Where: Imax Victoria, Royal B.C. Museum
When: Opens Friday, 10 a.m., 3 and 7 p.m. daily
Tickets, info: imaxvictoria.com
Rating: Four stars (out of five)
Let’s hope this doesn’t happen, but if a fly happens to land on that succulent steak you just ordered at your favourite restaurant, you’ll be better equipped to know what it’s up to after seeing Wild Flight: Conquest of the Skies 3D, the fascinating new giant screen film opening Friday at the Imax Victoria.
While there’s definitely an “eww” factor to close-up footage of a housefly at work on someone’s sirloin, it’s also as fascinating as many other visuals and accompanying factoids that populate director David Lee’s impressive documentary chronicling the wonders of aviation as practised in the natural world.
From its opening close-ups of white swans gracefully taking flight, looking for all the world like a fleet of whisper-quiet airplanes, to images of bats fluttering through the rainforests of Borneo, the film captures the miracle of flight by mating cool macro-photography with stunning visual effects.
It effectively conveys how far-reaching the natural ability to fly is for millions of creatures around the world, including some — such as armoured airborne beetles or winged lizards — that might surprise you. Indeed, all you need do is look around on any day in Victoria — and you’ll want to after seeing this film — to witness the pervasiveness of the animal aerial spectacle that we take for granted.
The spectacle of hummingbirds hovering, helicopter-like, while pecking for nectar as their wings flap up to 80 times a second, will certainly hit closer to home than the sight of ill-mannered vultures feasting on a pig after soaring over Spanish canyons, or a predatory white barn owl going in for the kill.
Narrated by Mark Bonnar, whose Scottish brogue is a bonus, the film takes us to several destinations to witness the antics of gravity-defying animal aviators. It includes brief stops in London, England; Loch Lomond in Scotland, where Hooper swans dwell; and in Rome and Ecuador.
Particularly eye-filling is footage of a Peregrine falcon, described as the fastest animal on the planet, capable of reaching speeds of up to 320 kilometres an hour; a dragonfly taking flight once its metamorphosis is complete; and a beautiful butterfly spreading its wings.
One of the film’s chief assets is how the makers sparingly tuck scientific data in the mix to provide analysis of how flying animals have evolved and the mechanics behind their skills. Nuggets of information rather than overkill can go a long way in a film that relies so much on striking visuals.
Lee and his team also mercifully spend less time on sequences that most obviously showcase the artifice of the computer-generated imagery — footage of prehistoric creatures such as the Quetzalcoatlus, which, we learn, had a wingspan of about 10 metres. It gets the point across that this is a 320-million-years-old story of how the first flying animals appeared before their evolution into the winged creatures in our skies today.
Wild Flight: Conquest of the Skies 3D joins a lineup that includes Rocky Mountain Express, Walking with Dinosaurs: Prehistoric Planet 3D, Dream Big 3D and Amazon Adventure 3D. Wonder Woman fans will be happy to know the summer blockbuster also opens in the full IMAX 3D format on Friday.