MOVIE REVIEW : Scenery, Camera Are Stars of IMAX ‘Hawaii’

If you discounted its extraordinary and often overwhelming visuals, “Behold Hawaii”--the latest offering at the Mitsubishi IMAX Theater--might seem an uninspired travelogue-action movie.

Certainly, the story skirts the banal. It’s about a young Hawaiian’s ancestral dreams on the night before his performance at the makahiki, or festival season. The boy, Keola (Blaine Kia), who is performing his hula lackadaisically, is given a pearl-shell fishhook by his grandfather and told to summon up the old ways.

As Keola tosses and turns on his storm-whipped hammock that night, he is beckoned by a ghostly torch-lit parade back toward the island of long ago. There, he is chased by a wild pig toward a sacred village, and plunged into a crash-course (“Oh, what they’re teaching me!”) in the ways of his forefathers: fishing, bridge-walking, sacred ceremonies, hip-jutting dances and, as a climax, mano-a-mano combat over a pretty wahine. All this charges him up enough to make for a mean makahiki hula after he wakes up the next day.

A story like this is nothing to write the mainland about--however sympathetically done or carefully researched. (And this movie, undeniably, is both.) But Greg MacGillivray, the producer, director and co-cinematographer, has worked many times in this superscreen format. He knows exactly how to tease and arrest an audience with it. In this case, he begins by using a fraction of the screen for relatively small images of natural turbulence. Then, suddenly, he moves to the full image: five stories high and seemingly another five across, with the camera soaring swiftly along the Pacific, waves scudding by in a gasp-inducing rush.

It’s scenes like this that make the film fascinating. IMAX, unlike the other large screen formats, fills such a huge chunk of your vision with images of such stunning depth and clarity, that, if the film simply shows you a little natural beauty, your attention is riveted.

In an ordinary-sized frame, the story would seem even more banal. But all MacGillivray and team have to do is plant a camera on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, and their vistas have you in a vise. The cinematography throughout is astonishing. And we can excuse the movie’s naivete, or its amateur cast, by focusing on the succession of majestic landscapes and images: the mist-shrouded mountains, a huge double waterfall cascading down a precipice of seemingly sheer rock, the helicopter shots zipping along the coast lines.

Perhaps the major frustration of the IMAX process is that no major film maker has used it for a fiction movie--not even Steven Spielberg, who might have been born for it. Imagining a movie like “The Right Stuff,” “The Last Emperor” or “Empire of the Sun” in IMAX is enough to make your mouth and your eyes water. Yet “Behold Hawaii” (Times-rated: Family)--obvious travelogue that it is--entertains and holds us well enough, as long as it keeps going back to those cliffs and waterfalls.

‘BEHOLD HAWAII’

Producer-director Greg MacGillivray. Executive producer Bill Bennett. Script-Editor-Associate producer Alec Lorimore. Music Basil Poledouris. Camera Stan Lazan, Jeff Blyth, Brad Ohlund, MacGillivray. With Blaine Kia, Kanani Velasco, Peter Kalua, Kimo Kahoano.

Running time: 40 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.