I was awed the first time I saw a movie in the IMAX Theater in Mumbai, awed by the sheer grandeur of experience of almost unbelievable visuals that literally engulfed me. The movie I saw was Polar Express. Mumbai IMAX boasts of the largest dome screen in the world. I was left imagining that what if the whole thing had been in 3D. I would probably have never come back then from the world I would be catapulted into.
I actually had a chance last week to realize that dream of mine, not in Mumbai but Melbourne. The IMAX theater screen in Melbourne is however not hemispherical but flat. However it’s 3 times the size of a normal movie screen and most importantly, they show 3D movies on it. There were at least half a dozen movies on the offering that day and we decided to go to ’’Walking on The Moon’’.
Walking on the moon is a 40 minute tale of human kind’s endeavor to touch that big shiny rock in the sky in the last century. It talks of all the Apollo missions that NASA undertook to realize that dream. As if the trailers of the coming attractions were not enough to make my jaw drop after I had put on those jumbo 3D glasses, the movie opens with a breathtaking view of the footprint of Neil Armstrong on the moon. I at that moment left the mortal world and sailed on to the heavens. I could barely stop myself reaching out and trying to touch the lunar soil. It was so damn real that its hard to believe that you are watching something in a dark room on a flat piece of cloth. The documentary is superbly narrated by none other than Tom Hanks who has also starred in the famed Apollo 13 movie. Since the actual footage of the lunar mission is quite old so it is nothing more than a distraction to the actual simulated 3D IMAX experience that is simply mind-blowing. The eerie nothingness that spreads across the lunar surface will engulf you. To actually see salt dunes like landscape against the pitch black sky will make you feel that creep in the spine. That is the feeling that has been referred to by the astronauts as “Magnificent Desolation”. I actually felt my breath stop and thought for once that I was sitting on the moon itself.
Equally breathtaking are the shots of astronauts inside their lunar capsule. Such is the clarity and closeness of the shots that you can see a clear reflection of their surroundings in the metal buttons of their dress. You will feel yourself accompanying the guy on the screen on the lunar mission. One of the fact highlighted in the movie that intrigued me that one loses his sense of scale when on the moon as there is no known thing to compare the dimensions against. You could be standing on the edge of a gorge on the lunar surface as deep as Grand Canyon and be imagining that it was just a slightly deep canal.
You have to watch it to believe it. I think 17$ is not too much of a price to pay for this heavenly experience. Even if you are not one of those science fiction buffs, every inch of your body will ache to be able Walk on The Moon. And the closest shot you have of doing so is actually go and see this. As the poster at the entrance would welcome you ..’’Only 12 men have walked on the moon so far. You are next!!’’