Back to the future

Film

Cinema, according to one notorious adage, is "truth at 24 frames a second". But what is cinema when it comes at 48 frames a second, projected in three dimensions on a screen seven storeys high?

IMAX is an invention calculated to evoke millennial anguish about the future of cinema. At the end of film's first century, visual technology has become so sophisticated that, for some prophets of the medium, nothing could be more archaic than the act of simply sitting and gazing at two-dimensional images. Director Brett Leonard has already dabbled in fantasies of virtual reality in films such as The Lawnmower Man, and now operates the gargantuan machinery of IMAX 3D in T-REX: back to the Cretaceous. The format, he claims, "is taking cinema to the next place that it's going . . . [It] creates the closest thing to truly immersive virtual reality that exists on the planet."

IMAX's weapons in its assault on our consciousness are sheer size and phenomenal technology. You watch the 3D projection on a vast screen, through goggles with liquid crystal lenses that flicker in and out of phase 48 times a second. The frames are ten times bigger than normal 35mm film, and therefore contain ten times the customary amount of visual information.

IMAX, which also comes in 2D, reworks the familiar film-going experience with a view to greater intensity and (supposedly) an enhanced sense of reality. But it uses curiously oppressive means to do it. Attuned to 24 frames a second, we find ourselves outpaced by pictures projected at twice that speed: our eyes and minds aren't fast enough to spot the sleight-of-image. We're conned into thinking we see solid objects; we're effectively robbed of the critical distance our perceptions normally maintain in the cinema.

In this respect, IMAX looks not to the future and a more sophisticated viewing process, but towards a mythical past, a more primitive way of seeing. It aims to stir us to naive awe, like that supposedly felt by the very first film-goers when the Lumiere brothers' cinematograph sent an express train rushing seemingly straight into their midst. As so often happens with futuristic technological utopias, the urge is actually for a state of lost innocence. In fact, that's pretty much the theme of T-REX, which wants to turn 1990s viewers into primeval gawpers slack-jawed before the big lizards.

In terms of sheer wonder, T-REX is a poor relation to Jurassic Park. At 40 minutes, it sacrifices that film's narrative drive for a loose series of tableaux, a spectacular, vaguely instructive prehistoric pageant. Its teenage heroine Ally is mysteriously zapped back to the Cretaceous era, as well as to more recent times for edifying chats with eminent pioneers of paleontology. But for all the film's educational aspirations, you learn next to nothing about dinosaurs, since the distracting solidity of the images makes it almost impossible to register the dialogue.

It goes without saying that what we register is the effects - and not necessarily the most showy, solid ones, either. The film's strangest features stem from the hallucinatory properties of the screen itself. When the camera points up, we seem to be looking up, and when it points down, we look down - shifts of perspective brilliantly exploited in a mountaineering sequence. There are disconcerting changes of dimension: when the camera shows us a vast perspective, the screen itself seems to stretch to infinity, but in close-ups, the screen appears to shrink, presenting objects as if in actual size. Ironically, IMAX's most challenging possibilities may be as a cinema of intimacy and miniature.

With all its unexpected shifts of consciousness, T-REX feels oddly like an acid movie for family audiences. There's even one sequence in which bones and museum artefacts fly at you in mid-air, as if you'd been thrust flailing into the cover of a Carlos Castaneda paperback. In keeping with this incongruously lysergic quality, T-REX provides beauty and idiocy in equal proportions.

What it doesn't provide is anything resembling reality, even though IMAX is haunted by an obsession with the real. Stunts have to be performed by the actors themselves, since stunt doubles would be easily spotted on such a huge screen; and actors must give muted, natural performances, since overacting would be ludicrously amplified. Yet T-REX mostly deals in pure illusion. The dinosaurs may be certified accurate in every detail, yet they are entirely computer- generated. When a T-Rex quizzically flares its nostrils, the only awe we feel is at the extraordinary craft that has gone into creating these finely veiled and gently throbbing orifices, nostrils worthy of a Cellini.

IMAX may never get round to exploring its true potential for disorientation and abstraction - although the most exciting thing I've seen in the format is a trailer for 3D animation, in which amorphous coloured blobs float in your lap or plummet at you from above. But one thing IMAX can never shake off is its own unwieldy gigantism. The raw facts about the format tend to the crassly numerical - a camera that weighs 240 pounds, computer imagery that demands 50 megabytes per frame . . . You can't help thinking that the future of filmic reality is not in the hands of cinema's corporate heavy artillery, but of the footsoldiers with camcorders.

"T-REX: back to the Cretaceous" (PG) is on release at the London Trocadero

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