats by, it’s easy to forget how dark and blurry it is, and marvel at how the filmmakers seemed to project this out-of-focus marvel of science right into your lap. Well, some of the time, at least. |
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