Awesome Alaska on city screen

KOLKATA: Imagine journeying from Antarctica to the North Pole — from the planet’s largest and driest desert to a voyage to the last great frontier where nature enchants the eye with magnificent spectacles. If it is tough to imagine, the Science City Space Odyssey theatre gives you the opportunity to experience the thrill. For the next six months, it will screen ‘Alaska: Spirit of the Wild’.
The Imax 70mm large format Academy Award-nominated documentary film featuring the landscape and wildlife of Alaska is the ultimate story of survival, where life triumphs season after season against fierce conditions and challenges. Produced by the same Imax filmmaking team that created ‘Africa: The Serengeti’, the inaugural film screened at the Science City when the theatre opened in 1997, ‘Alaska…’ has similar shots of vast landscapes that are particularly well suited for Imax large-screen theatres.
Director George Casey masterfully relates the genesis of Alaska and then explores its rich history, surprising wildlife, magnificent landscapes, harsh climate and abiding spirit. Aerial photography of the jagged snow-capped rocky landscape and towering glaciers are breathtaking.
The film features an abundance of Alaskan wildlife including moose, bears, seals, wolves, caribou and whales. In the immersing Imax experience, the audience gets to fish with brown bears, soar with bald eagles, dodge calving glaciers and race on the hooves of caribou. Cinematographer Rodney Taylor even gets the audience to experience the hunting by humpback whales. Underwater photography covers the entire sequence of whales dive, emit a ring of bubbles around a school of fish and then ascend through that ring to eat them.
Sharply scripted narration by Charlton Heston and an appropriate score add to the film’s magic. “It is a place little contaminated by the present, where we can rediscover a vitality and beauty vanishing from our lives. Whether or not we will ever reach Alaska, we all want to know such a place still exists” — this is how narrator Charlton Heston summed up the film.