Vancouver Has 3-D Imax -- New `Wings Of Courage' First All-Star Movie

Seattle won't be getting an IMAX 3D theater for a couple of years, not until the Pacific Science Center replaces its current IMAX auditorium with the Boeing IMAX Theater, which will be equipped with a much larger screen and synchronized 3-D projectors.

For the past 10 years, however, the CN IMAX theater in Vancouver, B.C., has been showing IMAX 3D productions, and the nearby Science World has been the site of the finest-quality Omnidome presentations on the continent. Both theaters are a legacy of Expo 86, and they're currently showing IMAX movies that haven't played Seattle.

"Wings of Courage," the first all-star narrative film to be released in IMAX 3D, was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud ("The Bear," "In the Name of the Rose," "The Lover") and stars Val Kilmer, Elizabeth McGovern, Craig Sheffer and Thomas Hulce.

It's not much of a movie, alas. Based on the true story of an airmail pilot's crash in the Andes in the 1930s, it can't decide whose story it wants to tell. Sheffer plays the stranded pilot, Henri Guillaumet, but Annaud seems distracted by the idea that he landed the more famous Kilmer for a minor role: daredevil pilot Jean Mermoz, who founded the airmail airline, Aeropostale.

Hulce plays Mermoz's famous partner, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the aviator-poet who wrote "Wind, Sand and Stars" and "The Little Prince." McGovern is Henri's wife, who waits anxiously for news of his fate. In this earnest, lumbering drama, Sheffer's character seems like an afterthought, when he should be the center of the story.

Nevertheless, the theater was packed when I saw "Wings of Courage" on a drizzly Friday afternoon. The movie's remarkable 3-D effects, including several eye-filling aerial views (filmed in the Canadian Rockies), seemed to cancel out any reservations the audience might have had about the script. To date, the picture has grossed more than $10 million on fewer than a dozen screens.

(In Vancouver, viewers watch "Wings of Courage" with lightweight polaroid glasses. In New York, they're given a heavy liquid-crystal headset - the same technology that will be used in the Boeing IMAX Theater here in 1998. IMAX officials insist that the headset is superior, but I found it uncomfortable, viselike and headache-inducing. So did the person sitting next to me at a New York screening. Over the years, I've never had a bad 3-D experience with the polaroid glasses in Vancouver.)

Also showing in Vancouver is Stephen Low's experimental 3-D IMAX production, "The Last Buffalo," which has been playing there on and off since 1990. Many Seattle moviegoers had their first experiences with IMAX 3D when they saw "Transitions" at the CN IMAX theater at Expo 86 in Vancouver. It was directed by Stephen's father, Colin Low.

More 3-D films coming soon

Several IMAX 3D productions are in the works, including Dutch/Australian director Paul Cox's "House Guests" and "L5: First City in Space," which will be completed by the end of the year. More IMAX 3D theaters have opened recently in California, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and in France, Germany and Spain. At this point, it looks like Seattle's new IMAX 3D theater will be one of only four on the West Coast. San Francisco is getting one this fall.

Also playing in Vancouver are a couple of new IMAX productions that are not 3-D and that haven't made it to Seattle yet.

David Douglas and David Attenborough's "Survival Island," which currently shares the schedule with "Wings," "Buffalo" and "Africa the Serengeti" at the CN IMAX Theater, is a fascinating documentary about the thousands of penguins, seals and other wildlife that populate the barren island of South Georgia during the Antarctic summer.

Nature scenes a delight

Like IMAX's "Antarctica," the movie gives us an intimate glimpse of a place most of us will never visit. The super-70mm images of male seals establishing their territory and albatrosses preparing for flight are stunning, and there's always room for a bit of unexpected comedy - such as the scene between a cranky bird and an expressionless scientist who lifts an egg out of its nest and measures it. The bird's reactions, first wary, then bewildered when the egg is gently returned, are priceless.

"Mystery of the Maya" is this summer's new IMAX attraction at the Omnidome theater at Science World. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, it combines dizzying views of Mayan ruins with dramatic re-creations of traditional Mayan life and the devastating Spanish invasion, which included the church-approved burning of Mayan books.

Most intriguing are recent discoveries about the pyramids, temples and palaces in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. The Spanish were so successful at obliterating Mayan writings that much of this information had to be pieced together from hieroglyphs - and these were not completely decipherable until 1990. It's a subject that's almost too large and provocative for this modest, sometimes traveloguish film.

Science World's 24-hour information line is (604) 268-6363. For information about the CN IMAX Theater, call (800) 582-4629.