oliver9184

The second greatest of these, for me, was Beowulf, which I saw on Imax 3D in 2007 and which was at the vanguard of the 3D explosion we're now experienceing, and bemoaning. Beowulf was so incredible that I had to watch it twice; subsequent attempts to watch it on DVD have failed because home viewing cannot come anywhere close to the Imax experience.

The first greatest was watching How the West Was Won on 3-strip Cinerama - a short-lived and extremely expensive widescreen process requiring a triple camera, three projectors and a huge curved screen - at a widescreen festival a few years ago. This is a film that I wouldn't even bother trying to watch on a television: the whole point of it is spectacle and it would look very sad and puny on a small screen. The fact that, looked at objectively as a film, it is a pretty pedestrian and derivative Western, is irrelevant. Re the cinema, spectacle is all-important. The cinema is and always was inherently spectacular.

Ebert is right because 3D doesn't really make a film more spectacular. To keep people in the cinemas and out of their homes the industry needs to look at what truly does make people gasp in amazement. Since reading about it just now I really really really want and need to see a MaxiVision film. Something shot like this on a large high-def format like IMAX (65mm or 70mm vs the standard 35mm), projected at 48 fps onto a huge screen cannot be anything but spectacular.

Samsara is due for release this year. It's a non-narrative film and hardly anyone will see it but if my facts are straight it's only the second feature-length film to be shot entirely on Imax-size film. The first, Samsara's prequel Baraka (by the same director, Ron Fricke, who DPed the wonderous Koyaanisqatsi) is apparently a favourite of Roger Ebert, who said of its Blu-Ray release : "the finest video disc I have ever viewed or ever imagined."