REVIEW : ‘CHRONOS’ A SIGHT AND SOUND TREAT

“Chronos” goes to great lengths to avoid the impression that it’s basically a travelogue, but it needn’t. On view at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater in Balboa Park, the film is the latest and arguably greatest to employ the giant-screen Omnimax/Imax format, and it’s a feast of visual poetics and moody electronic sound. It is also the closest you’ll ever feel to such locations as Stonehenge, the Grand Canyon or the Pyramids at Giza without actually being there. Such visual intimacy is itself worth the admission price.

Still, “Chronos” swirls in a sea of pretense--its publicity describes it as “a visual symphony in seven movements,” and notes its effort to capture the “essence” of time, “the connectedness of things . . . the eternal moment.”

It is certainly a technical feat for film maker Ron Fricke. He designed a computer-guided time-lapse camera to capture sweeping vistas, immense monuments and awe-inspiring architecture that stand serene amid the speeded-up motion of sunrises and moonsets, cloud movements, and the frenetic pace of human traffic.

Fricke directed the admired feature-length documentary, “Koyaanisqatsi,” a similarly wordless odyssey through more abstract visual terrain. Clearly he has hit upon a filmic approach all his own. He relies on the power of pure imagery and sonic rapture to make profound points about man in the universe. But “Chronos” (the ancient Greek word for “time”) is profoundly obvious in its depiction of nature’s majestic indifference and man’s magnificent attempts to immortalize himself.

As a poem about civilization’s intersection with the eons, “Chronos” is drawn out. Another poem, Shelley’s “Ozymandius,” said it more memorably in less time--with no pictures and no synthesizer music to drive the point deep into our brains.

In fact, Michael Stearns’ music is too often over-amplified and heavy-handed. However, it serves effectively in the climactic, high-speed scenes during which we seem to zoom through the streets of New York or the canals of Venice. The streaking, otherworldy light effects of these segments are dizzying but, by now, cliches out of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Kinetically, these may be the high points, but it’s the more static moments of the film that are the most moving.

When, for example, Fricke’s camera presses our noses against the eroded snout of the Sphinx, or transfixes us somewhere in the middle of Monument Valley, Utah, or floats us, eagle-like, through the Grand Canyon, the transporting power of the Omnimax/Imax format (in which 70mm film is shot lengthwise, and projected upon the curved planetarium dome of the Fleet) is matchless. This is the total-environment film experience that Cinerama never quite pulled off.

As well, there are long shots and close-ups of real humor, taste and elegance. At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, we study some clasped hands sculpted from stone during the Renaissance--hands that could not be more lifelike or expressive. And the shafts of sunlight that filter through Michelangelo’s domed windows in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome are like careless spotlights, compressing an afternoon’s shift of sun and shadow into a few time-lapsed moments. They illuminate the speeding stream of Vatican tourists who overrun the sacred place like so many Keystone Kops chasing fugitive memories with Instamatics.

Some of Fricke’s best shots are of the clouds, always seen in a time-lapsed hurry, scrolling and evaporating while below them the scenery sits postcard-still. There’s no more natural visual metaphor for man’s evanescense, but Fricke hammers the point any way he can, and we get repetition and anti-climax where we expect more of a dawning, ultimate illumination.

Then again, the whole Omnimax/Imax experience remains more of a novelty than the stuff of a serious art form. It’s hard to imagine sitting, stiff-necked and goggle-eyed, through a feature-length Omnimax film without needing the combined services of an optometrist and a chiropractor afterward.

Yet Fricke’s “Chronos,” which still seems too long at under an hour, certainly edges the format closer to true “cinema,” so its excesses are forgivable. You walk out of the theater with a bit of a headache, yes, but also with a sense of having seen something fairly important. True to its Ozymandian inspiration, “Chronos” puts us in our place.