FILM REVIEW : A Fragile Forest Is the Focus : OMNIMAX: ‘Tropical Rainforest’ at Reuben H. Fleet Space Center takes the audience to a different world.

Big, hairy bugs are a sure-fire way to grab a film audience.

B-movie directors learned that long ago. National Geographic documentary producers have made careers out of it.

Now, a team of OMNIMAX producers has brought the Big Bug Theory of filmmaking to the big-screen format. “Tropical Rainforest,” now at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater, splashes insects, snakes and an abundance of rare and slimy creatures across the theater’s dome in a manner sure to please both nature lovers and fans of “The Bug That Ate Cleveland.”

Of course, “Tropical Rainforest” is not a bug movie so much as an environmental statement. Focusing on the evolution of rain forests in Australia, Costa Rica, French Guiana and Malaysia, the 38-minute film is a tribute to the majesty of the rain forests.

Yet, it is more than just a film for eco-tourists. The film is not preachy, but it makes its point. News accounts from television are used to demonstrate that, besides impacting global warming and the potential loss of hundreds of life forms, plants used to make important drugs grow in the rain forests. Loggers, farmers and developers are destroying nature.

Like the best science-fiction movies, the film takes the audience to a different world. Under the hood of trees, whole civilizations develop and thrive. Biologists will love the views of rarely photographed fauna and wildlife. Kids will love the icky creatures and bizarre insects, blown up to 15-feet tall on the dome.

The filmmakers get close up, removing any sense of remoteness or detachment that often accompanies this type of film. Thanks to the 70-millimeter format, the stars are huge and full of personality, from colorful frogs to thousands of determined ants carrying chunks of leaves 10 times bigger than their bodies. When a boa constrictor peeps its head over a fallen log, it is a 4-foot wide snake suddenly slithering into the audience.

The perfect exotic touch is brought to the film by the Caribbean lilt of narrator Geoffrey Holder, best known as the spokesman with the shaved head featured in commercials for 7-Up, “the Un-cola.”

Pronouncing every syllable as if it were the key word in a Jamaican sonnet, Holder is a lyrical tour guide through the jungle, making Madagascar, the Congo and Thailand sound like the ends of the Earth in his slow and breathless style.

The structure of the film is uncomplicated. The idea is to trace the evolution of the rain forest, trying to give some comprehension to the concept of 400 million years of development.

“Imagine we are travelers in time,” Holder says at the opening of the film.

Through the years, increasingly complex critters develop, much in the way a beautiful, bright purple butterfly emerges from a cocoon, a scene which was dramatically photographed for the film. There is little to tie the scenes of various creatures together, except for the fact that they have all evolved in these huge rain forest incubators.

Many of the shots are spectacular, simply because it is clear how much time and patience and luck went into getting them. It’s no accident that the filmmakers captured a toucan munching on a fig. They were ready for it.

The various species are not identified, but the film is not meant as a biology lesson. This is a message movie. Modern times brings a screeching halt to the idyllic scenes of evolution. Suddenly the audience is confronted with a huge tree, one of the largest living organisms on earth and which fills the screen, crashing to earth at the hands of a chain saw.

“Four-hundred years of evolution and in four minutes a chain saw brings it down,” the narrator intones.

The film leaves no doubt that the world is facing a grave loss if people continue to hack away at the rain forests.

“We’re not just seeing the forest in human time, we’re seeing it in human terms,” director/co-producer Ben Shedd told the audience after a screening last week. Shedd is best known for his Oscar-winning documentary, “The Flight of the Gossamer Condor.”

Instead of entering the debate over deforestation, Shedd and his partners opted to settle for vividly illustrating the beauty of the rain forests, as well as the global implications of their demise.

Shedd said the film is more about helping people “understand the connections,” the interdependence between the exotic and wild rain forests and other forms of life on Earth.

At one point, Holder sums it up: “We need to look around.”

* “Tropical Rainforest” screens several times daily at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater in Balboa Park. Admission is $5.50 for adults, $3 for juniors and $4 for seniors. The ticket price includes admission to the science center. Contact 238-1233 for more information.