MOVIE REVIEW : An Exciting Stretch ‘To the Limit’

“To the Limit” offers viewers something more than a roller-coaster ride through a scenic calendar. Producer-director Greg MacGillivray uses sophisticated editing and cinematography to present information about human physiology coherently and enjoyably.

“To the Limit,” in examining the performances of a rock climber, a downhill skier and a ballerina, shows how intensive training affects the human body. The play of their finely tuned muscles against the relentless pull of gravity becomes a visual poem on the 70-foot wide screen.

MacGillivray juxtaposes the macroscopic with the microscopic, cutting from sweeping views of the climber scaling Yosemite’s Half Dome and the skier careening down a slope in Aspen to footage of capillaries and individual blood cells. Film shot in Britain with state-of-the-art endoscopic equipment shows how the heart and lungs function to bring the muscle cells the oxygen needed for these grueling performances.

The medical footage has been carefully chosen for palatability and even beauty; the film makers leave out the gross stuff that made you queasy in high school biology. The arching fibers of the heart muscle combine strength and grace in a way that recalls Britain’s Gothic architecture.

“To the Limit” also offers plenty of the big-screen thrills that constitute much of appeal of IMAX films. The vertiginous shots of the rock climber performing astounding gymnastic feats to find hand- and toe-holds on the sheer surface of Half Dome had the audience clutching their seats at the preview. A crash into an icy fence at 60 m.p.h., shot from the skier’s point of view, is as close as most viewers will ever want to get to a skiing accident.

The film falters in the sequence devoted to Bolshoi ballerina Nina Ananiashvili. She dances in brief snippets of “Don Quixote” and “Giselle,” and she is obviously as finely trained an athlete as the rock climber and the skier. But dance lacks the superhuman vistas of the other activities, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to film a ballerina in this outsized format.

The overall excellence of “To the Limit” suggests that the IMAX film is finally becoming a valid medium of expression, rather than a novelty. It screens daily at 10 a.m. and 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 9 p.m. at the Mitsubishi IMAX Theater of the California Museum of Science and Industry on Exposition Boulevard. Information: (213) 744-2014 or 774-2015.