MOVIE REVIEW : ‘ON THE WING’ SOARS INTO IMAX’S WILD, BLUE YONDER

A young, medieval daredevil poises on the parapets of an old, French walled city, under beautiful, birdlike wings that would have done Icarus proud. Poises, looks out, gulps, then soars. Not far, but not fatally, either.

It’s that pleasant, human touch that makes the new IMAX-format film, “On the Wing,” about man’s love affair with flight, as much fun as it is. (It opens today at the IMAX Theatre at the Museum of Science and Industry.) Technically, of course, it’s superb. You have the stomach-clutching sensation of whooshing down the Monument Valley’s red amethyst canyons yourself--seemingly without a plane in sight, or of riding the back of a prehistoric dragonfly. Or of piloting a Boeing 747 over the Cascade Range, from the dial-clogged cockpit.

“On the Wing” has historical re-creations too, from the repeated tries of the Wright brothers, to 16th-Century Chinese kite masters of Guilin, whose birds and dragons fly against backgrounds that could only be China. And there’s little of the amateur-pageant air that has blunted some of the past films in this super format.

“On the Wing” was produced for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum by film makers Bayley Silleck and Francis Thompson. They have given their film the most appealing “star,” Quetzalcoatlus northropi or Q.N. to us, a lifelike working re-creation of the great pterodactyl. We may know that this soaring monster, with claws at the joint of its 38-foot wings, is guided by circuitry, but it takes only the smallest amount of imagination to think how large its shadow must have loomed in its heyday.

You can hardly miss making an impact with a screen as large as a four-story parking garage, but “On the Wing” has the further virtue of continuity in its story. It’s a patient comparison of the attempt at flight by man with the ingrained knowledge of aerodynamics of birds and insects. A buoyant subject, fascinatingly done.

‘ON THE WING’

Director/Producers Bayley Silleck, Francis Thompson. Camera Burleigh Wartes, Leonidas Zourdoumis. Script Silleck. Composer Richard Einhorn. Sound Richard Patterson. Editor Thompson, Alexander Hammid, Silleck.

Times-rated: Family

Running time: 30 minutes.