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You can keep your Avengers and your Hunger Games. Some of us harrumphing cinema aesthetes are happy to forgo the mall-films for quiet documentaries about polar bears and dead satellites. Not a joke! We’re talkin’ ‘bout the St. Louis Science Center’s Omnimax Theater, which turns National Geographic-style docs into 3D mind-expanders. And you can bring in popcorn and sodie, just like you do at the megaplex.
Forthwith, a pocket guide to what’s playing at the Oakland Avenue cine now:
To the Arctic
Synopsis:
Climate change is killing polar bears faster than you can say “James Lovelock." The walruses and caribou are doing a tad better. Animals are damned cute.
The Terrifying Moments:
A male polar bear is so hungry from shrinking-climate issues he stalks two cute-as-a-button polar bear cubs, intending to eat them. Just as scary: a dude in a SCUBA tank breaks through the ice and swims beneath it with a big ol’ underwater IMAX camera in tow. Who’s his insurance carrier?
The Animal Freak Show:
Giant walruses stacked on top of one another, snoring, and later, bellowing in mating display. Perhaps they miss their buckets?
The Cecil B. DeMille Moment:
A vast herd of caribou thunders up a mountain.
The Scolding Schoolmarm Effect:
Repeated messages about climate change, a truth that the Science Center has made no bones about, should make viewers feel guilty.
The Cuddly Puffball Effect:
Did we mention how cute those polar bear cubs are? We still love you, Knut.
Space Junk
Synopsis:
Houston, we have a problem. We have so filled the spaceways around our blue marble with discarded rocket boosters, dead satellites, spare bolts, and the ashes of James Doohan that dangerous collisions between space junk and working satellites are happening with increasing frequency.
Your Outer Space Money Shots:
There are none, exactly, but the animated sequences projected within the Omnimax’s inverted-dome screen are bitchin’. The space junk apparently moves at 17,000 miles an hour, which is similarly bitchin’.
Let’s Not Forget:
The Internet, cell phones, and our entire electronic umbilicus depends on this stuff.
Oh My God, It’s Huge!:
Shots of the the Barringer Meteorite Crater in Winslow, Arizona are stunning. And this baby’s only one mile across—other craters, like the Beaverhead Crater, which spans Montana and Idaho, is 60 times as big.
The Scolding Schoolmarm Effect:
Let’s all write our Congressmen, or something. I have no idea what we’re supposed to do now, but I feel chastened, rebuked, and castigated, in that order.
Rocky Mountain Express
Synopsis:
Building the first trans-Canadian railroad a hundred years ago was no walk in the park. Actually, it was more like death in the Rockies. Steep terrain and icy weather tested our primitive technological abilities and killed not a few railroad workers. The film also works as a travelogue, which is even better by virtue of not involving Rick Steves.
Choo Choo-ness:
A restored steam engine belches huge clouds of smoke. Kids will love it. Museum of Transportation fans will love it more.
Sobering Thought:
In one particularly treacherous stretch of mountain, an average of six men died for every mile of track laid. Giant, disused stone trestles rise from the Canadian woods like grave markers for them. It’s eerie.
Best Use of the IMAX camera:
Beautiful vista after vista unrolls as the helicopter-mounted camera tracks the train meandering through lush river valleys, to a stirring classical-music score. (Eat your heart out, O. Winston Link!)
Rocky Mountain Express, Space Junk, and To the Arctic play at the Omnimax Theater at the St. Louis Science Center. Tickets are $6-$9; for more information, call 314-289-4424 or visit slsc.org.
