Let’s get this out of the way up front: The Dark Knight Rises is not as amazing as its stupendous predecessor, but it’s pretty awesome in its own right.
Despite some gaping plot holes that keep it from achieving true greatness, Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film is a satisfactorily thrilling and emotionally rousing conclusion to a fantastic trilogy.
We can delve into the film’s flaws at a later time but, for now, I’m finally calling “Bullshit!” on AMC’s digital IMAX theaters.
I’ve seen The Dark Knight Rises twice—first on opening night in super, giant, 70mm IMAX with a capacity crowd of approximately 500; the second time a week later in one of AMC’s newer and crushingly smaller digital IMAX venues with a sell-out audience of about 250 patrons. Counting digital, IMAX digital, standard 35mm and IMAX 70mm film presentations, there are no fewer than FOUR exhibitions of The Dark Knight Rises currently in circulation. Each format has its merits and peculiarities, but the differences between the two so-called “IMAX Experiences” are as stark as night and day.
Ticket-buyer beware.
Exhibit A: Super IMAX 70mm film
Aspect Ratio: Variable 2.40:1/1.44:1
Venue: Samuel Johnson IMAX Theater, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC
Adult Ticket: $15
Within the first minute of The Dark Knight Rises, the immense power of its giant IMAX cinematography is evident. As illustrated during the procession of studio and production company logos, the traditional panoramic 2.40:1 aspect ratio is projected onto the center of the giant boxy IMAX screen, just like the letterboxed image of a widescreen DVD would appear on an old, boxy 1.33:1 TV set, with unused dead space—the “black bars”—above and below the picture. When a scene cuts to IMAX, the frame literally pops open to fill the mammoth six-story-tall screen top-to-bottom. The high-resolution 70mm images are stunning in their brightness and clarity.
Add to this the thunderous rumble and enveloping swirl of the typical 12,000-watt IMAX sound system and the sensory effect is exhilarating—THIS is what you’re paying the IMAX surcharge for!
The Super-IMAX film exhibition is THE premiere presentation of the movie—it’s the only version director Nolan, a steadfast supporter of film versus digital, wants you to see. It’s been so long since I’ve actually SEEN a movie projected from actual physical FILM that I immediately felt a tinge of nostalgia for the fleeting sight of dirt speckles during the introductory logos. Much like audiophiles who find comfort in the hiss and pop of needle-and-groove turntable playback, I’ll gladly tolerate the random scratches, dust mites and “cigarette burn” reel-change markers of a film print as a fair tradeoff for its unparalleled luminosity, color fidelity and resolution.
The only caveat of the Super-IMAX presentation is the lack of trailers, as there’s literally no room on the modified projector carousel to hold any more film beyond the 600-pound 70mm IMAX print of the mammoth 164-minute movie.
“IMAX EXPERIENCE” RATING: A+
Exhibit B: IMAX Digital (a/k/a “MiniMAX”)
Aspect Ratio: Variable 2.40:1/1.78:1
Venue:
AMC Georgetown 14, Auditorium 7, Washington, DC
Adult Ticket: $18
Admittedly I’ve been a skeptic of these small “MiniMAX” screens ever since they began popping up in multiplexes in time for The Dark Knight back in 2008. Whether you call them Faux-MAX, Lie-MAX, IMAX-Junior or MiniMAX, the sniping is appropriate: AMC has shamelessly hijacked the IMAX brand and devalued its worth with their installation of appallingly tiny digital venues that barely—and I mean JUST BARELY—conform to IMAX’s strict technical specifications.
But they’re nowhere near the size of pure IMAX theaters. (Fun fact: the corporate name IMAX originally stood for “Image Maximum.”)
Granted, the turbo-charged speaker system in a MiniMAX theater is still incredible, but at my screening the sound was too unnecessarily loud. It’s one thing for a projectionist to pump up the volume to compensate for the noise of a sold-out crowd, but this MiniMAX theater had the audio cranked WAY past eleven to an uncomfortable—nay, piercing—level.
A digital theater needn’t take possession of a physical film print but instead receives a secure hard drive that plugs into the projector. This saves the studios zillions of dollars in duplication and shipping costs, and permits extraneous trailers to be “attached” to the hard drive as supplemental digital files, no matter how long the feature runs. Yet even with all the advances made in digital projection since the technology went wide in 1999 with The Phantom Menace, the chillier electronic image doesn’t hold a candle to the warmth of traditional film-based projection. Colors don’t pop as vibrantly, and there’s an overall milkiness to a digitally projected image that keeps blacks from rendering properly (with film, true black is reproduced by the absence of light filtering through a celluloid frame; with digital, even the blacks are artificially generated with electronic light—a trained eye can immediately spot the difference).
More troublesome is the obvious pixilation noticeable when viewing a digital projection on a MiniMAX screen: unless you’re watching the movie from the back rows, the dots of the matrix are plainly evident, like the pin-point pattern visible when you sit too close to a TV set. This is most noticeable with titles and along straight edges.
You may agree that the MiniMAX screens are too small out-of-hand and that they don’t deserve the prestige associated with the IMAX brand, but the fact is these small screens are actually too large to conceal the inherent flaws of current digital projection! If these digital MiniMAX screens were any larger, movies would be practically unwatchable on them—as the screen size increases, brightness and digital resolution would degrade exponentially. With film, the size and brightness of the projected image is dependent only on the “throw” of the projector lamp. Thusly, the resolution of film is, comparatively, infinite.
Furthering my frustration with MiniMAX is its inconsistency of aspect ratio. Even accounting for the fact that a MiniMAX venue is typically 25% the size of a giant Super-IMAX theater, the MiniMAX screen is not the same SHAPE as a pure Super-IMAX screen—its smaller rectangular canvas is more akin to the 16:9 ratio of an HD TV screen. As there’s less vertical “expansion room” above and below the 2.40:1 image, the top and the bottom of the boxier 1.44:1 pure IMAX frame is necessarily cropped down to fit the shorter MiniMAX ratio, so when the IMAX footage kicks into gear, the shift in aspect ratio is little more than subliminal. Yet a MiniMAX ticket is, ridiculously, pricier than one for the 70mm Super-IMAX presentation. You’re truly paying more for less!
One silver lining: the new 3-minute trailer for the upcoming 007 flick Skyfall—showing exclusively with MiniMAX presentations of The Dark Knight Rises—is thoroughly terrific!
To be fair, my ultimate assessment and summary dismissal of MiniMAX is based on multiple experiences with the format, in both 2D and 3D. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was exhibited in the same fashion as The Dark Knight Rises, with a top-to-bottom expansion of the 2D image whenever the IMAX material is on display. For both Tintin IMAX 3D and Prometheus IMAX 3D, the modified digital IMAX image was re-framed to match the narrower screen, and in both cases I found the wider, non-IMAX 2.40:1 presentations to be more aesthetically pleasing.
For The Amazing Spider-Man IMAX 3D, the constant 2.40:1 aspect ratio was maintained by “letterboxing” the entire movie in the same fashion as the non-IMAX The Dark Knight Rises footage is presented, with thin black bars of unused dead space at the top and bottom of the screen. Avengers IMAX 3D remains my least irritating MiniMAX experience simply because Avengers is the only one of these titles shot for a narrower 1:85:1 “standard” aspect ratio and thusly fills the screen most comfortably, with minimal cropping and reframing.
In each of the 3D cases, I had to repeatedly remove my goggles to temporarily alleviate the jab of pain I experienced in my left eyeball.
On more than one occasion, I volunteered to nearby patrons taking their seats that the ticket-taker had provided the wrong 3D glasses (Real-D 3D and IMAX 3D are different formats entirely, and I wonder how many 3D experiences have been ruined for unsuspecting moviegoers erroneously handed the wrong glasses, unaware that one set of goggles won’t work as a substitute for the other).
Because the now-ubiquitous IMAX logo makes no distinction between a gargantuan 70mm IMAX film palace and a tiny digital MiniMAX shoebox, and because the MiniMAX ticket price is typically HIGHER than admission into a Super-IMAX 70mm cinema, you may THINK you’re getting the same so-called “IMAX Experience” at an AMC digital theater as you would at a pure IMAX venue, but you’d be sorely mistaken…and taken for a ride to boot.
Sadly, the IMAX brand has been irreparably sullied by this shrewd AMC bait-and-switch ploy. So, much like my stance towards the tired gimmick of 3D itself, I’m now officially DONE with MiniMAX. So there.
“IMAX EXPERIENCE” RATING: C+
