What: Titans of the Ice Age
Where: Imax Victoria theatre
When: Opens Friday, 10 a.m., 1, 4 and 6 p.m.
Rating: Two and a half stars
Ever wonder what it would be like if the Royal B.C. Museum’s huge woolly mammoth replica suddenly sprang to life?
You’ll get a dramatic idea if you step out of its Natural History Gallery long enough to see Titans of the Ice Age, director David Clark’s giant-screen documentary, which takes you back to the Pleistocene ice age.
Beautifully narrated by actor Christopher Plummer, this large-format flashback — which starts Friday at Imax Victoria — is notable for its generous use of computer-generated imagery to depict such prehistoric creatures, as well as ferocious sabre-toothed cats, gigantic sloths and predatory wolves.
As impressive as these synthetic wonders are, especially when two mammoths lock curved tusks, it’s easy to be distracted by the technology, despite stunning backdrops such as Yellowstone National Park and the Rockies that accommodate them.
Indeed, there are moments when you’ll find yourself flashing back to that digitally enhanced tiger in Life of Pi.
There is some fascinating stuff in Clark’s 45-minute hybrid of digital wizardry and documentary footage.
His eye-filling journey takes us across spectacular glaciers and grasslands to depict frozen, otherwordly landscapes thousands of years before modern civilization, where the Ice Age titans of the title co-exist with Paleothic humans portrayed by Alaskan natives.
Highlights include the sight and story of Lyuba, a mummified mammoth calf smothered in a riverbed 40,000 years ago and discovered in Siberia in 2007, its remarkably preserved remains providing scientists with a treasure trove of data.
Then there’s Zed, the skeleton of a Colombian mammoth plucked from California’s famous La Brea Tar Pits — a development revealed against a strikingly jarring backdrop, metropolitan Los Angeles on a sunny, cloudless day.
We also learn how the concentric layers of the mammoth’s huge tusks can reveal its age, like rings on a tree trunk.
While this visually striking cautionary tale lensed by Reed Smoot isn’t as captivating as some Imax documentaries despite Sam Cardon’s swelling, John Williams-esque score that pulls us in, it’s a sobering reminder of how fragile our ecology is.
With the climatic changes of the past and their effect on Earth’s immense creatures and landscapes, the portrait of these majestic creatures and their fates in Titans of the Ice Age does make you think more about what the future holds.
