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Monthly Archives: February 2017

We became members of the Ontario Science Centre almost two years ago, but it is coming to a time where the membership is about to run out (the kids are sick of this place and they changed the plans to our detriment). One of the benefits of our current plan is that we can get free OMNIMAX tickets each visit – something which we’ve only used once! We decided to use this feature once more before it goes away and chose to watch Rocky Mountain Express.

I picked this one because the kids love trains and hopefully it would keep their interest – but that really only worked for about 20 minutes. The film is about connecting the Trans Canadian Railway from BC to the interior and like most IMAX films, it is a documentary. This documentary is quite poor as there is no storytelling that keeps the viewer engaged – the narration simply relays a bunch of facts about the history of what was done. It is like listening to Wikipedia. In fact, I was curious about many things during the film, but the documentary stayed far away from the interesting topics, like what convinced the GM to go through Roger’s Pass, or how the trains worked or how railroad building happened.

The narration served to show videos of a restored train in action, as it took the Trans Canadian Railway; and that is basically the point of watching an IMAX film. You can see and hear the train in high definition. Some of the shots were way to close, showing you the guts of the machine, but without the context of what it does. There were also many old photos which helped to relay history, but was otherwise a waste of IMAX.

I’m actually disappointed in the visuals, because there was severe distortion. I left wondering whether the film was shot for a normal screen but then shown on an omnimax curved screen. I wasn’t sitting in the absolute centre of the theatre, but it was still very bad.

I wouldn’t recommend this film, at least on the OMNIMAX screen. The film left me wanting my money back, but since I didn’t have to pay for it, then I was just disappointed. One out of five stars.