Ender's Game: An IMAX Experience

Well, this is a surprise.  I saw Ender's Game on Friday, here it is Monday, and various parties are saying that, with a $25 million opening, it is a bomb already!

The movie gods giveth, and the movie gods taketh away.

I was quite dubious about Ender's Game going in: a mini-major trying to launch a new franchise, who spent over $100 million to make it, from a "cult" science fiction novel by Mr. Notoriously Picky Writer who is on as a producer (I guess being a producer makes him too busy to write his own novels anymore), a director I had never heard of, and a marketing campaign which didn't really tell you squat about what the film was about.

With all of this going for it, how could it miss?

But, after possibly the lamest narrated opening exposition ever, explaining the attack on Earth by an alien species (is there any other kind?), the film picked up considerably, and worked for me. Worked not without missteps, but it exhibited a strange combination of elements until it became its very own movie by the end.

"Dish here Batt'l School ain't big enuff for us bot - see?"

Certainly, Orson Scott Card's notion of training young video-gaming-addicted kids to fight our future battles for us against alien invaders, followed classic sci-fi practice: Find a trend in human behavior that you are not crazy about, and follow it to its furthest extent. From the perspective of 1985, this was eerily prescient. But from the perspective of 2013, it seems like a pandering attempt to capture back the Hogwart's crowd.

There are many interesting and new things going on in Gavin Hood's film, but some of them are undermined in strange ways: while I liked the family dynamic at the beginning, their video wall was straight out of the original Total Recall (1990). It was interesting to see all of the dynamics of the nameless zero-gravity laser-shooting game, but it had an annoying resemblance to the Quiddich game in the Harry Potter novels and films - and just as impossible for non-coms to understand. There was a strange pleasure in watching as a central character someone as young as Ender Wiggin, but the tired old method of having all the grown-up supervisors muttering "he's the one" had me shaking my head - we have seen much of this before.

So I think the filmmaker's had a tough proposition: tell the story contained in the first of the Ender novels, while trying to avoid many of what have by now become clichés in this genre. But the film impressed me by being able to take me there anyway, despite some of these objections which popped out from time to time.

Futurist films have better luck with me when they ground themselves in Earth's reality and history. At least Gravity (2013) takes place within the space program that we currently have, which makes it more compelling for me. Here, the attack on Earth by the Formics was made grim by having our forces battle the advanced aliens with fighter planes which closely resemble those we have today.  But after that, we have to project ourselves into an assembly of sometimes hard to swallow concepts, such as an international effort to protect Earth from future alien attacks and the ridiculously expensive Battle School to train the young'ns to do what the Old Farts can't.

But to place this defense in the hands of a rigorously trained super child - well THAT'S new.  But in order for a film such as this to work properly, there is a certain amount of fantasy-fulfillment that has to go on.  I don't know anyone who wants to be a hyper-computerized battle commander - do you? Throughout this film, there is really no one to cling to, although Viola Davis' character of Gwen Anderson might have supplied it if she had not been pushed out of the way.

Although I didn't really understand the object of the zero-gravity game, once Ender enters into the proceedings, his super-defensive impulses are depicted in the most gloriously liberating scene of gunplay since Kate Beckinsale shot herself a circular escape hatch in Underworld (2003). Ender has so much fun shooting and blasting people in this mock-battle that he is twirled about for us with both arms extended, firing away, and laughing in delight.  The filmmakers must have considered this an epiphany for Ender, and the high point of the film, because the musical score reaches its absolute zenith here. As David Byrne once observed, "People look silly when they are in ecstasy." If Ender is half-warrior and half empath, it is easy to see which half the filmmaker's choose to glorify so strongly.  The sound system at the Chinese has no ability to reproduce this overloud orchestra with sound effects with anything like fidelity.  I am sure it sounded great at Todd-AO, but here, at these levels, it's pretty shredded.

I enjoyed most of the performances, despite the underwriting of most of them.  The whole thing is very stylized and controlled.  There are no mistakes.  They show you only the things they want you to see.  No one forgets their car keys.  Asa Butterfield as Ender, is quite a performer, pulling out all the stops when he discovers that the Top Brass has treated him pretty much the same way as all the bullies in Battle School did. Harrison Ford rumbled his way through, but I was glad that his part was not just a walk on.  In order to subject Our Hero to the most humiliating hazing, we are introduced to the most extreme caricature of personal militarism in Bonzo Madrid, played here by Moisés Arias, who must be channeling Eddie Cantor's evil twin.  The film's precis of "The more you hate your enemy, the more you love them" seems sort of crazy, but gets its first demonstration after Bonzo decides to attack Ender at his most vulnerable: while taking a shower. Ender lashes out, and Bonzo falls, cracking his head open.

Ender's personality causes him to be extremely remorseful over this, which is kind of puzzling.  We hated Bonzo enough when he was attacking us, but now that he has suffered a cracked dome because of a flaw in his balance, we are suddenly all choked up?  Ender is the kind of person you would want as a benevolent dictator, but as we all know, being a dictator robs you of your humanity and your intellect.  Being a super-militarist robs of you of some of your humanity also. Ender's sympathy for the Formics is indeed uncharacteristic of someone with a military mindset, and this duality is where the film either captures you, or it looses you. I am not sure where it left me. When this film ends, it ENDS.

What I find interesting when I see films like this and others, like Prometheus (2012), is that these films reflect an interest we have in interplanetary exploration along with knowledge of the sciences, while at the same time, these very things are hideously low on our national or international agendas. The oft-encountered futurist vision of all the nations pulling together to Save Earth from Whatever, always strikes me as hopelessly idealistic, given our reactions to Earth's current problems.  But at least here, fighting an alien invasion, Earth's loss of 40 million people is supposedly enough of a hit to bind all the nations together to form a common defense.

So who knows?  I liked the strategy of leaving the depiction of the Formics to the end, which, without giving away the store, Our Hero Ender decides to empathize with, allowing the film to throw itself into a whole new direction.  I hope that they get to make some more of these films.

Just for the record, the Chinese was showing this film with the sidewall curtains closed, and no masking top and bottom.

Gravity: An IMAX 3D Experience

I will join the chorus of approval for Gravity, a film which has a real buzz going for it. "Immersion" is a word you hear a lot around these IMAX / 3D films, and while that may be the new aesthetique du jour—take people someplace, anyplace—Gravity somehow has managed to be something that can only be communicated in the film form. How it got ground through two studios, various casts, and still found its singular greatness has to be attributable to the iron-clad will of director and co-scenarist Alphonso Cuarón.

The story of this film is so slight, that to speak about it at all almost requires giving the whole thing away, but Cuarón has fashioned a film so different from what we normally encounter at the movies today, a film which is both moderate in tempo and incredibly involving, allowing the viewer plenty of time and, uhh, space, to philosophically react to the events depicted.

And how this is done is especially interesting. I am sure that the first shot of Gravity will go down in history as one of film's most stunning achievements (if you exclude the opening of Robert Zemeckis' Contact [1997]). In what must be at least a 15 minute shot from on high looking down on Earth, all the players and the instruments and vehicles they are working on whirl into view. It is such an amazing ballet of images, performance, exposition, and staging, that it could only be accomplished by a director who has a genius for scene-setting.

I found it a very effective method to get all the techno-wonks (of whom a picture with a space theme would surely attract), to forget about "how did they do that?"; the shot goes on for so long that eventually, you find yourself forgetting all about how it must have been filmed, and when you are able to forget about how they did it, then you are able to actually be out there in space with the characters.

This is only the beginning.

During this long spacewalk outside the space shuttle Explorer, we are introduced to Sandra Bullock's character, Stone, who is trying to diagnose a troublesome faulty circuit board on the Hubble Space Telescope, while Clooney's character, Mission Commander Kowalski, is sort of skylarking around, assisted by a jetpack. They are both talking to Mission Control in that easy manner employed by people who must be very clear about what they say.

This tranquil atmosphere is broken when Mission Control informs them that debris from a detonated satellite is heading their way. And this is where I find that Cuarón's command of this film hits the ceiling - without really altering his staging technique of the first shot, the two astronauts find themselves having to pack it in, the telescope and the Explorer are destroyed, and our pair (focusing on Stone, who has no jetpack) are cast adrift in the immensity of space. The way that this sequence of events is depicted, with all of these huge objects whirling about the screen and exploding in silence is just stunningly viceral. Totally unique. And this is only the beginning.  There's more - lots more.

The space suits worn by both Bullock and Clooney somehow allow us to see them as people without our usual associations with them as movie stars. After Clooney does one of the most touching scenes I have ever seen him do, Bullock manages to get into the International Space Station, and it is here, after Stone has become a real person to us, we can really feel her release when she pulls off her space suit inside the station. We are with her as she curls into a fetal ball.

To say the this picture is a triumph for Sandra Bullock is something of an understatement. I am not sure she holds the picture together the same way Garland does in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but she comes close.  Unlike the actors in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Cuarón wisely never allows the technical stuff to overtake Bullock, who is allowed to carry the picture. She even manages to hurdle over that bugaboo of all performers who are in a film where they are lost and on their own: talking to themselves. All filmmakers resort to this, but only really gifted actors can pull it off.

I am somewhat at a loss as to how to explain how the rest of the picture effected me. I will try. I found the whole thing done in a style that was for me the most elegant way of telling the story, revealing the characters, and showing the settings. While at the same time, I found my mind free to wander; not over  "How did they do THAT?" but over "how do I react when things go wrong?" or "Do I believe in an afterlife at all?" The room the picture has in it for the viewer to reflect, is what makes Gravity so much more than a mere sci-fi potboiler.

When you read a novel, your mind fills in the pictures, and this has always been literature's strength. In Gravity, there are actors, pictures, and sounds, but there is also you, your own mind. You are allowed to speculate, if you will, on your own life. I tell you, I had a very strange feeling upon re-entering my car down in the dim parking garage after the film. . .

Gravity reminds me of the great films where everything is working together on the same high level. Script, performance -  the scale of the piece, which contrasts the two characters with the huge environment they are in - the music, all of it is contributing to this theatrical effect that you can't get on a stage or in a book, or on television or a video game. It gracefully pulls you in, and you stay there.  It's incredible.

In more mundane matters, the Chinese is running this film on their 87 foot wide IMAX screen with no masking top and bottom.  Having studied the situation carefully, I am pleased to report that the screen is much more deeply curved than what was originally proposed in the plans presented to the public prior to the remodel. Screen curvature is measured by the "rise", which is the distance between the "chord" (a line drawn between the outer edges of the screen), and the center of the screen. At the Chinese, the "rise" is 9 feet, and thus, the aspect ratio of this space is 1:9.66, which is just slightly shallower than the original short-throw CinemaScope specs (usually somewhere around 1:9, 1:8). so the new IMAX screen is in approximately the same place with the same curvature as the older screen we all loved so much.

Gravity is the first modern film with a more-or-less conventional score to play the IMAX'ed Chinese, and I have to say that the Achilles heel of most theatre sound systems is present here: really thin sounding high strings.  High strings don't sound like that, fellahs.  The rest of the sound range thunders along most agreeably, with the sub-woofers doing a very creditable job of vibrating everyone without that false rattle that sounds so much like the old Sensurround speakers from Earthquake (1974). . . But massed strings, choirs, and pianos - tough things to reproduce, all. The Chinese is running Gravity with the sidewall curtains open throughout.

I attended the first show, hastily added on at 9:30 AM.  I was hungry, so I ordered a hot dog. The attendant said that the dogs were not ready, but that she would bring one to me when they were done.  She offered to walk me to my seat to find out where I was sitting, but I just gave her my seat number, and she brought it right in on a tray with condiment packets - very nice.

Anyway, Gravity is a great picture, and I hope it makes a lot of money, which hinges on whether people return to see it again.  I would.

The Wizard of OZ: An IMAX 3D Experience

At yesterday's World Premiere at the Chinese of The Wizard of OZ: An IMAX 3D Experience, Oz Historian John Fricke, during his opening remarks, asked for the audience to indicate how many people had never seen the film.  Only a slight number of hands clapped. Then he asked, "How many of you have never seen Oz in a theatre?"  A much greater round of applause this time. And this is a shame. The trip to Oz is so much more interesting in a theatre for so many reasons.

And this lies at the heart of this new version of Oz, which has been prepared for us to enjoy.

Most of us encounter the film, one way or another, on television, replete with commercials, interruptions, and everything else. I know I did.  The Yuletide tradition.

But then, there is encountering the film the way it was originally designed to be seen: in a theatrical setting, probably on a screen about 18 feet (or less) tall. And now, at the Chinese anyway, you have the film playing on a screen 46 feet tall and 61 feet wide, watching it from what you might consider to be a theatre balcony with no orchestra floor and shoved closer and lower to the screen: you are right there in the middle of it.

This is what the IMAX format was designed to do. Every IMAX theatre duplicates this approach. The large screen, the cliff of seats, the surround sound — it admittedly is very good at providing the viewer with an immersive experience. In fact, Oz was preceded with one of those short clips telling you about how great IMAX is — computerized space-graphics of chromed letters zooming and bobbing around, accompanied by sound effects meant to suggest speed and impact. All very calculated, all very dimensional.

And then, a strange thing happens. A slightly sculpted Leo the Lion shows up, then the credits roll for Oz, and then into the opening of the film in sepia Kansas, and you know, the whole things looks very natural. The Wizard of Oz in 3D doesn't look in the slightest bit weird or strange at all.  I suspect that, since stereo photography had been around for a while even in 1939, whoever guided this 3D conversion had the taste and good sense to say to themselves, "If they had shot Oz in 3D back then, what would it have looked like?"

And this is what they have done. Provided you do not have the usual objections to 3D films, and that you do not suffer from the eye fatigue which so many people complain of, the experience of looking into the world created in the film becomes a really rather normal thing - you accept it right off. For a fellow such as myself, who has seen the film countless times theatrically, this is good news!

So that is out of the way.  The 3D is subtle and not overdone at all. Not even when they have a perfectly good opportunity, such as the shot looking up into the sky at the conclusion of the twister sequence, where the bottom of the house hurtles toward the camera — nope, they refrain from making that a "lookit everybody - duck!" moment.  That was not the point of the shot originally, so they hew to the through line they have set for themselves: don't be obvious.

The bigger issue (if you will pardon the pun) is that of the IMAX presentation. Since seeing the '59 Ben-Hur and Giant at the Chinese during the TCM Festival earlier this year, I have been musing on the subject of our spacial relationships to a screen.  Watching Ben-Hur on such a large screen provides you with a completely different relationship with the events presented, which had been staged counting on the fact you would be seeing it on a large screen in a theatre.

The aim of Hollywood during the 1930s was to make the sharpest, brightest color picture it was possible to make in 35mm (they tried 70mm, but it did not impress audiences at the time). Part of the visual design of Oz is that, when the Tin Man is dancing, they simply provide him with a background that contrasts with his figure, set the camera at a good angle, and let him do his thing.  Stagey a bit, but appropriate for the moment. It was possible to get away with simple camera coverage like this for two reasons: first, the players on camera were, for the most part, seasoned vaudevillians, trained to perform. One did not have to cut to a new angle every second in order to hide the performer's lack of technique. And secondly, the image was so gorgeous to look at: sharp, colorful, a joy to behold.

When Oz is enlarged to 46 feet tall, and one views it from the previously unimagined perspective of the IMAX bank of seats, a curious thing occurs, and it has nothing to do with sharpness. It has to do with the intimacy that has been gained. It seems strange to admit that a bigger screen would make for more intimacy, but it is true. All the old Hollywood directors liked the 1:1.33 frame, because it was so easy to compose close, intimate group scenes in the ratio. It is not surprising that the original 70mm IMAX was in this shape. The eye may reflexively sweep horizontally (hence widescreen), but that 1:1.33 image just fills your eyeline completely.

So much easier to compose groups in 1.33.

And so, the effect of stepping into the picture is greater.  I have noticed that with stadium seating, one tends to be less aware of the audience. Oz, I think, benefits from this to a degree, because it is a fantastical story happening to a young girl; when we do make the leap into the film's world, it is on a very personal level. Perhaps it is because we have all been introduced to Oz as children that does it.  We do not need an audience to enjoy it.

There are two scenes in Oz that never fail to grip me by the throat, and they both have been intensified by the IMAX 3D treatment.  The first is the sequence where Dorothy returns to the farm with the twister and her being knocked out.  Let's just say that the threatening image of the cyclone in the background, ripping up the land, as the camera stealthily tracks along as Dorothy tries to get the storm cellar open - it's terrifying.  The new sound work here is simply shattering.  Like the 3D effects, it is not over the top, but it is loud, scary and rumbly.

The second is where, on the balloon podium, in a very close shot, Dorothy must say goodbye to her three friends, culminating in the best example of underwriting there has ever been: "I'm going to miss you most of all."  Just reading these words almost makes me weep. It is a very close composition, very tender and sincerely played by all the actors.

These moments are made all the more real because of their newfound depth and closeness.

The IMAX 3D version of Oz gives us another way to see this most-cherished film, and I think that the way that they have done it is classy, respectful, and true to the spirit of the thing.  Let's hope they roll it out to IMAX theatres at Christmastime from here on.